the personal as political

I conceived this blog as an auxilary to my PressWatch broadcasts on KBOO 90.7 FM Community Radio (kboo.fm), so I intended at first to post my notes for the programs; but it occurs to me that re-use of material under "fair use" probably doesn't apply as well to this electronic forum, so I'm going to stop doing that.

Instead I'll post URLs for the kboo.fm webcasts. Here's the link (you'll have to cut and paste) for last week's comments on reversing global warming (see also the post below):

http://www.kboo.fm/node/5651

--and here's the link for this week's program on war, corruption, and the economic meltdown:

http://www.kboo.fm/node/5650

There. This week on PressWatch, I started off with a mention of cocaine shenanigans from madcowprod.com--go there, you'll be shocked, and that isn't easy these days, is it? I also quoted George Soros at length, about the reason that, this time, the economic crash will keep crashing. It's about the end of a paradigm, the logical result of all these years of Reagan voodoo economics. I suppose there's a reason George Bush Junior got bad grades in economics.

Now, to the personal. I have just come close to losing my house, just like so many others--not because I had adjustable rate mortgages (mine are fixed). Not because I had no savings--I had four months' worth. No--it's because I was off work for nine months and more; and the only reason I'm working at all is because I'm a union member.

Yep, that old dinosaur, the supposedly corrupt Union, saved my transgendered ass. I was able to return to work , not because the Company wanted me (at all) but because the union contract preserved my eligibility after all those months. Herein lies the moral of today's lesson. Now go home.

Kidding. Because there's more to say; the reason I was off work was due to the collapse of my ability to concentrate--pathologized as Panic Disorder. But there's more still; I had panic disorder because of gender harrassment. And the reason I suffer so much gender harrassment, in part, is because the neocons, the Republicans, and the conservative Democrats learned long ago that they could mobilize people based on their fears. It's difficult and even a little frightening, under our system of patriarchy and gender apartheid, to accept transwomen as members of society--and so it was quite easy to get people to fear and hate. Not a day passes without an insult, or some harrassment, or a threat, or actual violence. It's enough to drive anyone nuts. It took years to break me.

But now I'm "cured" and I'm back, driving a city bus. My mortgages will be saved, and I'll stay in my home. I don't want to paint a saintly picture of the Union--in fact, a majority (but not an essential supermajority) of Union members in my workplace voted to support an anti-gay measure just a couple of years ago. But it's the basic human right of organization for collective bargaining that kept my job--a good thing, because I didn't find any other workplace that wanted to hire me. Who wants trouble?