Same · as · a · Wildcat

Hee hee hee hee hee

Stephen Colbert weighs in on hate crimes :)

"What DO you know, Mr. Attorney General?....Your reputation is on the line here. What do you have to say for yourself?"

From no less a source than Barbara Kingsolver and Mother Jones Magazine:

Seeing Red: Eating Locally and Debunking the Red-Blue Divide

"Symptomatic of this rural-urban identity crisis is our eager embrace of a recently imposed divide: the red states and the blue states. That color map comes to us with the suggestion that both coasts are populated by educated civil libertarians, while the vast middle and south are crisscrossed with the studded tracks of atvs leaving a trail of flying beer cans and rebel yells. Okay, I'm exaggerating a little. But I certainly sense that when urban friends ask me how I can stand living here, "so far from everything." (When I hear this question over the phone, I'm usually looking out the window at a forest, a running creek, and a vegetable garden, thinking: "Define 'everything.'") Otherwise sensitive coast-dwelling folk may refer to the whole chunk of our continent lying between the Cascades and the Hudson River as "The Interior."

In fact, the politics of rural regions are no more predictable than those in cities. "Conservative" is a reasonable position for a farmer who can lose home and livelihood all in one year by taking a risk on a new crop. But that's "conservative" as in, "eager to conserve what we have, reluctant to change the rules overnight," and unrelated to how the term is currently (often incomprehensibly) applied in party politics. The farm county where I grew up had so few Republicans they all registered Democrat so they could vote in the only local primary. My earliest understanding of radical, class-conscious politics came from miners' strikes in one of the most rural parts of my state, and of our nation....

...If every state were visually represented with the exact blend of red and blue it earned in recent elections, we'd have ourselves a big purple country. The tidy divide is a media Just So story."

So my son saw the Onion clip about sweatshops and laughed. And then he said, "Wait...that doesn't really happen, does it?"

I said, yes, it does. He thought that one over. Then today, when he asked what I wanted for Mother's Day, I said, "Free trade chocolate". I explained what I meant by that and he said, "Can you do that with clothes?"

Why yes, I said, you certainly can. I said there were several ways we could accomplish that goal:

1) Buy from secondhand stores and wear hand-me-downs. Those clothes are still manufactured wherever they are manufactured, but you aren't putting any more into the system and they are getting recycled.

2) Buy items made in the US, or other countries with good labor laws.

3) Buy only from companies who are sweatshop-free. As I've recently discovered, this is a bit more complicated than it first appears. It can also get expensive.

4) Make it ourselves. I am intrigued by this idea. I was raised with a number of skills I have found useful later in life...such as cooking, sewing, and carpentry. So far my son only knows how to cook. I think he'd get a lot out of making things himself, and knowing how to make them.

I also found this project by an artist very interesting: http://www.littlebrowndress.com/recycling%20journal.htm

Previously she wore the same brown dress every day for a year. Now she's wearing only things she made herself, out of materials she already possessed.


I don't necessarily need a lot of new clothes. But boys do grow, and mine is verging on thirteen. This could be interesting.

My main obstacle, actually, is being in a big damn hurry. I think, "oh, the boy needs a new shirt to wear to x" and then by the time x rolls around I have just enough time to run over to Target. That's something I could perhaps do something about.

http://devildoll.livejournal.com/750924.html


Go look. Then come back, and I'll tell you what The Fabulous Wonder Boy had to say about it.

( My boy wins... )