3) YEARLONG CELEBRATION OF BROWN V. BOE BEGINS SEPT. 8
WVU’s yearlong celebration of Brown v. Board of Education will begin in the same setting where the 50-year-old decision outlawing segregation in public schools came down – a courtroom with lawyers arguing the merits of the Supreme Court ruling. A panel of legal scholars will discuss the landmark decision at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 8, in the College of Law Courtroom. More on the Net: http://www.nis.wvu.edu/2004_Releases/brown_vs_boe.htm

This post took on a life of it’s own after I got started. Although the start has little to do with where it went, I’ll leave it as is.

I sometimes wonder exactly what Old Oligarch is thinking when he posts things like this.

This is the main point of contention:

Is being a single woman in your thirties basically a sign that you’ve been misled by an ideology that is not great for you as a woman (and certainly not as a mother), but hey, you can’t see that; or, if you can, it’s too late now, so you vote for the party that defined your status quo?

Let’s see, getting married quite late in life describes a majority of my friends, as well as myself. We all married late (myself at 28). Misled by a political ideology and defined by the status quo? I think not.

Personally, I’ve always chalked up the late marriage trend to my parent’s generation. I saw many kids whose parents were divorced, and saw what divorce did to those kids. I decided that I was not going to rush into marriage until I was certain that I wasn’t going to be making a mistake. After all, we’re living a lot longer than any generation previously, and if I’m going to be spending 50 years or more with someone, I’d better make sure I like them as well as love them. (And let me tell you, if I’d married almost any of the people I dated before my husband, I’d be dead or divorced by now. I had (with one major exception) a knack for picking the worst guy possible for me.)

As far as this statement:

Women with traditional values succeed much more often and remain in stable unions; thus the high correlation between traditional values and marriage.

In my family traditional Catholic values are: charity, service, and electing Democrats.

Personally, I’d like to put Old Oligarch up against my mother in the political arena. She’s a staunch Catholic (a convert even!) and a staunch Democrat. Give him a taste of a real liberal woman.

Okay, I’ve looked at the census data, and I think that he’s full of it.

If you look at Historical Time Series data from the census records for marriage, you find that the the change in rates of never married women are slightly higher, while the rate for while the rates for divorced women have skyrocked.

My calculated rates of increase from 1950:

It seems to me that if anything we should be railing about the circumstances that have led to the huge increase in divorce rates, including, perhaps, marrying at too young an age. (I shan’t rail against the fact that we’re living longer, since I hardly see that as part of the problem.)

Now, let’s look at the article he quotes, which goes right to the heart of what I find so maddening about the Republican party:

People who are secure vote Republican, while those who are on the margins and on the edges vote Democratic.

The reasons for that are obvious, in that time and again the Republican party has ignored the poor (and frequently made things worse) while serving corporate interests. So many conservatives neither know, nor care, about those in poverty in this country.

This is an outrage.

I know quite clearly what it’s like to not have health insurance, and the fear of getting sick: fear that stems not being able to afford either health care to treat the illness or to take time off from work. I went to work sick more times that I can count, and I still have a hard time shaking the idea that if I can stand, I can have to go to work. (The public health crisis inherent in that idea is a rant for another day.)

I also know quite clearly what it’s like to struggle to make ends meet, despite the fact that when I was working minimum wage, I was far better off than many. Even today I watch my checkbook like a hawk, and absolutely refuse to let us go into the red–or in fact get anywhere near it. The fear of not being able to pay bills–even though we’ve been on solid financial ground now for years, is still quite real for me, and will probably remain so for the rest of my life.

That fear doesn’t even cover the terror of an unexpected expense, like car repair (For of course if you’re living on the margin, you can’t afford a car in good working order, if you can afford a car at all.)

And then there is the sheer exhaustion that comes with working such jobs. The long days that come from working any overtime you can get; the exhaustion that comes from getting off work at 10 at night, and having to come back into work the next morning at 6; spending precious days off (and almost never were those days off two days in a row) just trying to get things like grocery shopping taken care of.

For me it was going through life without ever getting enough sleep, always being on the verge of illness, and throughout it all a general feeling of helplessness and hopelessness. The fear that I’d never escape and find a “real” job.

I remember these things sharply, painfully, and it is those memories that lead me to always tip more than 20%. It is personal knowledge of how companies treat their employees that keeps me from ever buying fast food. It is memories of going to work sick time and again that make me so adamant that all Americans must have access to health care–and not just because it is the right thing to do.

It is the denial of the problem of poverty that so enrages me. It is our duty–our obligation–to care for those who are less fortunate than ourselves. Those who ignore that duty while catering to the wealthy are not deserving of the power that we the voters have entrusted them with.

And THAT is why I am a liberal.