Almost everyone who knows me post my relationship with my husband knows the story of how we met: I stalked him at his place of work for a month, and then finally got up the nerve to say, "Um, I saw you like Doctor Who, and I like Doctor Who, and do you want to grab a soda and talk about Doctor Who?" And we hit it off, and have been fairly inseparable ever since, nearly thirty years. And we all say, "Aw, what a sweet, romantic story," right? But in the age of # METOO , I keep t hinking, what if the situation were reversed? If I were a man who stood in the paperbacks every day staring a female worker? That woman would have had security walk her to her car every night. Or what if I were a man who had stalked Nick (Nick's bi-sexuality not-withstanding)? I was eighteen and weighed 105 pounds. Nick's age was unknown to me, and my college roommate pointed out that he might actually have been in high school making me the pedophile (he was actually t...
Sadly, although I think Bernie’s ideas are exactly what the country needs, and a long time coming, there is a piece of me that cannot see him in winning the White House. 1) He’s a democratic socialist. For a large portion of the population over 60 the word ‘socialist’ disqualifies him from the office of the president no matter what words precede it. My father would have been one of them. Of course, for my father and many others, the fact he protested the VietNam war would have been enough to dismiss him. To argue that socialism, as described in the works of Marx and Engel and many earlier social philosophies, has never been practiced by any major government on the planet—the classic ‘well, it works on paper’ argument—falls on deaf ears. Or to point out that a democratic system of governance is as vital to a socialist system as it is to a capitalistic one—if not more so—will not be believed. There are those who still think that FDR’s socialistic policies led the United States do...