alli snow

A dumbass from a political comm I'm on posted this recently, and I thought the Christians on my f-list would get a laugh out of it.

On Facebook, ElJay, on billboards, welcome signs and city walls (not to mention bumperstickers... no wait, I just did mention bumperstickers), I am constantly having Christian pride thrown in my face. For instance, I wake up at 6 am to make some coffee and check the Facey-book only to get a wall full of family and friends all proudly declaring their Christianity,and boy are they are ever proud, it is almost like they are angry about it.

Well, screw you too, I guess...

Why do Christians have to be so in our face? My own fundamentalist background has me confused on this issue... as any good quasi-Calvinsist knows, being a Christian amounts to being picked and imposed upon. Yet for all the fundie quasi-Calvinist congregations out there, they speak as if their pride is a measure of their choice or ability in "making a stand for Jesus" or some such nonsense. What a bunch of political theater.

Christians, why are you so proud? What are you proud of, anyway? Was it a lot of work getting the Christian badge? Is it like an achievement or something? Are there trials? A gauntlet maybe?

Keep it in your houses and in your own private buildings.

Sheesh.

I'm tempted to rewrite his/her/its whole hissy fit but replace 'Christian' with 'Muslim' or, even better 'gay' pride.

I'll say it again: dumbass.

So today was my second day of work. Tomorrow I actually get interviewed for the job that I'm currently doing. Pretty much I just have to make sure I don't embarass myself. Not worried.

Now, the reason for this post. I just had to share what a fun commute home I had. I was still in the city, which - just for some context - is completely ghetto-tastic... the neighborhood where my school is located is one of the older areas that hasn't completely gone to crap, and there was still a shooting across the street last year (after school got out, thank God). Crime rate's about twice the nat'l average. But, aside from the whole 'day after' shooting thing, I haven't had many issues.

Well today I'm in the city, on the eastbound freeway, and people are driving more stupidly than usual. I passed a couple of trucks going about 50mph and then needed to merge back to the right to make my offramp to get on the southbound freeway. I get in behind this black car which suddenly breaks because... I'm not sure why. People cant drive, I've learned to deal with it. Anyway, she breaks. So I have to break, and I'm still partway in the second lane, partway in the first. The black car gets its act together and accelerates, and I finish my lane change. There's still half a mile before my exit.

Suddenly, this crappy white sedan from behind me has pulled up alongside me, in the lane I just left. I wouldn't have noticed except it was staying right alongside, almost in my blind spot. I glance over and the passenger is flailing and shouting at me. I had no idea what her problem was. I don't even have my NOBAMA bumper sticker on my car anymore. I thought, "well maybe that car was behind me when I changed lanes and were mad they had to slow down". Whatever. I shook my head and went back to driving. I was coming up on my exit.

The white sedan suddenly accelerates, swerves in front of me and stops on the on-ramp. Suddenly I'm wondering if I hit them when I changed lanes, even though I didn't feel anything... but wait, they were behind me, so it's not my fault if they didn't keep the minimum safe distance (if anyone even knows what that is anymore).

To my shock, the driver and passenger - a black couple, just for context - BOTH GET OUT OF THE CAR. I didn't have room on the right to go around them and to the left would have taken me up on the median. The driver starts walking up towards my car, and I put the window up - it was open a smidge for the air - and grabbed the pepper spray on my keychain. My cell phone was at the bottom of my purse so with my other hand I start rummaging around for it.

The guy's yelling - I can't even understand him through his gold teef, so I still have no idea what pissed him off so bad. I bet he wouldn't have had his temper tantrum if I wasn't a skinny white girl, though. I mean, if I'd been a brotha, I might have been packing heat! (I don't know what I was planning on doing with my pepper spray with the window rolled up. I have power windows, so I supposed if I tried I could have rolled it down a crack, sprayed him, and rolled it back up.)

But keep in mind this is all happening on the FREEWAY, right where the ramp branches off. If I had sprayed the moron, he might have stumbled back into traffic and wound up squashed on someone's windsheild. I doubt I'm that lucky, though. I wasn't even lucky enough to have a cop around when this happened.

So I finally grab my phone and when the moron sees me starting to dial, he jumps back in his car really fast - so does his babymama - and takes off, using the lane that puts him back on the eastbound freeway. I wish I had a good enough memory to recall his license plate, but I'm kinda dyslexic when it comes to numbers and having letters thrown in there doesn't help. So I comforted myself with flipping his rearview mirror a one-fingered salute as I finally took my offramp.

WEIRD $#it.

Maybe they didn't like my PRO-LIFE bumper sticker.

As a follow-up to this post: Greg Gutfield, everyone.

Call me a dog who likes to return to sniff his own vomit, but whenever someone on the right dies, I instinctively check out blogs like Daily Kos and Gawker. I already know what to expect, but I do it anyway. There, I find the typical ghouls, triumphing the death of Jesse Helms, or to a lesser extent – Tony Snow – as if their own personal politics have been validated by, uh, cancer. I could quote all the vile stuff I found on these sites, but it would take too long and it might make you violent.

Instead, I`d like to discuss why the left – the champions of tolerance – takes so much glee in watching their ideological adversaries croak. I came up with three theories.

1. They`re stupid. And being stupid means they cannot grasp the notion that different opinions don`t necessarily mean the person you disagree with is evil. I must confess that I see this thinking both on the left and the right. But for some reason it`s more intense on the left – possibly because a liberal always believes his stance is uniquely and romantically heroic – even though everyone else he knows agrees with him! When they run into someone - be it a friend or stranger -who disagrees – well, they must be evil.

2. Because conservatives reject moral relativism – it`s easier for them to see the world as a range of "bad things" to "good things." So while they might hate Ted Kennedy for everything he stands for, he`s no Hitler. He`s not even a Michael Moore. For a hardcore leftist though, judgments like that are impossible in a relativistic world, so Tony Snow can be just as evil as Saddam Hussein. Or Hitler, maybe. Hence, all ghoulish applause found this weekend at the Daily Kos.

3. Finally, on the web, cowards become cowboys – anonymity makes easier to threaten adversaries, as well as dance on their graves. Granted, I once posed the question of whether the View`s studio audience should die, but I did that partly in jest. It was after they spent the morning applauding 9/11 conspiracy theories, so you can imagine why it was only "partly."

And if you disagree with me, then you sir are worse than Hitler.

Personally, I think it's a combination of 1 and 2, with a little 3 thrown in for good measure.

Obama says, "Don't worry about immigrants learning English; your child should be learning Spanish! Cause it's embarrassing that all our kids aren't bilingual! I know, because I'm not bilingual either!"

Okay, I paraphrased.



What a creep. Is my Nobama bumper sticker here yet?

Let me "clarify": this is not about whether kids should learn foreign languages. Most colleges these days say you have to take two years of a foreign language as a pre-req (at least in California). Even if you never leave the English-speaking world, it can be an enjoyable experience. I took 2 years of high school Spanish and two semesters in college and I still don't have the skills to use it in conversation, which is frustrating. Not because I really want to talk to people in Spanish but because I want to know what people are saying when they think the little white girl can't understand ;) I can probably catch one word in eight.

The problem here is that Obama somehow doesn't understand that the influx of non-English speakers, the majority of them currently coming from Mexico, is a real source of irritation for people in this country. We don't like it that the DMV has to translate it's paperwork into fifteen different languages, and that people come into our places of work and automatically expect that we will provide a translator, and that they assume that we will teach their children in their native language when they may or may not even be legal citizens of this country...

Don't put this back on us, Barry. I'm sorry if you're embarrassed that the plebes you want voting for you are monolingual, but you know what? That's our choice, not yours.

Obama: Don't drive SUVs, eat, use air conditioning

Now, he wants us to do all these things so... the rest of the world will follow our lead on climate change?

WTF?