Happy PUMA 1-month Birthday!

It’s me, SM!  My very first post!  WordPress wouldn’t let me have a two-lettered username, so sm77 will be my “name” when I post.

 

********

 

 

Wow! Our little cub of dissent has grown into a fear-inducing beast of majestic proportions, to the point that anti-PUMA sites are cropping up lately (see Governor Ed Rendell’s H.O.U.N.D.)  Anti-PUMA articles fill up with comments, brimming with conspiracy and rat-f&ckery such as the latest new rumor “PUMAs are Republicans.” Or that PUMAs are, as Riverdaughter quotes a certain orange-tinged blogger, “shrieking bands of paranoid holdouts.” 

Here at the Confluence, we all witnessed our PUMA cub’s birth on June 1st 2008 in a wee little comments section, a feline mutt that’s half Snarky and half Rebellious Defiance.  We giggled and cooed how cute and funny she turned out.  Whenever we would say her full name, it was like seeing Happy the New Year Baby’s big ears.  Party Unity My Ass, hee-hee! 

Yet Mother Riverdaughter’s muse, the inspiring Hypergraphia, retreated from the gleeful crowd.  In calm seclusion, Hypergraphia gave the cub potent megavitamins of symbolic purpose, chanted shamanic prayers of justice and taught little PUMA how stand on its own two feet.   Like watching the Aurora Borealis color a once-barren night sky, we stood in awe as PUMA arose from its tiny snark paws into a fierce beast of political dissent.  

That same day, PUMA wandered out from its birthplace, reaching official 527 status through Murphy’s PUMAPac.  Each hour-second-minute that ticked on June 1st reaching virtual light speed velocity, PUMA grew faster, bigger, stronger, charging through teh intertubez and resonated with millions of voters who agreed that something wasn’t right with the DNC/RBC ruling, famously demonstrated by PUMA Elder Priestess-in-Chief, Harriet Christian.

Then a week later on June 8^th, 2008, the PUMA Priestess-in-Prada Diane Mantouvalos and PUMA Chieftain Supreme Will Bower appeared on the MSM networks, announcing PUMAs’ arrival to the talking heads, miraculously herding a 2,000,000+ PUMA pride coalition at JustSayNoDeal.com.  Through small Midwestern towns to large cosmopolitan cities, through laptops, desktops, telephones and word-of-mouth, emails and thread comments, interviews and soundbites, the PUMA cat not just flew outta the bag, it shredded the bag to pieces.  Yummy. 

But where does PUMA get the energy to move so fast and furious, to charge through the valleys of vote-stealing politicians, through the meadows of blogger boy chicanery, scaling mountains of mainstream media hubris?   

It’s YOU.  And me.  And the people you intertube with.  And your mom, your dad, your daughter, your son, your friend, your boss, your co-worker, your convenience store clerk, your pharmacist, your dry cleaner, your pizza delivery kid, your customer service representative, your nurse, your rooftop installer, your lover, your migrant worker, your ex-boyfriend’s mom and dad, your former best-friend,  your high school teacher, your doctor.  All of YOU.

What we all have in common is that we are all life-long Democrats that defy the RBC ruling on May 31st, 2008.  We defy the sexism, the false accusations of racism, the mainstream media’s relentless drive to choose a nominee for us without having a majority of the popular votes.  And so many other things – but I digress.

PUMA, I am here to celebrate your first month of life.  Thank you for empowering me and millions of disenfranchised voters.  You gave us a voice that was taken away from us on May 31st, 2008.  Thank you for fueling us to fight the injustice that our own Democratic party has inflicted.  “One person, one vote” should not be replaced by “my candidate is better than yours so move over, bitch” politics.  And as long as the Democratic Fraternity Party appeases this un-Democratic behavior, PUMAs will pounce and growl louder than ever. 

¡Que viva los PUMAs! 

(Long live PUMAs!)

Mid-Afternoon Breaktime Open Thread

It’s been mentioned in the threads that Corbett at WILK radio in Scranton will be covering PUMA today. Riverdaughter just sent this message:

He asked me to call in around 3:35pm

And from the Comments (Hugh Gagner)

If you want to call in, ESPECIALLY if you live in PA, call 570-883-0098

PUMA

November To Remember

Here’s a link to more information (thanks grlpatriot!)

This? Is an Open Thread.

Monday: The Racism Backlash

I’m running a little late again and I suspect I have a meeting this morning at work. But in the 6 minutes I have, I would like to relate a little story about what happened here in my school district back in the 90’s. Note to teachers: this incident may be isolated and is in no way intended to disparage a whole generation of educators.

I ran for the school board (and won) back in the early 90s when I went to a curriculum goals team meeting and the only thing the curriculum supervisors wanted to talk about was teaching values. Call me fussy but I don’t think it is the role of the school to teach values. It is the role of the school to teach. Reading, writing, arithmetic, calculus, spanish, english, you know, stuff like that. And I preferred that they do it well. Not my school district. No, they were more interested in making flowery statements about how “Children are the messengers that we send into a future we will never see…” Seriously, that’s the opening line of our district goals. {{gag me}}

So, anyway, I ran and won. Then came Diversity Day 1996. Oh. My. God.

Diversity Day was set up by those same educators who thought it was a good idea to teach values. And in a way, it sounds like a great idea. All ethnicities, races and lifestyles are able to show students what they are all about in a non-threatening and safe environment. Cool and groovy. Except, there were some parents who were strict fundamentalists who kept their kids home on Diversity day because they didn’t like the Gay and Lesbian students who had their own kiosks. Hey, whatever you may think about whether this is right or not, the parents must *still* have the final word about this. I think they are wrong but they are still parents and Diversity Day is a non-academic school day. So, they kept their kids home.

No can do, said the administration. An absence on Diversity Day was to be recorded as an unexcused absence, even you were sick. So, everyone was forced to attend. To give parents some leeway, students got to choose which presentations they could attend. But once a section filled up, they got diverted into another one, involuntarily.

Which leads me to the AIDS activist. She was a poet from around here and she was quite, um, assertive? She started out her presentation with a recitation of the F word. She wanted everyone to get comfortable with it. Then she talked about masturbation and fantasies. One of the more interesting fantasies was if you could discuss your fantasies with your parents at the breakfast table (no I am not making this up). Then she said that everyone should take a good look at their vagina and if you didn’t have one, maybe you could borrow someone else’s. Then, to top it all off, as if that weren’t enough, she put a condom on a purple dildo – with her mouth.

What the principle and the curriculum supervisors didn’t realize s that there was a reporter from the local rag in the audience who took down every word of it and was so shocked she told the principle. The principle asked the AIDS activist to leave out the F word for the afternoon session.

When I got home from work, I immediately started getting phone calls from angry parents who couldn’t understand how I could let something like this happen (I didn’t know about it before hand) to reporters looking for a quote to take out of context (I learned my lesson that day).

The board meetings were normally held in the HS library but the throng that threatened to show up at the next one was so large that they shifted it to the HS Auditorium. I walked to my seat from the wings and HOLY HEMIOLA! The place was packed and there were klieg lights and national media and a fricking circus.

For 3 hours, I listened as parent after parent raked us over the coals. It was humiliating. But the worst thing was the stupid educators who got up to defend themselves because, after all, how else would students know how to protect themselves? They were just taking on the role that parents who were too timid to perform the task themselves. The demonstration was necessary.

I was speechless. The role of the educator was not to invite an amateur sexologist and public health specialist to a school to allow her to highjack a presentation and turn it into a national spectacle. The role of the educator is to have the health teachers perform these tasks in a professional way and TO MAKE SURE THE STUDENTS CAN READ THE GD CONDOM PACKAGE!

Backlash? Honey, you haven’t seen backlash until you see hundreds of angry parents who want your head. None of them thought they were so ignorant that they couldn’t talk to their children about sex. But the fact that educators sought to take this right away from them because they knew how to teach these values better just pissed them off to no end. These are well educated suburban parents and they mightily resented it when the principle et al implied they were ignorant, backwards, prudes who couldn’t understand kids these days. No, my droogs, that did not go over well. A lot of those parents became regulars at school board meetings.

So what is my point? I see a lot of the same kind of stuff going on with the election this year. You’ve got a lot of pretentious liberals who have interrupted the most important election of my lifetime and have decided to turn it into a teachable moment about race. This is a baaaaad idea. Because they have insulted the character of so many voters who do not see the election in racial terms. They think this election is about the future of our country and they are not pleased to be sidetracked by racism nor are they happy about being called racists by people who think they know better.

Backlash is coming, complete with Klieg lights and cameras.