Yays and Boos

November has been a month of highs and lows.

First, the serious stuff:

Yay: After two elections and eight long horrendous years, Americans have finally realized that voting for an “average Joe” with misplaced priorities has hurt the country more than it has helped it. There are many reasons to celebrate Barack Obama’s win; for me, it is less about electing the country’s first African American as president than it is about finally electing someone who possesses intellectual curiosity, integrity, and openness to complexity and diversity of opinion. And beautiful ears.

Yay: Sarah Palin is not the next vice-president of the United States. I am so much more afraid of Palin in the White House than I am of Putin rearing his head in our air space.

Boo: Six and a half million haters in California voted to strip gays of the right to marry and voters in Arizona and Florida defeated similar amendments. Moreover, 57 percent of voters in Arkansas denied the rights of unmarried couples to adopt, another maneuver to thwart the “gay agenda.”

The campaign supporting California’s Proposition 8, primarily funded by the Mormon Church and other religious institutions, targeted minority groups and the morally conservative and swayed voters through shameful scare tactics. Rather than focusing on the issue as being about human rights, Prop 8 supporters aired commercials that declared that public schools would treat same-sex marriage as normal, thus insinuating that if gays were given the right to marry, all children would magically turn into raging homosexuals (because being gay is really a choice) and the world would erupt into flames. And people actually bought into this bullwocky.

What is infuriating is minority groups choosing to deny the civil rights of another. Does the Mormon Church need to be reminded of its less than sparkling history of matrimonial excess or of its own persecution for its beliefs? And do we need to remind ourselves of our history of de jure racial segregation (removed by law beginning only in the 1950s), anti-miscsegenation a.k.a. ban on interracial marriage (repealed only in 1967), and women’s suffrage (granted only in 1920)?

Ignorance and bigotry are never - and should never be - in fashion.

Boo: And if that weren’t depressing enough, a) the US economy is in the shitter and we taxpayers will be inheriting the disaster of our failed financial institutions; b) the US auto industry is on the brink of bankruptcy and yet when the CEOs came to Congress to plead for a financial bailout, they arrived on expensive fancy private jets; c) global warming and climate change haven’t disappeared just because gas prices fell below $3 a gallon; d) the government’s idea of a solution to meet our energy needs is to sell oil and gas leases on 500 square miles of public land in eastern Utah; e) despite the economic downturn holiday consumerism is still rampant and perilous for retail workers; f) and oh yeah, hunger, disease, violence, illiteracy, and poverty still exist in the world.

Side note: One of the most important articles I’ve read recently is Michael Pollan’s open letter to the next “Farmer in Chief,” urging the next President-elect to prioritize the reform of America’s food system. The major point Pollan makes is that we cannot solve the three major crises that we currently face – national security, health care, and global warming – without recognizing the role food policy makes in contributing to them and the necessity of overhauling the system. I hope Barack is paying attention to this. Read the full article here.

Stepping off my soap box and moving on to the lighter side of life:

Yay: Because no blog post would be complete without some Ultimate-related tidbit, the Fighting Carrots, my clique team, made it to the finals in B league.

Boo: And lost. Another season as the bridesmaid and not the bride.

Yay: Some homies and I are going to New Zealand for 2.5 weeks in April!

Boo: April is a long five months away.

Yay?/Boo?: I will be a teaching assistant for a seven-week course on cost-benefit analysis starting in mid-January at CMU’s DC campus. I was offered the position based on a recommendation from the professor who will be teaching the class. I get the feeling that I'll be getting far more than what I bargained for with this one.

Yay: Thanksgiving came, and with it brought good food, good company, a week of leftovers, and many things and people to be grateful for, including readers of this blog!