Letters to the Editor
imho
Published Letters: 52 Editor's Choice: 11
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Grandchildren are a gift, not an entitlement
[Read the article: The past won't let me go]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Neither do grandparents have any intrinsic worth. They are only as valuable as their behaviour. We know that the best way to predict the future is to study the past. Since LW's parents have a clear and relentless history of emotionally abusing their own child, and continue to do so, there is no evidence that their conduct will change. Especially since they deny, not only their actions, but the effects thereof.
LW has several problems, the most pressing being that she needs support & advice, and still has not received it. Her next problem, the only bit Cary, in his hysteria, got right, is that LW would benefit from counseling. Not because she is broken or moaning or unfocussed, but because her parents are so toxic that ordinary social norms do not apply. If they had tortured a stranger's child, no one would be telling LW to get over it and make up for the children's sake. She needs to take care of herself for her own welfare and that of her children; in the same way that flight attendants tell parents to put our own oxygen masks on first. She must find a way to heal.
Lastly, LW must protect her children. It is often hard to deny even the most pernicious grandparents visitation. Heavy social norms are manipulative enough, without LW's own guilt and insecurity engendered by a lifetime of odious parenting. But she still needs to do it, even if it looks like anger and punishment. Even if it IS anger and punishment, she still must put the emotional health of her children first. Before custom. Before the financial assets her parents might offer. Without ignoring the danger or discounting the torture.
I suspect that when her children are protected, LW will begin to feel safer as well.
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Speaking in gross generalizations
[Read the article: I had no father -- will I always feel I need a man?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Women attach. That's what we do. Absent fathers, loving fathers, we attach anyway. We don't like being alone, whether we're gay or straight (hence the old joke about what lesbians take on the second date: a U-Haul). There's no reason attaching should get us into trouble, except that, like creepy stalkers in their larval state, we don't know when to quit.
The other, more significant reason this gets us into trouble, is that 90% of us attach to men. This is a problem for several reasons:
1. They're not the always the most compassionate monkeys on the block. Note the identifiably male reactions so far; it's almost as if they were lurking atop their computers waiting for a chance to attack anything female.
2. THEY are first and foremost attached not to women, but to their penises, and tend to be obsessed with them: their size, their color, their jism, etc.; and where and how often they can put it in places that belong to someone else. And they are totally broken when you don't fancy their dicks as much as they do.
3. They see women as objects to enhance their own self-esteem, and to use as trophies to flaunt before other males. I'm still waiting to see some ranking male sports figure/movie star/fat radio commentator/businessman hook up with someone 100 pounds heavier or twenty years older than himself. For the most part, you have to expect to be prettier than your boyfriend, and stay that way.
4. They behave as if we are lucky to get one. Any one.
5. They run the world, and don't brook dissent. In consequence, that filters down to guys thinking they should always have the upper hand in a relationship, and viewing a 50/50 split of choices and chores as wussy.
In short, they're hardly worth the trouble, and we love them anyway. How amazing is that!?! A bazillion books have been written for women who attach too much, or too fast, or too unwisely. You're in the majority, but, unlike many of us, seem to be self aware enough to know you'd rather be lovey than needy. Good on you. With any luck, you'll stagger through a few relationships and find the one that's jolly & self-sustaining & includes foot rubs. May fortune smile upon you.
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My vote
[Read the article: The Scandal Sheet]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...For the most important scandal is that I have no vote. Republican-owned voting systems with Republican-owned proprietary software are deciding elections, not our votes. In 2000, 2002, and 2004, election scandals installed even more Republican politicians than pre-election polls predicted, or exit polls could account for. Electronic voting machines have given Republican majorities in heavily Democratic districts, and counted more Republican votes than there were registered voters, and still the machines are in place.
For weeks Republican pundits have been innoculating us to confounding results by saying, "On the day, when people go into the privacy of their voting booths, they'll pull the Republican handle." In one swell foop, they're sustaining the fiction that verifiable voting machines are available to voters, as well as setting up the talking point that, at the last minute, voters trust Republicans more than Democrats. And the networks not only buy that line, they sell it.
While we are wasting lives and spending billion$ to "bring democracy" to Iraq - when what Iraqis might prefer is clean water, electricity, and their right to live out a normal lifespan - democracy here is being quietly destroyed. Not by brown shirts kicking in our doors and clubbing us in the streets, but by proprietary software and undetectable programming worms. We are more than halfway to an autocratic totalitarian state, with a shredded Constitution, a Christian right agenda, no checks, no balances, and no independent mass media, and our next election is paved by Diebold. Is this not a scandal?