Dear Readers,
Across the UC, people like me are now working without a contract. The UC came in with an insulting proposal at the last minute (after nine months of us trying to work all this out). They offered a new title for the old guard and a couple of tiny raises for the new people. In return, they would get the right to get rid of us very easily (and without enough notice to find another job), creating a system where our jobs are constantly in turn-over, among other things.
Would UC admin ever sign an agreement saying they would be hired for a quarter or a year in a “self-terminating contract”? Of course not.
So we are rallying this Monday–tomorrow–2/3–at noon, on the steps of MRAK Hall.
Please come show your support.

My union has been trying to get a decent contract since last March. Our current contract expires THIS FRIDAY.

I’ve written already about how the UC system wants to take our offices away. The sad news is that keeping our offices isn’t even in the top three goals for our current contract.

We want better pay (ex: when the tenured faculty vote to give themselves all a raise, we (the colonists who get no votes) must get that raise too. Last time, the tenured people gave themselves 4%–we were given 3%).

We want more job security (the UC system wants to turn us all into adjuncts, who can be fired at whim, with no real warning, no matter the experience, awards, etc.).

We want to stop being told to do unpaid labor, to stop being punished for it when we resist.

If you’re around, you can come see what’s happening and show your support.

All are welcome to attend bargaining 10-5 at Gladys Valley Hall in the Vet Med center. We’ll be in the following rooms:

Wednesday, 1/29  Room 2030
Thursday, 1/30  Room 2071
Friday, 1/31  Room 2030

Be sure to mark your calendar and make plans to attend our Stand Up for Teaching! rally on Monday, February 3. We’ll meet at the steps of Mrak Hall at noon to show UC management that we’re united in fighting for a strong contract that values the work of all lecturers.

If you have questions, please email us at ucaft2023@gmail.com.

Today, my feed showed friends making the point that more people died from gun violence in New Orleans in one day than died in all of Japan in a year.

THIS IS THE ONLY 1ST WORLD COUNTRY IN WHICH SHIT LIKE THIS HAPPENS.

We are also the only country that is going to make it hard for those who survive the shootings to survive the bills afterwards.

At any given mass shooting, there will be some insured people and some uninsured ones.

Under my current insurance, for example, I am paying a couple hundred dollars a month in premium costs (under single payer, I would be paying much less each month in taxes). Some of my tax dollars also go to provide healthcare for the poor, the elderly, the military, the politicians, etc.

On top of that, a victim under a plan like mine would have to pay just under $1000 for the ambulance, $200 to enter the ER, and copays for tests, treatments, and doctors.

And I have good insurance.

Some victims with insurance will have to fight with insurance company. They will have their insurance company telling them they’re paying the whole bill because they didn’t go to the right ER, that they should have somehow gotten a pre-authorization. They will be denied medications, treatments, and care that insurance deems “unnecessary.” A panel of nonexperts will override the doctor, making more money for the insurance company.

Some victims won’t have insurance, because they’re contractors or because they’re between jobs or because they work for a small company or because they work for a giant company that only gives them 34 work hours a week just so the giant company doesn’t have to help pay for healthcare.

Those victims will be charged just a few thousand, if they’re lucky. Others will be charged tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars to stay alive after someone shot them.

Problems with medical bills will affect victims’ credit. Many will go bankrupt.

(A few years ago, I got sent to a collections agency because I refused to pay for the same ambulance ride twice. It took a year and many infuriating phone calls to straighten it all out.)

Some people won’t be able to return to work without intensive physical therapy; if they’re lucky enough to still have insurance, they’ll be paying a copay at every visit. Some won’t be able to return at all.

A few will have disability insurance, though it will take months to see any money from that, months in which the landlord still needs that rent check.

Some will lose their jobs because they become disabled. They’ll have a year or more of paperwork to certify that are unable to work.

If they’re in Southern/Republican states, they will have to wait two more years after being certified disabled to have access to nonER healthcare.

Some people will be lucky enough to be able to work part time, but if they want insurance, they’ll have to look for a full time job. In our country, even when you work several part time jobs, equaling more than 40 hours/week, you’re still not eligible.

If the person who was shot was the primary breadwinner (and thus the person whose insurance policy covered the household), the whole family may lose their insurance in addition to their income.

If another family member has to quit a job to help a mass shooting victim in the struggle to stay alive, that person loses coverage.

THIS IS THE ONLY 1ST WORLD COUNTRY IN WHICH SHIT LIKE THIS HAPPENS.

Here’s what we know: Access to contraception and comprehensive sex ed are what lowers abortion rates.

Banning it usually has the opposite effect, because those doing the banning also oppose contraception and comprehensive sex ed.

In general, the banners also oppose universal healthcare, funding education, raising the minimum wage, and women’s equality in the workplace.

In other words, what they’re doing will cause more unplanned pregnancies.

We will also have more:

*Women forced to be pregnant in a job market that will often lay them off for it
*Women forced to give birth in a country with the highest maternal mortality rate in the Western world
*Women thrown into poverty
*Children born into poverty
*Women with pregnancy/birth-related problems that will make them ineligible for insurance if they try to get it later
*Women who might be able to get healthcare for their child in some states, the same states who tell them they can’t have it (even though most would agree a household can’t survive when a parent is fighting chronic or potentially life-threatening illnesses)
*Women struggling to support their families with low wages, which have not caught up with inflation
*Women struggling to go to college and to send their child to college, considering tuition is over 1100% higher than it was in the 1970s
*Children struggling to stay alive in a school system where they might be murdered on any given day
*Women struggling to feed their child, as there are actually politicians who say children should be made to feel shame if they need free lunch
*Children struggling to learn in chronically underfunded education systems
*Women who will forever struggle to find firm financial footing, along with their children often trapped in a cycle of poverty
*Women struggling to pay for their child’s daycare (they have to work; they aren’t allowed to be on public assistance to stay home with their child (they will be made to feel guilty for not staying home with their child)), since daycare is sometimes more than a women will get paid

These women will be told that all of their problems are their fault for having a child.

(These same people will say that if poor women don’t have a cellphone, which employers count on them having, all of their money problems will disappear.)

Most women who get abortions are married women who already have children, who are doing what they have to keep their marriage together, to keep their existing children fed. They know the cost of a child in a struggling household. And we can’t tell them to be abstinent.

There is a three-step process to lowering abortion rates:

1. Give access to contraception

2. Provide comprehensive sex ed

3. Work to fix societal problems, so that women can choose to have that child in a world that won’t leave them and their children to starve

It’s been a difficult week here in pre-Gilead.

And it’s only Thursday morning.

I’m tempted to stop watching and reading the news. And I understand why many friends have.

But I’m an Atwoodian.

So when it occurred to me that I should take a “break” from reality for my mental health, a little voice said, “careful, June.”

June/Offred, in The Handmaid’s Tale, was passive, like so many of us are. She was lulled into accepting roadblocks as necessary after a terrorist attack–they became normal. And when the government started attacking women’s rights, she didn’t go to the marches–she tried to distract herself with baking, with her daughter’s lunches. And then they started opening fire on the protestors.

She tried to act too late.

“We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it. Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it” (74).

Jimmy/Snowman, in Oryx and Crake, is the same, except as a male, he is more protected. He is privileged enough to be obtuse, to not ask, when his friend says sterilizing people without their knowledge is “step one”: “Wait, what’s step 2? And where do these steps lead?”

And then it’s too late.

“How could I have missed it? Snowman thinks. What he was telling me. How could I have been so stupid? No, not stupid. He can’t describe himself, the way he’d been. Not unmarked–events had marked him, he’d had his own scars, his dark emotions. Ignorant, perhaps. Unformed, inchoate. There had been something willed about it though, his ignorance. Or not willed, exactly: structured. He’d grown up in walled spaces, and then he had become one. He had shut things out” (184).

I can’t choose what these narrators do.

I can’t turn off the news and start a loaf of bread. I can’t be lulled by pizza and sex.

My eyes have to stay open, even with the tears.

My voice has to stay loud, even though I’m hoarse.

My heart has to keep beating to fuel this fight, even though I’m weary.

Atwood has written the warning.

I must heed the call.

I teach my students about the difference between the words censor and censure–because I want them to know what words mean and because I want them to be able to participate in conversations about the 1st Amendment.

This is especially important with my freshmen, many of whom are Chinese, learning here in a system that throws around “free speech” like everyone knows what it means.

The problem is that most Americans don’t seem to know what it means.*

I was disappointed by Bill Maher’s show last night,** because it seemed that he doesn’t know what it means.

He was furious that people are calling for a boycott of Laura Ingraham’s sponsors after her awful comments about the Parkland protestors.

I understand Maher’s anger–he is sensitive about this topic, since he lost his job–and his show–after a statement he made on Politically Incorrect after 9/11. Many people were calling the attackers “cowards.” Maher disagreed. The attackers were many things, but they were willing to die for their beliefs, which means they didn’t fit the definition of coward.

Maher’s opponents falsely claimed that he praised the attackers.

No–he was making a semantic point. (A correct one.)

Which is why I’m disappointed that he equated calling for a boycott of Ingraham’s sponsors with attacks on “free speech.”

Free speech means the government can’t shut you down, can’t imprison you.

It doesn’t mean you get to say whatever you want without consequences.

It doesn’t mean that you get to have other people pay you to say those things.

Laura Ingraham gets to say whatever she wants. She can blog about it, self-publish about it, yell it to people walking by, mumble it to herself in the insane asylum where she belongs.

But if her speech is no longer profitable, no one has the obligation to pay her to say it.

The old man on the quad who calls women “sluts” when they walk by gets to do that–free speech!

We can call him an asshole–free speech!

But the university doesn’t have to invite him to give a talk, no one has to publish his rantings, and I don’t have to let him follow my students into the classroom, give him “equal time,” or turn the other cheek.

When we disapprove of speech, by saying, “hey, that’s racist,” we’re not censoring anyone–we’re censuring them. Disapproval is not censorship.

My grandparents liked to remind people that my grandfather served to protect free speech–this was of course a form of censure–an attempt to tell liberals they didn’t have the right to speak if the speech didn’t agree with my grandparents’ view of the world.

Like it or not, my grandfather’s job was to fight for my right to criticize his party and to advocate for minorities and for women’s rights.

My job is teaching writing and critical thinking.

Words have meaning. Which is why the 1st Amendment is important in the first place.

 

 

 

*Of course, the 1st Amendment isn’t the only misunderstood one. Ummmm . . . militias . . . ?

** I have to add that Louie Anderson was on the show. And I love him. Desperately.

 

 

This quarter, I taught a seminar on Margaret Atwood–we read poetry and short fiction, but focused on The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake, Alias Grace, and Hag-Seed. It was a great course, and my students were engaged.

A few observations:

• the current socio-political climate came up during discussions of each book–they’re frighteningly apropos
• I had to explain second wave feminism, female genital mutilation, the difference between r and x rated films, and many other fascinating things as they came up in discussion
• my students think Alias is pronounced uh-lie-us
• a couple of my students, prior to taking the course, thought “feminist” meant its opposite; when one kept saying the commander was being “so feminist,” we cleared it up

My favorite part of the course was on the last day, when we talked about what, if anything, we’d learned together. One of my students said that what all the texts had in common was a warning to pay attention–to wake up to the world around us and to do something about it.

Thank the universe for Atwood.

• The Republican tax plan, especially the effect it will have on insurance, teachers, the poor, the middle class, blue states, etc. My taxes would go way up, and Alexander would soon find himself without insurance and without a path to grad school.
• Al Franken’s resignation.
• Republican support of a man who says that women shouldn’t have the vote, that Muslims can’t serve as lawmakers, that homosexuals should be jailed. . . and wasn’t there something about him being a sexual assaulter and harasser too?
• The violence in the middle east, created by Trump’s nonsensical, unilateral decision to provoke it.
• The Republican plan to go after social security, medicare, and medicaid next.
• The California wildfires.
• The fact that Republicans are going after wildfire disaster relief.
• Trump pretending he gives a shit about civil rights, when he characterizes those who fight for civil rights now as traitors and praises Nazis as good people.
• That Trump is still President.

It’s Finnish Independence Day! In fact, it’s the 100th anniversary.

Happy Anniversary, Finland!

On this day in 1917, Finland broke free from Russia. Historically, Finland had to break free a lot–its neighbors didn’t respect it, but the Finn’s sisu (a uniquely Finnish characteristic involving perseverance and stubbornness and quiet resolve) has freed it time and again and kept its culture and language unique.

(Independence did not, by the way, stop Russia from re-invading during WWII. And for some reason, the Finns had to pay a war debt for defending their own country. Apparently, since the allies won, and since Russia was an ally, the Finns were supposed to just say, “sure, c’mon in, the sauna is all warmed up for you.”)

When I was in Finland several years ago, I spotted this painting in the national museum:

I was drawn to it immediately.

“Yeah, girl! Protect that book!”

Of course, I discovered it wasn’t just celebrating bibliophilia.

The woman is the maiden of Finland, defending the rule of law against the Russian eagle.

As we celebrate Finnish independence today, let’s all take a moment to consider the sad fact that we need a picture just like this, with the Statue of Liberty instead. Or Mueller. Or a donkey.