Most people are aware of the problems associated with the color pink.If you walk down the aisles at Toys “R” Us you will find at least one aisle that appears to be the victim of an exploding case of Pepto-Bismol. Everything is pink.

This is a somewhat new phenomenon. I’ve never been fond of that particular shade even as a child. I made sure nothing I owned was pink and, that wasn’t difficult to do back when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

Today’s girls have a much more difficult time avoiding the pinkification factor. Anything marketed to young females has to be bathed in it.

The problem, however, is far worse than battling a single color. Simply put, girls are no longer in style. Manufacturers oust female characters when using familiar pop culture subjects. The Justice League will often forget to show Wonder Woman. The Avengers will only highlight the male members. I recently read an article in the Pigtail Pairs & Ballcap Buddies Blog about a shopping trip looking for Big Hero 6 fabric to turn into pillows. To their dismay, all of the fabric choices left out two of the six heroes. Naturally, they were the female members of the team. When the shopper wrote to the manufacturer to ask why, she received a letter that said boys didn’t want girls on their merchandise because, and I quote, “…eeeww girls! Yuck! Haha”. With the help of a write-in campaign from the blog’s readers, the manufacturer promised to change.

It reminded me of a similar experience I had last year. I went to the Milwaukee County Museum and, as I always do, I dropped by the gift shop on my way out. I love the museum gift shop. It always has fascinating things like fossils, rocks, toys, games, books and much more.

On this particular trip I found an amazing group of figures representing mankind’s evolutionary voyage. It included Australopithecus afarensis, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Homo Neanderthalensis, and Homo sapiens sapiens. They are a handsome bunch, and yet something was terribly wrong. I wondered why there was not a single female in our evolutionary history. Not even the most famous skeleton ever found — Lucy the Australopithecus — is represented. In fact, on nearly every television show that purports to show evolution, Lucy is spotlighted and then it’s all men from then on, no matter how many female skeletons have been discovered. I think it is fair to say that among thinking people it can be agreed that women did play a part in evolution.

The Evolution of Man figures [shown above] are a product of Safari Ltd. so I sent them an email. After discussing how much I enjoyed the figures I made a request:

“I do have one suggestion for a future set, if one occurs. Don’t take the title ‘Evolution of Man’ so literally and include a couple of females. I have it on good authority that females did exist in prehistoric times. If nothing else, you could model the Australopithecus on Lucy. And if you make the Homo Erectus female, one could avoid all those bad, dirty jokes when introducing them to people who are not as familiar with our ancestors. Most of all, it’s important for our daughters to feel represented. There is a tendency to pretend only males existed in prehistory, with the single exception of Lucy. In film, books, and TV one is far more likely to see males in every recreation with, at most, a blurry female cooking way in the background. You have an opportunity with these figures to let little girls feel connected to our past.”

Within a few days I received a response:

“Dear Joanna,

Thank you for your email. We enjoy receiving emails from Safari Ltd. customers and fans alike. Any information they can share with us, allows us to make products that they will enjoy.

I’ve forward [sic] your suggestion onto [sic] our product development team. […]

If you have any other suggestions, please do not hesitate to contact us at any time.

Thank You,

Stacie “Beavs” Beavers
Data & Market Analyst
Toy Workshop

Although she certainly didn’t promise anything, I hope that they would at least think about including females in some of their toy sets in the future. The evolution set remains unchanged, but I did see a female pilot in a different series.

Please don’t take everyday sexism for granted. We need to write letters. We need to tell the people who make the toys that girls deserve every bit as much attention as boys. We need to tell them there are more colors in the rainbow than pink. We need to remind them “Princess” is not the only female profession. We need to demand that female characters in established teams have to be represented in merchandising.

It may seem like a small thing, but there is nothing inconsequential about it. Normalizing girls as being “icky” and unworthy of inclusion will follow the children who learn that lesson for the rest of their lives, male and female.

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With all the talk of raising the minimum wage, there is one state that shouldn’t have any trouble at all doing just that. Why? Because it’s the law. The minimum-wage law for the state of Wisconsin includes some very interesting language:

104.02  Living wage prescribed. Every wage paid or agreed to be paid by any employer to any employee… shall be not less than a living wage.
History: 1975 c. 94; 2005 a. 12.

104.03  Unlawful wages. Any employer paying, offering to pay, or agreeing to pay any employee a wage lower or less in value than a living wage is guilty of a violation of this chapter.

Recently, 100 people with salaries ranging from the minimum wage of $7.25 to as high as $15.05 filed a complaint with the administration of Gov. Scott Walker, telling him why their wage was not a living wage and therefore it violated the state statute. With a lie bigger than the Green Bay Packers’ offensive line, Walker’s DWD (Department of Workforce Development) was quick to respond that $7.25 met the requirement for a living wage.

They did not call any of the 100 complainants. Despite being told over and over again that these people, who work full time, often had to decide between paying rent, buying food, or buying medicine (unable to afford all three and sometimes, could only afford one of the three), the DWD somehow felt that the respondents were living in the lap of luxury off of those princely sums. Unbelievably, part of the reason was that government assistance was considered enough extra income to meet the standard. That means food stamps bumped minimum-wage earners into the leisure class in the eyes of Walker’s government – the same government that provided the food stamps. Were they to simply raise the minimum wage, they would no longer have to provide food stamps for countless numbers of at risk workers.

Although Wisconsin Jobs Now vows the fight is not over, I am finding myself unable to get past the inhuman decision from Walker’s administration.

More justifications of this untenable decision had to do with “stuff” that the poor people owned. That old, tired, and insulting idea that if a poor person owns a refrigerator they are somehow living the life of Riley needs to die a quick and painful death. Some people used to have money and now have none. They may have owned things from that former life, like an aging iPhone or a battered car. (Yes, those who owned cars were considered living well above need. However, were any of those cars to break down there were no funds to repair them.) They may have realized that being able to buy food in a grocery store and keep it in a refrigerator saved a lot of money in the long run over eating out. Many apartments include a refrigerator in the furnishings. Most people consider it as essential as a stove or oven. The only people who appear to think of a refrigerator as a sign of abundant wealth are the kind of people who have never wanted for anything in their entire lives.

Regardless of the erroneous fantasies held by those with piles of money in the bank, this particular statute is there to protect the people who work hard and cannot make food and rent at the same time. The law is there to make sure that government fatcats and corporate masters value the workers who are such a huge part of any industry. Naturally, business interests are screaming that a higher minimum wage would immediately make them flee the state. Walker even cites some bogus study that says the more you pay your workforce, the more jobs are lost. This has been proven incorrect. In Seattle, WA, the minimum wage was raised to $15 an hour and their job figures have been steadily climbing ever since.

It’s an easy equation even for someone who is not an economics major. If you put more money in the pockets of your workers, they will immediately pour that money into the economy of the state. They don’t hide it in offshore accounts. They use it, because they have to. They use it paying rents, buying food, clothes, and the occasional birthday cake. They spend the money on their kids, buying them school supplies and a new wardrobe for their growing bodies. They buy health insurance and gas for their functioning car. If you keep paying them too little to survive, there is only money for necessities. They pay their rent, or get some groceries, or maybe they decide to buy some much-needed medication (Walker did not accept Medicaid expansion, so a lot of poor people here have no insurance at all).

I am hoping that the battle for a living wage continues. The law is on the side of the underpaid. We just need to find a way to get our ridiculous little homunculus of a governor* to listen. Judging by all of the John Doe investigations into him and his administration, he’s not a big fan of laws. We need a miracle – like Mary Burke winning the Governor’s election next month.

*Ordinarily, I am not a fan of name-calling. I make an exception in Walker’s case because it’s an accurate description.

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There are two ways to solve the gun crisis in America that have yet to be discussed. First, there is one group above all others that is the source of most of gun violence in this country. According to the US National Library of Medicine/National Institute of Health one group of Americans caused 85.3% of all deaths by firearms in this country between 1976 and 1987. That is a pretty overwhelming statistic. Obviously, if we can get the guns away from this group then we can drastically reduce the amount of gun violence in this country.

The deadly group? Men. All we have to do is make sure men are never allowed to own, touch, or have any access to guns. Women can continue to have all the 2nd Amendment freedoms that they enjoy today. Men, not so much. With over 85% of all gun violence fueled by testosterone, I have no idea why this hasn’t been tried already (other than the fact that men make the laws, control almost everything, and would cry as though their favorite team just lost the Super Bowl were anything even close to this tried).

Imagine a world where buying a phallic stand-in would have to involve something that was not directly about snuffing the life out of another living being. I hear fast cars are a pretty good substitute for inadequate man pipes. Perhaps men could take up archery. Granted, getting a concealed carry permit for a long bow and a quiver doesn’t have the same thrill of stealth, but it’s a great way to play out your Green Arrow fantasies. Perhaps a Paleolithic spear thrower is more your style. Going old school.

It all sounds quite silly, but gun violence is never very funny. Having one group perpetuating so much more violence than another does point out that the testosterone-possessors among us need to be severely regulated. As the familiar phrase goes, “Everyone is a responsible gun owner until they aren’t.” So what can be done?

Enter the second way to regulate guns! We need to look at an approach taken by the very people who scream the loudest if gun ownership is threatened. After all, they’re masters at knowing how to take away a protected right.

Imagine that there’s only one store in your state that sells guns and it’s nowhere near you. Now imagine that there is no one in your state willing to sell guns, so a guy flies in once a week, on Friday, to open the shop. Now imagine that your state legislature passes a law that makes it mandatory to talk to the gun guy 3 days before you’re allowed to buy a gun from him. Oops, since he’s only there once a week, that means you’ll not only have to pay to fly to that one location where there’s a shop, but you’ll also have to get a hotel for a week. Don’t despair!

Those same lawmakers have also mandated that you not only get lectured by the gun guy against owning a gun, including made-up stuff about guns exploding in people’s hands all the time, or spontaneously burning down houses, but you also have to go for a long lecture from a bunch of people who don’t know anything at all about guns except that they hate them. These people will get to talk for several hours about the evils of guns and no one will check to see what they say is true. After you get this mind-numbing, one-sided, mandated lecture, you’re free to talk to the gun guy one more time, when he flies to the state. If you still want the gun, you get to wait until the gun guy returns (which includes getting to pay all those hotel fees, round trip airfares, or whatever). Yay! He’s back. One final lecture and you’re the proud owner of a small handgun (there are size limits)!

You may think this is ridiculous because, after all, the right to bear arms is the law. You should be protected. Roe vs. Wade made abortion legal. And yet the above is basically the reproductive law in several states. Just substitute doctor for “gun guy” and “legal medical procedure” for “gun”. Cheer up, though, because I could be discussing “admitting privileges” for gun shop owners and so sorry, you’ll have to go to Mexico and risk dying from defective arms.

So what’s the big difference? Guns are used to kill, so it can’t be about “saving lives.”Both are legal. You tell me. Why is one law backed up by billions of dollars, countless lobbyists, an enormous and powerful organization and the worshipping voices of millions of fans of things that blast holes into animals and people, and the other consists of women (because there isn’t a single law on the books restricting the rights of the father of those precious cells). It’s time to go all “pro-life” on the NRA.

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I was born into a Republican family. Both my father and mother shared the same ideology. I am not certain how my father found his political party, whether it was by decision or heredity, but he was a very conservative man with very conservative ideals. My mother’s family had been Republican since Abraham Lincoln. She was originally from Illinois and in fact, Abraham Lincoln had a law office in her city. He gave a very famous speech from the balcony of a building that is now a museum there. She likes to tell of the political discussions that used to happen around the dinner table between her father and her grandfather. I never questioned why she was a Republican with that sort of history.

My mother is 87 years old and those discussions took place in the 30s. That is a very different kind of Republican than those we see nowadays. There was no tea party back then. When it was created in 1854, the Republican Party, born in Wisconsin, had a narrow focus. They wanted the abolition of slavery, the kind of admirable goal that can make a person tear up if one thinks too hard about the sacrifices made in this quest. The truth is, it was the only goal of the Republican Party when it was first formed. How things have changed.

So the views of this conservative man and old guard Republican woman formed the political ideology under which I grew up. Wanting to be like my parents, I called myself a Republican, though I never paid one whit of attention to politics when I was young. When it was time to vote I would call my dad and ask, “What candidate would help you the most?” He would tell me the Republican candidate and I would vote a party ticket having done my civic duty without actually doing any of the work that should go with it.

One memorable dinner, my older brother and father had a huge blowup because the former voted for a Democrat for president. My father looked as though a knife had been plunged into his heart. His face was so red, his expression so pained, his breathing so irregular, it really did feel like my brother had harmed him in some permanent way. That incident made me decide never to go against my father when it came to politics. It wasn’t worth it.

Still, I did have to vote. During the 80’s I worked in aerospace and was told by my coworkers to vote for Reagan because our jobs depended on it. Star Wars (a missile defense system in outer space) was one of our big contracts. We also had the Space Shuttle Main Engines, the peacekeeper missile, and my favorite program, the National Aero-Space Plane (NASP). I was voting with my profession, having graduated from voting with a phone call to dad.

Then my father passed away suddenly, and my job in aerospace ended. For the first time in my life, I missed some elections. Having been forced to actually look at the candidates, I could not bring myself to vote for any more Republicans. Were they like this all along, I wondered? Had I really been voting for people who had so many programs that went against what I believed in? I was one of those people who had never met a prejudice I could like. I loved social programs, hated war, hated guns, was a feminist — in short, without knowing it, I had been a Democrat all along.

At the time, I still had a lot of affection for, if nothing else, the word “Republican.” It was my father, my mother, my younger brother, other relatives, my former coworkers, and Abraham Lincoln. I found it difficult to pull the handle for a Democrat when they had been vilified in my family for so long. I messed around, skipping a vote here, voting Green party there, but eventually there was an election too close to call, and I had to make a mark next to a D. It was freeing. I had done it and the sky had not fallen. The ghost of my father did not pummel me with disappointment and pain. Mom wasn’t happy — she told me again about Abraham Lincoln and dinner table discussions, but nowhere in those cajoling memories was there anything that connected to today’s Republican party.

Long gone are the abolitionists and Lincoln. Today’s Republicans are a shattered group of tea party extremists, hyper-controlling members of the religious right and a few conservative dinosaurs. I am proud to count myself among the liberals today. As for my mother, well, she wanted me to use an assumed name for this article so none of her friends would find out I was one of “them.” Not a chance, Mom. I am proud of my political journey because I vote for the parties as they actually are and not for something that existed close to a century ago. Besides, were Lincoln alive today, he would almost certainly be a Democrat, just like me.

The post A personal political journey from Republican to Democrat appeared first on Occasional Planet.

I am addicted to the Chris Christie bridge scandal. In trying to figure out why this story has resonated so deeply with me, I happened upon a unique possibility. I believe it is my love for fictional political thrillers. The writer in me cannot help looking at this scandal as the plot of a novel. It’s not difficult to come up with twists that have yet to be discovered. The more I think about them, the more I feel there’s a lot more we have yet to learn.

Chris Christie, being an East Coast governor and Republican, never showed up on my radar until everyone noticed him. Just before the presidential election, and after hurricane Sandy’s landfall, Chris Christie abandoned Mitt Romney and started hanging out with President Obama. To me, it seemed a strange thing to do. Yes, I heard Christie say that he would do anything to help his state, but he was overly affectionate, so very chummy, and the timing was insane, if you were rooting for the Republican to win the election.

Fast-forward to the bridge scandal and it got me thinking. Christie is being painted as a vindictive man who cannot be crossed. Whether the bridge scandal is payback for a non-endorsement or something else, none of the theories has a positive spin for the governor of New Jersey. He has the appearance of a petty, small-minded man who will break any rule to get his message out: don’t mess with Christie.

He is also known as a micro-manager whose fingers are in every pie. Resembling Richard Nixon at the height of his paranoid thuggery, Christie never forgets a slight. It didn’t matter that his election was in the bag. Like Nixon, he could not ignore his own base nature. Or, as Chris Hedges wrote in Truthdig, “Christie is the caricature of a Third World despot. He has a vicious temper, a propensity to bully and belittle those weaker than himself, an insatiable thirst for revenge against real or perceived enemies, and little respect for the law and, as recent events have made clear, for the truth.”

How, in our imaginary novel, do we apply what we’ve learned in the bridge scandal to what happened at the end of the last presidential election? Mitt Romney had been receiving a lot of pressure from the east coast moneymen to make Chris Christie his running mate. This was the same money Mitt came from himself, so one would assume it carried a lot of influence. And yet, he went with Paul Ryan, a Midwesterner. It leaves us with a lot of questions. How did Christie feel about getting snubbed? And for a man like Christie, who had spent his life living in the land of vendettas and whose standard operating procedure was, “We don’t get mad; we get even,”[1] — how would he reconcile being passed over for a prize that big? His character tells us that he would not let it pass. Is it possible that Chris Christie’s behavior in the run-up to the election had more to do with revenge than hurricane relief. Perhaps hugs with Obama were a small price to pay for helping to lead Romney to a humiliating loss.

Or was it something even more Machiavellian? He may have killed two birds with one stone. By helping torpedo Mitt Romney’s bid for the presidency, Christie played a role in getting Barack Obama a second term. Had Romney won, it would most likely have been eight years until the next election. And then Paul Ryan, who would still be a young man, could try for his eight years. That’s 16 years of Republican rule that may have left the country desperate for some Democrats. Where would that have left Christie? He is an impatient man when it comes to power. He would not want to wait 16+ years. Instead, because Romney lost, he just had to wait the four years of Obama’s second term and then the field was wide open.

Christie has said on more than one occasion that he was willing to do anything in order to win whatever he had his sights on. Everyone knows his eyes are firmly fixed on the Presidency. Just what is he willing to do? Calling for some traffic problems seems small in comparison to sabotaging a presidential election. And yet, his abandoning Romney and cozying up to the President may have played at least some role in the reelection of Barack Obama therefore giving Chris Christie a clear shot in 2016… as long as no one figured out who he really was.

Let’s hope this is one book that does not have a happy ending for its villainous central character. Time for this petty despot to fade into a footnote.

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[1] Christy quote repeated by Richard Merkt on “Up w/Steve Kornacki” 01/11/2014

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