Green

Sometimes I listen to my friends and close ones fly off the pan handle about various things and think...yea I feel that but my you're worked up! Sometimes I get worked up too.

Yesterday was one of those days where everything just kept getting me worked up. It all started with the new issue of Mothering that has Ms. DiFranco on the cover with her partner and their child. We picked up the issue at our local whole foods while we were conscientiously buying organic dairy products and grass fed beef. While HH was making lunch, I perused the issue, starting of course with the article on Ani and backtracking to the open letters section. Here I find a letter by a woman who is enraged by the number of coupons she is receiving for formula and in fact went so far as to collect them in garbage bags and shred them This, in turn, enrages me. What kind of a socially conscious individual would shred hundreds of dollars worth of coupons? Is this individual unaware of the hundreds, perhaps thousands of women who are either unable to breast feed or not raising children they bore? Is she unaware of the thousands of children in the foster system who are in desperate need of formula and the foster parents who are given 200 a month to feed and clothe these children? A sum of money which barely covers a few onesies and a pair of shoes much less enough formula and diapers for an entire month. Is she so isolated that she does not understand that while SHE may be lucky enough to both breast feed and pump ( because she has the luxury of working part time) many women are not so lucky and NEED formula. WHAT A SELFISH BITCH. She couldn't have seen her way to donating those coupons? She couldn't have managed to find a way to give those free cans of formula to children that actually need it? No, because she is the only person on the planet and how dare a formula company assume she might need their services?

So after I finished my rant about the intensely self-absorbed green housewives of america, my roommate wandered into the kitchen and announced that she was not going to vote for Hil because "the world isn't ready for a female leader" and " other countries won't take us seriously if we have a female president". At which point a bomb of shocked silence exploded over the kitchen. Before I could close my mouth and swallow, HH had launched into a list of current female leaders and historical ones, their locations in the world and how most of the world in fact, does take a woman as a leader quite seriously, more seriously in fact, than America does. I seconded and added to the list of names and countries as my unsuspecting roommate failed to comprehend what we were saying. She literally could not process the information, or comprehend that women were in power somewhere else...where?... in the world. I followed this discussion with a printed list of female world leaders, which I casually slipped under her door.

And of course, after these there is one more. We are driving along talking about our mutual soapbox-drama and what is in the lane next to us but a PRIUS. A vehicle that makes HH simply detonate. and what is happening in the prius? A teenager is chewing chunks of his styrofoam cup and spitting them out of the window onto the ground. Yup. That about sums it up folks.