I happened to catch a few minutes of the local news on TV, after getting to the end of a terrific National Geographic Channel special on the superflu (last week I saw episodes about ebola, cannibalism, and voudon — you know the show’s gonna be good when they warn you that viewer discretion is advised due to extremely graphic content!). But anyway, back to catching a bit of the local news…

Normally I don’t watch the news (local or otherwise) because it’s phenomenally depressing. Many years ago, I used to watch the news, and subscribe to the daily newspaper, and watch all the news-magazine shows like 20/20 and 60 Minutes. I followed the Rodney King story; I watched the OJ Simpson trial avidly (and first began to suspect the profound stupidity of the average American when the jurors were clearly lost in the testimony on the forensic evidence, while I understood every bit of it — in spite of being a 26-year-old high school dropout & stay-at-home mom, and my abject lack of knowledge about DNA evidence technology). And then one day I caught myself bawling my head off because Mary Beth Whitehead lost custody of the child she’d had in a surrogate-mother agreement and refused to give up. In a moment of stunning clarity, I realized that getting overly emotionally-involved in a situation that I could do nothing about and wasn’t my goddamned business anyway was downright stupid and unhealthy. (Unfortunately, it took many more years to learn to apply this philosophy to my interpersonal relationships…but I think I’ve got the knack of it now.) I stopped watching the news for the most part, and I’ve been a lot happier since.

To finally get to the point of this post, I caught a brief news segment on the “peace protest” that went on today in downtown Portland. The only reason I didn’t change the channel immediately is because I suspected I might see someone I knew in the news coverage — and sure enough, I did. One of my eldest demonspawn’s friends back in elementary & middle school was a girl who was pleasant enough, if rather unsupervised and a bit wild. Her father was one of those New Age hippies who apparently has difficulty holding down a job, meeting any of his financial obligations (like paying rent) or relationship responsibilities (like holding together a marriage or actually parenting his child instead of “being her friend”), spends most of his free time protesting something-or-other, and smoking a lot of pot when he’s not protesting something-or-other.

One evening when Angst was 11 or 12, this guy was picking her up to have a sleepover with his daughter. I’d given permission for the sleepover, despite my lack of faith in his parenting skills, because his wife at the time was quite responsible and I knew she’d be properly supervising the girls. So this guy asked if he could take Angst to a “rally” that he’d been planning on attending, and since his wife had prior obligations for the evening, he wanted to take the girls along. I asked a few basic questions to make sure my kid wouldn’t be dragged into the woods and chained to an old growth forest or anything equally stupid, and he assured me it was going to “be peaceful” and take place downtown. Like an idiot, I neglected to ask how long it would last (figuring a protest rally couldn’t take more than a few hours, right?) or what it was involving (figuring he was a pretty harmless guy, if wacky & irresponsible).

The next day, my child was returned to me exhausted, cold, hungry, confused, and her clothes covered in anti-corporate slogan stickers. This “peaceful protest” turned out to be an overnight sit-in at either a college or corporate campus (I never did discover which), protesting corporations in general or perhaps just one (I never did discover which). So my kid wound up spending the night getting very little sleep, and very little food or water, and a whole lot of hippie propaganda yelled at her when she tried to ask — out of honest curiosity in wanting to understand — the protesters what was so wrong about what they were protesting. You can bet I made sure she wouldn’t be attending any kind of protest or rally again. Especially after seeing idiots on the news being outraged that their toddlers were supposedly pepper-sprayed when police had to contain an out-of-control protest, which led me to question why those parents weren’t arrested for child neglect or abuse in taking babies & toddlers to a highly-emotional ADULT event, or not getting their kids right the fuck out of there when they saw things were possibly not going to stay peaceful! People who put their young children in situations like that deliberately, or yell at pre-teens who are asking honest questions, are not people I want having anything to do with my children whatsoever.

So that’s the guy I saw on the news tonight. My daughter hasn’t spent a whole lot of time with his daughter in a while now, and that’s been just fine with me, especially after hearing about some of the drunken parties this girl threw at her dad’s house (with her dad’s knowledge) when she wasn’t even 18, much less the legal age to drink. Seeing him for a few seconds on the news made me remember that I’m only a Democrat because I can’t stand the Republican Party’s positions on gays, abortion, the right to die (which we here in Oregon are very firm about being an option, since the voters approved it twice), and most of their religious ideology — and how much I laughed when I saw a particular bumpersticker the other day:

War has never solved anything (except for ending slavery, facism, Nazism, and communism).