Discussion To Fence Commercial Dumpsters: Fill & Download for Free

I’m in a bit of a unique position to answer this, I suppose, as I also note on my companion answer to the corresponding conservative question. I’m a never-Trumper and I believe in careful, measured, restrained, deliberate progress. My more liberal friends are convinced I’m a conservative, but most conservatives seem convinced I’m somewhere left of Karl Marx.I grew up a short distance away from the birthplace of the Republican Party, which was a liberal and highly progressive party when it was created, I might point out. I had immediate family in the Grange, a progressive Republican organization of farmers for most of its history. I was probably in college before I met a Democrat.But, by the time I was old enough to be aware of politics, most people around me listened to WTMJ and Charlie Sykes and Republicanism had turned conservative and reactionary. The Tea Party was highly active and successful in my hometown and school district. My home county broke 60–30 for Trump.How did an area of LaFollette progressive farmers barely 100 years ago become what it is today?Progressivism started failing them. Them, specifically.And this is largely what I think liberals have tended to fail to consider.I understand that I’m likely to be a bit stereotypical here in lumping liberals in with city people. There are liberals in the rural areas, sure. Most of them will have already realized a lot of what I’m writing.But for the most part, most of the outspoken liberals out there are not rural folks. The ones that dominate the Democratic Party are typically from urban areas.This is, as I have looked into the history of things, an artifact of the 20th century. There were formerly progressive wings in both major parties. But into the 20th century, the Republican Party tended to move more and more rural rather than just North. Republicans had always tended to be more pro-capital through the late 19th Century, while labor was more of a Democratic Party plank. There was a pro-labor progressive movement that for a brief time really held sway over the Republican Party with leaders such as Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, Robert “Fighting Bob” LaFollette, and William Howard Taft.Rural organizations like the Grange were the progressive pro-labor force in the agricultural regions like the Midwest.As the Republican Party lost its progressive wing in the early 20th century into intraparty fighting between the more measured Roosevelt progressives and the more radical LaFollette Republicans, the conservative pro-capital wing regained control of the Republican Party with party leadership such as Warren Harding and Herbert Hoover.Woodrow Wilson solidified a pro-labor progressive contingent within the Democratic Party when the Republican coalition fell apart in 1912. This was primarily aimed at unionization, which in turn tended to more heavily favor the increasing industrialization and urbanization of the country. By the time that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected to office, Republicans were increasingly becoming the party of the rural areas and the Northeast and Democrats were increasingly becoming the party of the cities.That split was torn open by the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and other progressive reforms of the late 1960’s. The conservative “Dixiecrats” of the rural South finally abandoned party loyalty for ideological loyalty and switched sides when conservative leadership within the Republican Party worked out a deal to provide them with continued seniority, starting with Strom Thurmond.This urban-rural divide has continued to accelerate to today, evident in electoral maps such as these from the 2016 national election:That looks like a huge sea of red.Adjusted for population, it looks more like this:I don’t bring this up to get into a debate about the electoral college, only to point out that urban-rural divide.1. It’s not about ideology or even partisanship, it’s about the “rural consciousness.”If you haven’t read Katherine Cramer’s outstanding work in The Politics of Resentment, you really really should. As I read it, I was stunned at how well she described my hometown and the people in it. I don’t know if one of the test groups she had was actually in my town, but it might as well have been. It was eerily familiar.Cramer discovered that rural people very much have their own social identity, and they feel that it is both under attack and worthy of preservation.And that is not unjustified. The politics are dominated by the increasingly concentrated populations of the urban areas. Without geographical representation like the electoral college or what liberals point out is an unfair weighting of the rural vote, there is a fear, one that is often realized, that the city folk will simply come in, invade them, and impose their city-minded views on them.When you hear rural people wanting “deregulation” and complaining about “overreach,” they’re just latching on to terms that describe what they experience. I can’t tell you how many farmers or rural county executives I know that are pissed to hell at the state because it seems like every year, there’s some new unfunded mandate or regulation or new tax. There may be and usually are very good reasons for these things, but they aren’t explained to my people. It’s just another edict from Madison and Milwaukee.They have lower tax bases and lower economies of scale because of the lack of population density. Progressive policies often fail to take that into account, and raise revenue by raising statewide property taxes. This massively disproportionately hits rural people, who tend to be land rich and money poor. Land is a great asset, but it’s not a liquid one. So, when we’re barely breaking even most years and two shitty seasons away from complete insolvency and China and California and giant agricorps are dumping cheap milk and pork into the system, we’re kind of fucked when you start demanding another thousand bucks a year from us.Minnesota is trying something that might help in the form of a tax credit for agricultural land when school districts want to pass a referendum, so that farmers that are disproportionately impacted by property tax hikes don’t get hit as hard. This is a good idea, and a way to try to help show that progressive policies don’t have to end up breaking them.2. You can be pretentious AF at times.Mal: You backed out of a deal last time. Left us hanging.Jayne: Hurt our feelings.Mal: You recall why that took place?Badger: Had a problem with your attitude, is why. Felt you was… what’s the word…?Jayne: Pretentious? [Mal gives Jayne a dirty look]Badger: Exactly! You think you’re better’n other people!Mal: Just the ones I’m better than.Firefly, “Shindig”My people consider liberals to be smug elitists that look down on them, and both sides are not unjustified.Look at what you see on TV representing my people. The positive end of that stick is the naivety of Parks and Rec. What do we more commonly see ourselves portrayed as? Called on national television?Rednecks. Inbred hicks. Toothless hillbillies. Racists and homophobes clinging to guns and Bibles. (Yeah, I know, if you take Obama’s entire quote in context, it’s speaking precisely to this problem, but that sound bite was all my people heard.)Look, this isn’t entirely your fault, liberals. I grew up with Jew jokes and black jokes and rampant homophobia. A family member who was a coach once yelled to one of his kids, “Run like a Mexican with a TV on his shoulder!” I’m not kidding. It’s that bad.I don’t want to make excuses for any of that.But here’s why context matters: we didn’t have any of those people in our community, with the exception of homosexual people, though we certainly didn’t know any of those. Homosexuality was one of those things that was pointedly ignored. I had a great aunt and an uncle who lived with “a friend” for all of my life. My family still won’t acknowledge the truth of it.It wasn’t really until I got to college and grew up that I began to realize with some horror why that is, in fact, really that bad. It’s not unjustified to look at those back home who don’t understand that and probably never will with some degree of that horror. The liberal disdain for it is not wholly undeserved.I’ve tried to explain it to my people. Most of them won’t listen. You can look at the comments I receive from certain people when I’ve written about white privilege as exhibit A. I get basically the same trying to explain it to people back home.When I used to try to explain it to them, I was considered one of them smug, pretentious elitists who got a degree and thinks I’m better than them right now. It took time for me to learn how to have those conversations in a way that helped them realize the real harm those things cause.What liberals tend to fail to realize is that it’s a lack of experience with those groups of people.Liberals tend to make a moral judgment about these people because of these things. These people, in their view, must believe these things because they are terrible, immoral people. They believe that these people must be irredeemable because who doesn’t know that such things are wrong today?That’s not it. It’s a lack of realness to them. The only place that most of these minority communities exist to them is on television, which is never set where they are. It’s set in the cities, far away from them. They don’t see their reality represented back to them with any fairness.My family has had to learn hard why black jokes aren’t cool after my sister married a black man from Chicago.It was suddenly real to them.An increasing Hispanic population in my home area working a lot of the dairy jobs has created an interesting split. The people who interact with them constantly like the dairy farms that hire them have done a 180 on Mexican jokes and anti-Hispanic rhetoric. People who don’t interact with that community regularly are still set in their old ways. And it’s causing a lot of friction, not just between the Hispanic community and the bigoted population, but between the two white communities.My people are pretty welcoming to people they actually know. When something happens, we’ll all pitch in to the fundraiser or grab chainsaws to get a tree off someone’s house after a bad storm. Doesn’t matter who you are, or what you look like, or what your sexual orientation or non-binary gender is.But this isn’t reported. This isn’t what makes it to portrayals of my people on television. Nobody makes a nationally-broadcast-over-aerial television show out of rural Wisconsin that depicts the positives of rural life, as it really is.Even on cable, every show I’ve ever watched doesn’t honor the rural consciousness. It treats us as a joke or an exaggeration at best. At worst, we are a land of serial killers and deplorables and poor people.And if we weren’t hanging on by a raggedy thread, maybe we could take it. Maybe. But we are.My people feel humiliated by you.And ultimately, humiliation is the root of all terrorism.There are some serious fences to mend here, and it’s going to take a lot of effort to rebuild some measure of trust. That’s made a lot harder by something I’ll discuss later.3. Marketing MattersThere’s little to no difference between marketing and propaganda. I literally used commercials to teach propaganda to my high school students.You can say that Republicans are propaganda masters all you want. It’s marketing. And they’re damned good at it.Say what you want about their policies, Republicans have long been waaaaaaaaaaaaay the hell better at selling their policies, especially to rural America.Matthew Bates isn’t wrong about why they have an advantage here: a win for them is to do nothing. Their whole schtick is “do absolutely nothing new and do a lot less of what you’re already doing” and they’ve sold it incredibly well. Whether it’s catchy bits like Reagan’s “welfare queen” or the line “government is the problem,” Republicans have been doing an excellent job of selling the idea that government is not an instrument of the people for doing good for society.They’ve successfully gotten a significant chunk of people to believe that the Constitution doesn’t actually say in multiple places that the purpose of government and of taxation is for the general welfare, or at a minimum, redefined what that means to “rich people gonna rich and that’s the way it should be.”They’ve sold a philosophy that what’s good for the golden goose is good for the rest of you regular ganders and made people think that’s morally correct.They’ve mastered oversimplification of complex issues for the average person.Their actual mascot should really be this guy:Oh, think, my friends, how can any Medicare system ever hope to compete with a gold parachute for a health insurance CEO? Remember, my friends, what a handful of enterprising entrepreneurs did to the famous, fabled walls of socialism! Oh, Venezuela’s price controls come a tumblin’ down!They are incredibly effective atCreating a “problem,”Selling a “solution” which they can conveniently offer at a discount price,Profiting wildly from that solution; andLeaving the whole thing in shambles behind them for someone else to clean up.And most of all, they are fantastic at convincing people that the alternative to getting screwed over by them is somehow worse.Why do rural people eat this up? Because it seizes on something that feels pretty damned real to them: government is constantly putting more burdens on them and they don’t feel like they’re getting what they pay for. Democrats have done a bang up job promoting mass transit and electric cars and all sorts of things… that they will never see. In the meanwhile, their hospitals are closing and their schools are shrinking and losing good teachers and the buses don’t go past their place and their roads are falling to shit and their health insurance keeps going up. It sure seems like Democrats are helping the city people and not them.If you drove a Tesla out to my people, they’d laugh their asses off at you. It seems like a completely impractical car to them. It’s too nice to get it dirty and has waaaay too many bells and whistles.And that’s what they see AOC telling them to buy.Liberals are goddamned horrible at marketing their policies to my people.This is especially true in the era of Trump. Liberals have been essentially running on a platform of “well, we’re better than that shit-filled dumpster fire, right?”That isn’t good enough.You want progress? You have to sell it, to them.These policies are undeniably good for a lot of people who haven’t bought into them.Universal health care would absolutely be good for a lot of people who aren’t currently voting for Democrats or on board with more liberal policies. Many of them are paying out of control premiums and deductibles and going into medical bankruptcy. Rural hospitals are going under or cutting back essential services, all of which makes it that much harder on those people. A universal health insurance system that could ensure that rural people can still get adequate care at a lower cost than they currently pay is undeniably good for them.I constantly see liberals who just wave this away.They simply refuse to market anything, because they think it’s obvious and only an idiot would not understand that. (And again: that just plays into the pretentiousness problem.)No. That’s not enough. Liberals have to sell it.And yeah, they have the extra disadvantage that they have to play to win when all Republicans have to do is play not to lose. Doing something is a lot harder than doing nothing. And it’s easier to scare people into sticking with a shitty thing that they know than a scary thing that they don’t.Republican policies right now are repackaging their own warm piss in unwashed bleach bottles with hastily scrawled “leminaid” in Sharpie on a taped-on piece of ripped off notebook paper.But seriously, if you can’t beat that, you’re clearly in need a better marketing firm.If you want change, you have to sell it.No, no. Stop. I can hear your complaint already.4. Your bitching about conservatives not playing in good faith is a waste of time.Doctor: It's not fair? Oh, I didn't realize that it was not fair! Well, you know what? My TARDIS doesn't work properly and I don't have my own personal tailor.Doctor Who, “The Zygon Inversion”I can hear fifty liberals reading this far who already just audibly sighed or got angry because they’re pissed at the fact that it’s a massively uphill battle. You’re going to bitch about the electoral college and gerrymandering and voter ID and all the ways that liberals are being deprived of a fair shake in government and conservatives are not engaging in good faith.I’ll be the first right there to tell you that all of that is true.And none of it matters.No, it doesn’t.You know what wasn’t fair? Decades of getting kicked in the teeth as global trade and automation and debt traps pounded rural economies based on agriculture and manufacturing while progressive policies promised help that never came.My people aren’t going to play in good faith because they see no reason to and they have no incentive to trust liberals in their book. Playing dirty is getting them what they want. Compromising never did.At least conservatives are honest about the fact that my people are on their own and can’t expect meaningful assistance from the government. That tracks with their experience. Progressives spent decades overpromising and underdelivering. At least when they elect Republicans, they get what they pay for. If you’re going to get kicked in ass, might as well get lower taxes out of it.As P.J. O’Rourke once noted: “The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it.”I’m not saying you need to take the low road and get in the mud. As my people say, “if you wrestle with a pig in the sty, all that happens is you get dirty and the pig likes it.”I’m saying you need to quit being surprised, have a plan for that, and be better at controlling the messaging around it. Bernie’s socialism shtick is screwing y’all over. It’s the same liberal strategy that’s gotten you where you are: promise a metric shit ton that’s going to be imposed on us whether we like it or not and we all get to live with the catastrophic failure if it implodes.5. Not everything unjust is racist and not everything that is racist is intentionally racist.Words matter. What words we use matters.I tried to tell liberals this when they compared Mitt Romney to Hitler and Mussolini. I was told to go away.And here we are: my people won’t listen to you anymore because everything is racist. Everything is over the top, or at least so they feel.And I get that criticism. I understand that criticism from both sides.There is a ton of injustice in this country and a solid 70% of it is continued trauma and inertia from slavery and its successors. Being anything not white in this country does put you at an inherent, automatic disadvantage compared to the advantage of being white.Some of that has to do with actual racism, and some of that has to do with the disadvantages of poverty, which largely exist because of prior actual racism and there’s a lot of catch-up to do.But when everything becomes a matter of outrageous injustice, it does start to become less meaningful. When the outrage is constant, it starts to become background noise. When everything is racist, eventually nothing really is to conservatives.Appropriately challenging racism and injustice is tough. It’s hard to see something that is deeply upsetting and not want to just yell in rage at it. I get that. I do it myself a lot. It’s rarely successful.I feel statements are very effective. Putting a human face on an injustice is very effective. “This is how what you just said was hurtful to me” can be very effective. (Don’t try this online. Most of the time, you’re dealing with trolls who don’t give a shit. But in person, this can be very effective.)Most conservatives and most of my people aren’t being racist on purpose, and that’s why they actually get offended when you call them that. They honestly don’t know why what they just said or did was racist or otherwise unjust. They have a very, very simplified view of what that means.It’s not even that they don’t understand things like microaggressions. They just don’t have the same context for it. They understand trauma, but very differently. They understand disadvantage, but very differently.Take a calming breath. Respond in kindness. Explain how what was said is hurtful and why. Most of my people are not intentionally hurtful. They’re not trying to be racist. They literally just don’t understand why what they did or said was hurtful.6. People do switch sides if they have a good reason, so quit writing off my people as a lost cause.Honestly, this one bothers me the most. I can’t tell you how many liberals who are thoroughly convinced that every Trump supporter and every Republican is a lost cause and will never, ever change.One of your own standard bearers changed sides: Elizabeth Warren. She was a Republican and a die-hard conservative, not that long ago. She was 47 when she switched sides, after she spent a long time dealing with bankruptcies and foreclosures as a lawyer and then through having her grad assistants research that. She was convinced of the Republican line before then, that people failed the consumer game because they were bad at it and made bad choices and scammed the system.She found that people in bankruptcy were often a lot different than the irresponsible deadbeats she’d believed them to be. Eventually, she saw how corporate America had been trapping people into debt cycles for a long time, and that’s how we got the Liz Warren we see today.There are a lot of Obama-Trump voters; people who voted for “hope and change” and then turned around and voted for Trump.And perhaps this shouldn’t be entirely surprising.There were a lot of people, especially the rural voters where I’m from, who voted for Obama thought they were going to get “hope and change.”And they got shit on with the recovery from the 2008 financial collapse. They didn’t get the bailouts or the assistance. They didn’t get their jobs back. They didn’t see most of the recovery. Their industries, their towns, all remained in ruin. God bless David Wong over at Cracked, who fucking nailed it with this piece. And it was written before Trump was elected, so that should tell you that it wasn’t just some liberal soul-searching afterwards. It was a warning.Farm bankruptcies were already rising under Obama as small dairies and crop farmers went under more and more, due in large part to predatory debt traps and then a freeze on credit. The CFPB helped a little, which is why you’re seeing these skyrocket under Trump’s massive deregulation push.But my people felt betrayed by eight years of Obama. They saw their health insurance get more expensive and all the growth in the stock market sure didn’t seem to help them.So, when Hillary ran effectively as Obama’s third term, they were willing to throw their lot in with Trump, who they believed knew the secret sauce to being rich and was going to somehow share it with everyone. They really thought that he was going to somehow strongarm China into playing better and everything else. Many of them still do. They think they’re going to get the change that they were promised under Obama.And believe me, plenty of them feel just as betrayed and ready to burn the whole thing to the ground because they feel just as betrayed by both sides. Some of them are sticking with Trump even though they know he’s burning everything to the ground because at least then they’ll have the government off their backs. If everything’s going to shit either way, might as well go for the one who is going to get rid of all of those pesky regulations about why they can’t drain off the back willows and get a few extra acres.My people are not ideologues, for the most part. They don’t actually care about “small government” conservatism or the “nanny state.” Those are just convenient things they’re repeating as stand-ins for what they really want.They generally just want the basics: a fair shake in life, reasonable rules that make sense, and general security.They want Roosevelt’s square deal.They want to quit being punished for working hard when it does feel like some others are gaming the system.They want a path to retirement.They want to be able to try their hand at a business.They want to send their kids to a good school.They want to live in a safe neighborhood.They want to drive on decent roads.They want a hospital that isn’t hundreds of miles away and that won’t bankrupt them.They want laws and regulations that are logical and not overly burdensome, and most of all: something that they have some say over.They want to put food on the table.They want basic dignity and respect.They want what progressives want to give them. And they’ll gladly pay their taxes if they think they’re actually going to get it.Sell them on how your policies will give them that, and seriously, you can make progressives out of lifelong Republicans.

Very close. It’s Déjà vu. I grew up during both the Cold War and the Oil Embargo. I called myself a PUPpy — paranoid upwardly mobile professional — if I didn’t starve to death, I’d die from a mushroom cloud — or both.I’m a white female, and was born Republican, but even as a Kindergartener, I voted for McGovern over Nixon in our mock elections. Nixon appeared fake to me even then. McGovern’s TV commercial had him walking, coat off and over his shoulder, alongside a man in a hardhat. Many politicians have used his honest and “of the people” approach since. Apparently no one really actually cares about the people or this planet anymore.In upstate NY, you had to be a Republican — half our population, NYC, was Democrat, and they sucked all of our tax money, then we never saw it back. My tiny county was literally the only one with a balanced budget at the end of the 70’s, cause our budget was too low to overspend. Back then, tRump and the Mafia were Democrats. But when the Dems finally got a conscience, they swapped parties.I grew up next door to a Methodist church, and was calling the religious bastards hypocrites as soon as I learned the word as a little girl. Don’t get me started on what they did to my family, esp. my widowed mother, after my dad died. I had to go to the Village Council meeting with a list of grievances. Thankfully our mayor was an Episcopalian, from up the street, and they were fixed. The Methodists repeatedly tried to bankrupt our small town, and after taxes, with no infrastructure or educational funding added back in, drove GE, Link, and IBM out, they finally succeeded. My high school classmate wrote a scathing editorial, listing the crimes of the Methodist bastards in our hometown, including the then local sheriff. He lived on the curve of the street on the other side of my little town of 300 homes.It was no surprise when Baby Bush and Darth Cheney, fleecers of our nation, and accelerators of the recession that we’ve barely clawed our way out from under, were the first Methodist POTUS and VP pair in our nation’s country. It all started with handing out pamphlets trashing Carbon 14, so the Shroud of Turin was possibly still authentic (spoiler alert — it’s still a fake, after many more methods have been applied to many more samples).If all religious people were Jimmy Carter, I’d respect them. I instantly made sure that our very large company added Habitat for Humanity to our list of places you could put in 8 hrs of community service, and get paid for it.But most religious people are NOT Jimmy Carter, they are selfish in-groupie monsters, and I SPIT on them. I’m tired of being stared at to be sure I’m lip synching “Under God” during the pledge of allegiance. I’m sick of the Trinity church’s daughter brainwashing my best friend to base her future friendship with me on whether or not I verbally announced that “Jesus was in my heart.” I’m sick of watching 25% of my female classmates carry babies to term before high school graduation, not even counting the abortions, because we didn’t teach 1/2 year health class until 11th or 12th grade, and most kids took driver’s ed in 11th and pushed Health off til senior year. I noticed that the girls with older sisters didn’t get pregnant. My mom got me the Life Cycle Library at age 7, so I was also informed enough.When my friend Amy was obviously pregnant and taking a final exam, my male science teacher verbally put her down in front of us all. Same biology teacher that drew his wife in profile with inward pointing cleavage, she was so flat, then went on to draw/discuss the actual science topic and organs. No one said a thing to Amy’s boyfriend (who did actually marry her). I will hate that teacher to this day. Sadly, my dad had first dibs on this job, but he stayed at IBM because they paid him 14% more, and my mom had gotten pregnant with me (while mom and dad were in college). His dream was to be a teacher, but he died of cancer at age 42, having smoked cigarettes handed to him for free by the cigarette mafia, in college (after having been star football wide receiver and class VP in high school), and then working around etch chemicals at IBM. Many IBM dads died with him, including my best buddy’s dad, aged 39, while we were still in high school. No one got a cent. Our moms were tossed into poverty, to work at low end jobs. After my dad died, I was lucky enough to scrape together enough while on co-op to survive my senior year and get a degree. Soon after, I was buying my mother a new car, so she could work and not worry about repairs, and me, I bought a used car.My widowed mom has a bad knee and can’t get it replaced. She hurt it at work, tripping onto the concrete, over some circuit boards another inspector was hoarding on the floor next to her desk (they were easier to inspect so she would get a better efficiency score and keep her job). I never raised my own children, because I promised my dying father that I’d keep my mom from being homeless on the street. My mom’s mom needed my help with rent when she hurt her ankle, and couldn’t babysit the baby and the elderly person she normally watched. My uncle’s wife had installed hardwood floors, so he couldn’t do it. I don’t know what to say, but my family isn’t benefiting from the social safety net. But if they cut it more, I know my family will suffer even worse. My mother voted for tRump because her neighbor told he that Hillary would take her guns away, She sleeps with a gun at night because the drug addict kids are breaking into homes just up the road from her. I don’t see tRump helping those kids, these neighbors, or my mom. She hobbles in a cane and can’t work — I can’t afford to fix her knee, and her employer changed her efficiency numbers and fired her. She just lost her 2nd husband to a diabetic heart attack — they were constantly having his medications juggled around, due to artificially high medication costs.My mom ‘s mental outlook is in a dumpster, and I don’t know what to do. I live across the country from her. My job is hanging in the balance.tRump and his Mafia are the problem, but the monsters have the inbred rabble brainwashed. We can’t keep the tRump Mafia in control. We’re already spiraling back into recession yet again. Our planet is spiraling out of control, for economy, weather, and politics. WW3 is a real threat. The isolationism that we’re entering now, is where we were at the start of WW1 and WW2. My company had already laid people off. Our customers are pushing payments and contracts into next year that were supposed to be this year.I went to school with the Brett Kavanaughs. 40% of our student body belonged to frats. I have written an entire Quora answer listing some of the rape victims at our college, and what happened afterward. One was gang raped at 2 pm. All she needed was a ride to the grocery store. She never got there. Another girl was also raped downtown in the early afternoon. Yet another was one of my only 8 fellow female mechanical engineering classmates (out of 1200 students for the entire graduating class) — and we were the only 2 natural blondes. And she had recently won the female bodybuilding championship. One was the quietest member of my college XC team — she committed suicide. The next time our XC team met, our coach (also VP of Student Affairs) sat us down to tell us, and we all cried. Two of the frat rape incidents were so bad, our 1824 school took their houses away and gave them to sororities who had been waiting for years for a house.I was part of student government, so I got to hear what most students didn’t. I got to hear about every rape, and every suicide. Most suicides were “converted” into accidents, so their parents could collect on health insurance. The “accidental” bullet in the head, out in front yard, was not successfully converted. But my XC runner friend’s “accidental” ingestion of poison from the Chemistry Lab was.If you still think Brett really deserves to be on the Supreme Court, you can continue to shove your head even further up your a**, just for me. He is what today’s Republican is. And NOTHING has changed decades later. Rich white college boys are still getting away with rape scott free.I don’t remember the day or month when my teenaged town drug dealer asked me if I’d give him a blow job on my way to my bus stop. I was in Kindergarten. But I can still see and hear him ask it. I can still see his buddy laugh hysterically. I an still remember asking my mom what blowjob was. I can still remember finding a metal rod, bending it in half, and hiding it in the dead tree stump across the street from my bus stop. I an still remember showing Kellie, the other girl my age, the rod, in case she needed it. Of course, she told her mom. I remember being called into the principal’s office. I remember my principal, holding my rod, still bent, in his hand, asking me if I really had hidden this in a stump to beat the boys with. From his tone of voice, I knew to flatly deny it. He announced he was throwing it out. Apparently, it was a bigger problem that I might bruise Matt while he tried to force me to give him a blowjob, than if he forced me to give him a blow job. My mom did succeed in moving me to another bus stop. No one stopped Matt’s dad from sexually abusing Matt’s 2 sisters. No one stopped Matt from selling drugs that this Korean war veteran dad was smuggling into town for Matt to sell. And no one stopped Matt from asking 4–5 year old little girls to give him a blowjob. He lived directly across the side street from the Methodist church.This was the same church that gave the same sermon about my family, twice. The new preacher inherited the retiring preacher’s sermon book. The gossip network just had to let us know each time. It went like this:1. My mom and dad were faithful to each other (unlike the church members)2. My dad was a good bread winner and provider to his family, and a good neighbor and friend to everyone who knew him.3. My mom was a good stay at home mom, raising a straight A, well behaved daughter (me).4. My parents were active in the fire department. My dad was every level of chief and then commissioner, putting in long hours drawing up budgets to be voted on for a new ambulance or tanker or pumper. My mom manned the fire phone (before 911 centers), and when every one else partied, my mom stayed home to man that phone.5. BUT … we were all going to HELL, cause we didn’t belong to the church, and we hadn’t handed over our back yard (full of a vegetable garden) as a parking lot for them, after they had covered their parking lot with a pole barn to brainwash children in as part of their “daycare.”This included walking into our yard, and stomping on our food to grab what they wanted. It included flooding our yard with their basement water, as they were too lazy to get a longer hose to go to the TWO road drains they had. After cutting down all of our trees, and letting one destroy my swing set, no compensation. After not even adding grass or anything after tearing up half of our back yard. This included storing piles of trash on the side of their church toward our house, where it stunk to high heaven and we had to close our windows. This included wearing a PATH across our back yard, until I built a fence to stop them, before they tried to claim a right of way after 7 years. As I built the fence, families would “just happen: to go for a pleasant walk by me, and ask me why I was building it. And I had to be nice.This same church tried to CONDEMN our home and the others next to us, to get their parking lot after all, so my mom panicked and moved out. One of the other neighbors fought back, and brought a rep from Albany down to shut them up. But the damage was done. My mom had bought another house, but our old house was 200 years old and no one could get a conventional loan on it with the unconventional basement it had. So a lady agreed to buy my childhood home with her upcoming disability settlement. But it never came. The lawyers would refuse to pay, and the judge would fine them for less than the interest they were getting. Rinse repeat the next year. This lady never got a cent and so she squatted. My mom had to sell our childhood home for $13,500 to a guy who spent that amount again evicting the squatter lady, then converting the home into 3 apartments. The only justice from all of this was that the squatter lady had a mean dog who terrorized the brainwashed church kids. Too bad my family had gone to hell and left them with worse.WAKE UP!I have some frequency based gizmos (for drones, bugs, cameras, and also medical for debugging tumors, fibroids, and for matching to pain inducing frequencies, like in Cuba), and a movie script what includes them, if anyone wants to help me stave WW3 off, in a dark comedy fashion.

I’m a white female, and was born Republican, but even as a Kindergartener, I voted for McGovern over Nixon in our mock elections. Nixon appeared fake to me even then. McGovern’s TV commercial had him walking, coat off and over his shoulder, alongside a man in a hardhat. Many politicians have used his honest and “of the people” approach since. Apparently no one really actually cares about the people anymore. They are just dumb pawns with MAGA hats.I agree with everything stated by Adam Roach. I was born a Republican. In upstate NY, you had to be one — half our population, NYC, was Democrat, and they sucked all of our tax money, then we never saw it back. My tiny county was literally the only one with a balanced budget at the end of the 70’s, cause our budget was too low to overspend. Back then, tRump and the Mafia were Democrats. But when the Dems finally got a conscience, they swapped parties.I grew up next door to a Methodist church, and was calling the religious bastards hypocrites as soon as I learned the word as a little girl. Don’t get me started on what they did to my family, esp. my widowed mother, after my dad died. I had to go to the Village Council meeting with a list of grievances. Thankfully our mayor was an Episcopalian, from up the street, and they were fixed. The Methodists repeatedly tried to bankrupt our small town, and after taxes, with no infrastructure or educational funding added back in, drove GE, Link, and IBM out, they finally succeeded. My high school classmate wrote a scathing editorial, listing the crimes of the Methodist bastards in our hometown, including the then local sheriff. He lived on the curve of the street on the other side of my little town of 300 homes. It was no surprise when Baby Bush and Darth Cheney, fleecers of our nation, and accelerators of the recession that we’ve barely clawed our way out from under, were the first Methodist POTUS and VP pair in our nation’s country. It all started with handing out pamphlets trashing Carbon 14, so the Shroud of Turin was possibly still authentic (spoiler alert — it’s still a fake, after many more methods have been applied to many more samples).If all religious people were Jimmy Carter, I’d respect them. I instantly made sure that our very large company added Habitat for Humanity to our list of places you could put in 8 hrs of community service, and get paid for it.But most religious people are NOT Jimmy Carter, they are selfish in-groupie monsters, and I SPIT on them. I’m tired of being stared at to be sure I’m lip synching “Under God” during the pledge of allegiance. I’m sick of the Trinity church’s daughter brainwashing my best friend to base her future friendship with me on whether or not I verbally announced that “Jesus was in my heart.” I’m sick of watching 25% of my female classmates carry babies to term before high school graduation, not even counting the abortions, because we didn’t teach 1/2 year health class until 11th or 12th grade, and most kids took driver’s ed in 11th and pushed Health off til senior year. I noticed that the girls with older sisters didn’t get pregnant. My mom got me the Life Cycle Library at age 7, so I was also informed enough.When my friend Amy was obviously pregnant and taking a final exam, my male science teacher verbally put her down in front of us all. Same biology teacher that drew his wife in profile with inward pointing cleavage, she was so flat, then went on to draw/discuss the actual science topic and organs. No one said a thing to Amy’s boyfriend (who did actually marry her). I will hate that teacher to this day. Sadly, my dad had first dibs on this job, but he stayed at IBM because they paid him 14% more, and my mom had gotten pregnant with me (while mom and dad were in college). His dream was to be a teacher, but he died of cancer at age 42, having smoked cigarettes handed to him for free by the cigarette mafia, in college (after having been star football wide receiver and class VP in high school), and then working around etch chemicals at IBM. Many IBM dads died with him, including my best buddy’s dad, aged 39, while we were still in high school. No one got a cent. Our moms were tossed into poverty, to work at low end jobs. After my dad died, I was lucky enough to scrape together enough while on co-op to survive my senior year and get a degree. Soon after, I was buying my mother a new car, so she could work and not worry about repairs, and me, I bought a used car.My widowed mom has a bad knee and can’t get it replaced. She hurt it at work, tripping onto the concrete, over some circuit boards another inspector was hoarding on the floor next to her desk (they were easier to inspect so she would get a better efficiency score and keep her job). I never raised my own children, because I promised my dying father that I’d keep my mom from being homeless on the street. My mom’s mom needed my help with rent when she hurt her ankle, and couldn’t babysit the baby and the elderly person she normally watched. My uncle’s wife had installed hardwood floors, so he couldn’t do it. I don’t know what to say, but my family isn’t benefiting from the social safety net. But if they cut it more, I know my family will suffer even worse. My mother voted for tRump because her neighbor told he that Hillary would take her guns away, She sleeps with a gun at night because the drug addict kids are breaking into homes just up the road from her. I don’t see tRump helping those kids, these neighbors, or my mom. She hobbles in a cane and can’t work — I can’t afford to fix her knee, and her employer changed her efficiency numbers and fired her. She just lost her 2nd husband to a diabetic heart attack — they were constantly having his medications juggled around, due to artificially high medication costs. My mom ‘s mental outlook is in a dumpster, and I don’t know what to do. I live across the country from her. My job is hanging in the balance.tRump and his Mafia are the problem, but the monsters have the inbred rabble brainwashed. We can’t keep the tRump Mafia in control. We’re already spiraling back into recession yet again. Our planet is spiraling out of control, for economy, weather, and politics. WW3 is a real threat. The isolationism that we’re entering now, is where we were at the start of WW1 and WW2. My company had already laid people off. Our customers are pushing payments and contracts into next year that were supposed to be this year.I went to school with the Brett Kavanaughs. 40% of our student body belonged to frats. I have written an entire Quora answer listing some of the rape victims at our college, and what happened afterward. One was gang raped at 2 pm. All she needed was a ride to the grocery store. She never got there. Another girl was also raped downtown in the early afternoon. Yet another was one of my only 8 fellow female mechanical engineering classmates (out of 1200 students for the entire graduating class) — and we were the only 2 natural blondes. And she had recently won the female bodybuilding championship. One was the quietest member of my college XC team — she committed suicide. The next time our XC team met, our coach (also VP of Student Affairs) sat us down to tell us, and we all cried. Two of the frat rape incidents were so bad, our 1824 school took their houses away and gave them to sororities who had been waiting for years for a house.I was part of student government, so I got to hear what most students didn’t. I got to hear about every rape, and every suicide. Most suicides were “converted” into accidents, so their parents could collect on health insurance. The “accidental” bullet in the head, out in front yard, was not successfully converted. But my XC runner friend’s “accidental” ingestion of poison from the Chemistry Lab was.If you still think Brett really deserves to be on the Supreme Court, you can continue to shove your head even further up your a**, just for me. He is what today’s Republican is. And NOTHING has changed decades later. Rich white college boys are still getting away with rape scott free.I don’t remember the day or month when my teenaged town drug dealer asked me if I’d give him a blow job on my way to my bus stop. I was in Kindergarten. But I can still see and hear him ask it. I can still see his buddy laugh hysterically. I an still remember asking my mom what blowjob was. I can still remember finding a metal rod, bending it in half, and hiding it in the dead tree stump across the street from my bus stop. I an still remember showing Kellie, the other girl my age, the rod, in case she needed it. Of course, she told her mom. I remember being called into the principal’s office. I remember my principal, holding my rod, still bent, in his hand, asking me if I really had hidden this in a stump to beat the boys with. From his tone of voice, I knew to flatly deny it. He announced he was throwing it out. Apparently, it was a bigger problem that I might bruise Matt while he tried to force me to give him a blowjob, than if he forced me to give him a blow job. My mom did succeed in moving me to another bus stop. No one stopped Matt’s dad from sexually abusing Matt’s 2 sisters. No one stopped Matt from selling drugs that this Korean war veteran dad was smuggling into town for Matt to sell. And no one stopped Matt from asking 4–5 year old little girls to give him a blowjob. He lived directly across the side street from the Methodist church.This was the same church that gave the same sermon about my family, twice. The new preacher inherited the retiring preacher’s sermon book. The gossip network just had to let us know each time. It went like this:1. My mom and dad were faithful to each other (unlike the church members)2. My dad was a good bread winner and provider to his family, and a good neighbor and friend to everyone who knew him.3. My mom was a good stay at home mom, raising a straight A, well behaved daughter (me).4. My parents were active in the fire department. My dad was every level of chief and then commissioner, putting in long hours drawing up budgets to be voted on for a new ambulance or tanker or pumper. My mom manned the fire phone (before 911 centers), and when every one else partied, my mom stayed home to man that phone.5. BUT … we were all going to HELL, cause we didn’t belong to the church, and we hadn’t handed over our back yard (full of a vegetable garden) as a parking lot for them, after they had covered their parking lot with a pole barn to brainwash children in as part of their “daycare.” This included walking into our yard, and stomping on our food to grab what they wanted. It included flooding our yard with their basement water, as they were too lazy to get a longer hose to go to the TWO road drains they had. After cutting down all of our trees, and letting one destroy my swing set, no compensation. After not even adding grass or anything after tearing up half of our back yard. This included storing piles of trash on the side of their church toward our house, where it stunk to high heaven and we had to close our windows. This included wearing a PATH across our back yard, until I built a fence to stop them, before they tried to claim a right of way after 7 years. As I built the fence, families would “just happen: to go for a pleasant walk by me, and ask me why I was building it. And I had to be nice. This same church tried to CONDEMN our home and the others next to us, to get their parking lot after all, so my mom panicked and moved out. One of the other neighbors fought back, and brought a rep from Albany down to shut them up. But the damage was done. My mom had bought another house, but our old house was 200 years old and no one could get a conventional loan on it with the unconventional basement it had. So a lady agreed to buy my childhood home with her upcoming disability settlement. But it never came. The lawyers would refuse to pay, and the judge would fine them for less than the interest they were getting. Rinse repeat the next year. This lady never got a cent and so she squatted. My mom had to sell our childhood home for $13,500 to a guy who spent that amount again evicting the squatter lady, then converting the home into 3 apartments. The only justice from all of this was that the squatter lady had a mean dog who terrorized the brainwashed church kids. Too bad my family had gone to hell and left them with worse.WAKE UP!I have some frequency based gizmos (for drones, bugs, cameras, and also medical for debugging tumors, fibroids, and for matching to pain inducing frequencies, like in Cuba), and a movie script what includes them, if anyone wants to help me stave WW3 off, in a dark comedy fashion.