I used to blog all the time and then I got told to be quiet. I am not a quiet person and I have been waiting patiently for the day when my voice had enough strength to rise again. I was ripped apart and shredded. I thoroughly understood why women go underground and are afraid to speak their mind. And then, I tried to call my Grandma who has been dead for years and I cried and realized that the advice that she would have given me would have been to keep talking but just to change the venue so here is the change of venue.

Welcome to my blog...and here is why I write it:

The 2004 general election in Utah left many feeling as if their voices and their votes were not heard or accounted for. Those of us that tend to be progressive, liberal, or not easily swayed by the establishment were left feeling a general sense of what can be done next, if anything can be done at all. As a social worker, I have often worried that my needs and the needs of my clients are not being met by the current, conservative political administration, locally and nationally.

The morning after the election it turned out that my whole world had been tipped on it's axis. This man was to be our president for the next 4 years, this was a choice that was disturbing to me given his ideas regarding women and homosexuals in America. He is a tyrant, a dictator, and a man who feels entitled to his position simply because of who he is. He takes for granted the position that he currently holds as the leader of the free world. He is a simple minded small little man who is more concerned about how he looks to his cabinet than to the rest of the world. He lives in a bubble, never thinking for one minute how is ramshackle, frivilous ideas are going to affect the rest of the nation.

Then you have the constitutional amendment that defined marriage in Utah. How could so many not stop to think of the ramifications that this would have on so many thousands of people. We are human beings after all. A group of individuals that cannot help how they were born. People who just want to love and be loved like everybody else. How is it that a state, indeed a nation, can revert back to it's ideologies that all who are deemed different from the majority must be kept in the minority for the greater good of the general population. Have we so quickly forgotten the senseless slaughter of the indigenous people of this great land, the incessant and disturbing keeping of slaves, the racism and outright discriminatory behavior of whites against all those who are of a different color than they.

It feels as if we have gone back in time to a day in which those who are different are unworthy in the eyes of the straight, white, man were persecuted and often murdered in the name of keeping things pure. Is this not the 21st century? Are we not supposed to be paving the way for our future generations to know a growing, prosperous, all tolerant nation? Who do these leaders think they are that they believe that discrimination, hatred, and bigotry will take this country where it needs to go?

All women need to exercise their right to vote in every single election, no matter the level, no matter the candidate, no matter the cause. It is time for women to exert their capability as free thinking citizens of America to stand up for their children and the children of others. It is time for all women on welfare to educate themselves about what it means to vote, the process of voting, and how to get others in their same financial situation to vote as well. It is time for women to get to the polls in bigger numbers than ever before because it is truly their lives that are at stake. If our president has his way, no woman will remain on welfare, no children will receive a hot meal, and families will become homeless at rates this nation has never seen. It is because of his short-sighted, heavy-handed rhetoric that the chasm between upper and lower income individuals gets ever larger. Women and men are forced into extreme poverty and hopelessness, while the rich once again get richer. When is this country going to leave the era of the industrial revolution and come to its senses? We are supposed to be leaders of the free world, as individuals and as a nation, and we are living with politicians who believe that dictatorship is easier and that education is something to be made into a religious institution.

We fight over a senate seat based on the notion that a spouse should obviously fill that seat. Based on what, our current ideals, our fondness of nepotism? Alexander Hamilton would roll over in his grave at the notion of his wife taking his place at the table. Democracy in its intended form so rarely works well in this country that when it finally does, people lose any shred of sanity they may have ever held. All of a sudden things become personal as if there is some undocumented rite of passage for a legislator to get to choose their successor. Is that not a position of the people for the people, in as much that the people should choose who gets to fill it? No we say, and we get upset, and the media goes on a frenzy, and people wonder how this could have ever of happened because the person in power wants it one way, so does that mean that the people who voted them in no longer have a voice, a choice, a vote?

--February 6, 2006