Dry Bones Dance

Don't let her push you around

    I have recently taken to watching soccer.  My Little Sister plays, and I’ve been going to her games most weekends.  Her mother brings a chair for me, we sit in the sun (this being southern California), and she explains the meaning of offsides and corner kicks. 

    I’m not much of a sports fan, but I’ve found myself wishing that I’d played more sports when I was a girl.  Other than a brief flirtation with gymnastics when I was six, I was not an athletic child. I read for hours at a time, took piano lessons, won the spelling bee, and did everything in my power to get out of playing dodge ball in gym class. 

    It’s not that I feel I missed my opportunity to be an Olympic champion, because I’m pretty sure that was never going to happen.  It took me a while to figure out what I liked about the vibe of the games, and I finally realized what it was:  Every weekend, there are a bunch of men looking at a group of girls and not checking out where they fall on the sexual desirability scale.

Abortion Week: We have met the enemy and they are partly right (Part II)

    I was going to post this sooner, but I was temporarily out of action from the stomach flu. Now, however, I am off the saltines and ginger ale diet, and more or less functional. This is, however, a rather long and rambling post, so it's possible that my brain isn't 100% yet.

    You cannot listen to the pro-choice side of the abortion debate very long without hearing the phrase “a woman’s right to choose,” while anti-abortion foes, in an attempt to appear pro-woman, will talk about how abortion really allows men greater latitude to impregnate women willy-nilly, dispose of the problem with a few hundred dollars, and go merrily on their promiscuous way. The pro-lifers have a point. I understand that the rhetoric is a reaction to those who want to take away our choice, but I think that framing abortion as a ”woman’s right to choose” makes two mistakes:

The End of Arrogance

I will get back to the topic of abortion later this week, but if you are tired of hearing American media pundits hold forth on our current economic crisis and bailout, this article in the German magazine Der Spiegel gives an interesting perspective on our current financial crisis and what it means.

To summarize, their opinion is that we ain't in charge no more - no matter how many flag pins our Presidential candidates wear. As our financial house of cards falls, the "turbo-capitalism" that America sold to the rest of the world will fall with it - along with American political, economic, and maybe even cultural dominance.

They say a lot of things that I have thought for a while (except they have a much greater grasp on things like hedge funds and securities): It's a new world, and we aren't at the center of it anymore. Asia's economic power is growing rapidly, we've pissed off the entire EU, Russia is entirely finished with their post-Soviet repentance, and Latin America keeps electing leftish leaders who reject American economic policies with varying degrees of vehemence.

And to my fellow citizens (and candidates for public office) who still hold to the myth of American dominance: You know you're not the big man on campus anymore when the President of Bolivia starts talking trash.