Yesterday we learned that Mitt Romney, in addition to being a vulture capitalist and a rank political opportunist, was also a schoolyard bully. This is my unsurprised face.

John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn’t having it.

“He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend…

A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.

… “It happened very quickly, and to this day it troubles me,” said Buford, the school’s wrestling champion, who said he joined Romney in restraining Lauber. Buford subsequently apologized to Lauber, who was “terrified,” he said.

… “He was just easy pickin’s,” said Friedemann, then the student prefect, or student authority leader of Stevens Hall, expressing remorse about his failure to stop it.

… Friedemann, guilt ridden, made a point of not talking about it with his friend and waited to see what form of discipline would befall Romney at the famously strict institution. Nothing happened.

Read the entire article for more exciting tales of Mitt’s teenage years.

Romney claims that he doesn’t remember the incident, but we all know that he does. We know this not just because the man is a proven liar, but because when a person carries out an act of violence like that, they remember it. Probably with a lot of pride.

The only way I would accept that Mitt doesn’t remember that particular incident is if there were so many times that he bullied and assaulted classmates he didn’t like and thought were gay that he just can’t separate one from another. Either way, the picture is pretty grim.

And not all that surprising.

Consider the kind of man Romney is. He has not a bit of compassion, empathy, or regard for people other than himself and the people he holds dear¹. He casually destroys people’s lives, makes their jobs disappear, then laughs and makes jokes about it. His ever-changing political stances prove that he doesn’t hold values, he pretends them, and says whatever is politically expedient no matter who it hurts.

And he knows he can get away with it, because he’s been getting away with imposing his will on others in a violent manner since school. No teacher, no principal, no student challenged or punished him for what he did to that kid. He probably went home to his family and received praise for it.

Mitt Romney is a perfect example of why the problem of bullying needs to be addressed at all times, wherever it happens. Schools need to take responsibility, parents need to take responsibility. And this is for the good of the victim of the bullying as much as the bully themselves. Because, if gone unchecked, that bully may grow up to think victimization is acceptable. Which means that more people have to suffer because of the bully’s lack of empathy or restraint.

Any time anyone wants to give me an excuse for why they won’t take steps to stop bullying, whether it be because of some myth about the victims needing to “man up” or some bullshit about not having enough resources to deal with it, I am going to point at the nearest picture of Mitt Romney and say “people like you are the reason why Mitt Romney is the man he is. If you admire him, then you’re just as bad. If you recoil from that thought, stop making excuses and address this problem.”

Mitt Romney Inadvertantly Teaches Us A Lesson About The Long Term Effects Of Bullying -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

Footnotes

1. And it is apparently limited to people. Just look at what he did to his poor dog.

Had a conversation with kid #1 (12 years old), about how to handle himself if he’s been stopped by the cops, or someone like Zimmerman. Somewhere in the middle of explaining how to protect his head & neck if a cop decided to kick his ass (happened to my husband when he was 13), and how to respond if a cop calls him a nigger (happened to me at 12) I had this sudden ridiculous urge to start screaming. I didn’t.

I kept talking to him, and he mentioned racist kids at his school & how there’s one teacher who lets them get away with it, but who threatens to write him up if he says anything back. And I asked him if he wanted us to get involved & he said no because he’d already handled it. How did he handle it? He told the teacher to go ahead & write him up and then they could all talk to the principal about the things she lets kids say to him. She left him alone after that so he doesn’t want me to come wreck shit.

Which…says a lot about my kid & about our family I guess, but the reality is that it’s good that he’s learning to defend himself against the system. And shit like that is why we stay in cities & don’t live in suburbs. My parents moved me to burbs in high school, and it was a lot more than one teacher turning a blind eye to racism. I don’t have any answers for other parents of young black males. None. I’m muddling through & hoping that this can all be life lessons he never needs to use.

But, his 19 year old cousin is planning to come over & talk to him about dealing with the cops because he’s been there and done that. And I just…we’re passing down through the generations life lessons on how to handle/avoid police brutality because it’s just that necessary. And people want to claim that America is post racial, or racism isn’t widespread. How many individual acts does it take to make up a system? How many beatings, rapes, & deaths will it take for that system to be acknowledged by everyone?

Life Lessons -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

This pledge is titled, “THE MARRIAGE VOW: A Declaration of Dependence Upon MARRIAGE and FAMiLY.” … To their partial credit, their pledge opens by acknowledging that one cannot claim to defend marriage without focusing on the high divorce rate, broken families, infidelity and other challenges (besides THE GAYS) “threatening” traditional marriage. … To their discredit, the first bullet point is:

Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA’s first African-American President.

This is the point at which my brain started to bleed from the anger + incredulousness + assault by batshittery.

Why stop at two-parent households? Let’s celebrate the free housing, healthcare and meal plan offered to every black slave! You know what else slavery did for black people? Exercise! Oh it was just great! We even got to work outside. Speaking of work, today, African-American unemployment is over 16 percent. In Milwauke, Wisc., over one-third of black men are unemployed. But during slavery times, every black man had a job! See, things were better in the past, and now things are bad. Ah, the good old days…

Scope whole thing over at Baratunde Thurston’s blog.

From The Angry Black Tumblr | Comment below or Reblog @ Tumblr

“They love America the way a four-year old loves her mommy. Liberals love America like grown-ups. To a four-year-old, everything Mommy does is wonderful and anyone who criticizes Mommy is bad. Grown-up love means actually understanding what you love, taking the good with the bad, and helping your loved one grow. Love takes attention and work and is the best thing in the world. That’s why we liberals want America to do the right thing. We know America is the hope of the world, and we love it and want it to do well. We also want it to do good.” -

— Al Franken

(via dulce)

Re-blogged for being 100% right.

(via nefariousnewt)

OMG THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS.

(salymander)

via: emilytheslayer

From The Angry Black Tumblr | Comment below or Reblog @ Tumblr

This has been linked everywhere but I’m going to post it again because everything he says is true and this needs a signal boost to the sky.

Perhaps when our alien overlords do finally come, they will spare some of us because of this man.

Baratunde Thurston Lays It All Out For America -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

It’s not often I cede the floor to a white guy, but Keith makes some good points. Bottom line, this community center everyone is trying to get you up in arms about is: A) Not a mosque, and B) Not at Ground Zero.

Oh, and one other thing: Ground Zero is not holy ground. It’s true that many people’s remains may still be there, but that does not make it holy ground nor does it make the general area off limits to houses of worship that you disagree with. Not in America, at any rate.

There Is No Ground Zero Mosque -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

Adviser for Americans arrested in Haiti suspected of Child Trafficking in El Salvador. So am I supposed to believe they just happened to find someone connected to human trafficking and hired him? Don’t answer that. In other “I hate the world” news this shit right here? Prime example of what happens when groups get so focused on their pet interest that they throw all logic and common sense out the window. The reality is that abortions are not happening because Planned Parenthood exists. Long before Margaret Sanger was a notion in her mother’s eye women had ways to end a pregnancy. And they did so (and still do so) for a lot of reasons having nothing to do with race, though as with everything else racism does play a part in the underpinnings of some of those reasons.

First up, there’s the purely financial aspect of things. We live in a country that begrudges people a living wage and health insurance. For some reason these are viewed as things you have to earn, and if you don’t manage to secure them then it’s all your fault for not using those magical boostraps. Never mind pesky details like limited educational opportunities, a sagging job market, and the overall lack of boots or straps that plague much of our population. Attitudes toward public assistance are ugly and filled with all sort of ridiculous myths about recipients. Especially recipients of color. That Welfare Queen schtick is alive and well along with an idea that more money = better parents. Not true.

Then there’s the reality that not every relationship that produces a child is a safe healthy long term one. That’s not exclusive to any race, but the reality is that a WOC in an abusive situation is going to have an even harder time getting help. And more kids can make it harder to leave. And of course there’s the simply reality that not every pregnancy is a wanted pregnancy for a whole other host of reasons. But hey, why let facts get in the way when you can fin all new ways to pretend that WOC don’t love their children. After all, if they breed them but can’t feed them then the answer is to steal save them right? Right. Oh wait, I was supposed to be outraged at the idea of abortion wasn’t I? Sorry, I reserve that emotion for stupid manipulative ad campaigns that ignore reality.

Evaluating the Outrageous -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

So there’s a minor tempest in a teapot at the moment because the Republicans’ racism slip is showing again. Shiny new Congresswoman Lynn Jenkins uttered a very Freudian slip at one of her public addresses, suggesting that “Republicans are struggling right now to find the great white hope.” Brava, Congresswoman! Way to step in it right out of the box. Predictably, the media’s given a collective gasp to show that it is shocked, shocked I tell you, that there is any whiff of open racism in the party’s agenda. Keith Olbermann has called for the congresswoman to face “some sort of sanction”, and the rest of the left is practically salivating for its pound of flesh. And of course, the congresswoman is hastening to fauxpologize and clarify that she didn’t mean to invoke deadly race riots and racist history, no, never, ‘course not.

Y’know what? I’m tired of this.

I want the Republicans to just stop dancing around the issue. Drop all the dogwhistles and “I know you are but what am I” crap; ditch the dramatic irony of using racists to cry racism. I want them to just come out and say that this is what they want:

From sea to bright, white, shining sea.

Because if that’s what they want, fine. There’s nowhere near enough white men in this country to win them another election. Once they’ve alienated all the PoC, all the women, all the GLBTQIs, everybody who doesn’t look and act like them, they’ll have relegated themselves to political obscurity. Then they won’t regain power and screw up our economy again, get us into another dumbass war, threaten to turn us into a theocracy, or make the rest of us feel ashamed of being American.

So I hope they find their Great White Hope. I hope they embrace their racism, and their neo-Southern Strategy, until it kills them. Then we can relegate them to the bin of history, and maybe a sane conservative party will take its place — or better still, several sane new parties. And maybe then we can actually start trying to become, y’know, post-racial. (Whatever the hell that is.)

Let Them Have Their Great White Hope -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

For most of my adult life, I’ve had to live without health insurance. Because I was a freelancer for many years, or because I did not have a fixed residence for a while, or because my skills and career interests often meant that the best jobs available to me were with small companies or non-profit organizations that did not offer benefits. I spent something like 6 years without health insurance.

Whenever I caught bronchitis (about once a year), I had to wait it out and hope that it wouldn’t develop into pneumonia. I constantly worried that the cancer I’ve been free and clear of for years would come back. If I ever broke a bone? I was screwed. Once I caught a severe bacterial infection and lived with it for over a week before finally breaking down and going to a doctor though I knew I couldn’t afford it. Forget about managing my high blood pressure, or getting advice on avoiding the diabetes and heart disease that runs in my family.

My situation was hardly the most dire. I may have been one emergency room trip away from missing my rent payment, but I have a large and loving family, so I have a net. Many people don’t. Many people do not have the benefits of education and skill that I have. Many people are like me, with skills that are useful and sought after, but not always by companies that can afford to bring them on full time, or offer benefits to any staff. There are dozens, maybe hundreds of other reasons why a person may not have access to health insurance, and are therefore barred from regular access to health care.

Any time I hear someone going on about how horrible socialized or universal or government-run health care is, I think back to the many nights I would go to bed worried that my heart palpitations meant the onset of a heart attack, but I couldn’t afford to go to the emergency room just to be sure (the last time I had done so it cost me $250 for a doctor to look at me for 5 minutes and say I was fine). So I’d fall asleep, heart racing, probably in the midst of a heart attack, partially convinced I might not wake up in the morning. I also think of my friend with asthma who would suffer through particularly bad attacks which the over the counter spray did not alleviate, hoping that it would pass, or that breathing techniques would work, and calculating if she had enough credit on her Visa to pay for the emergency room again. Or that little boy who died because of an infection in his tooth that would have been simple to fix except his mother couldn’t afford to take him to a dentist.

Every time I see protesters or blowhards on television I wish I could infect them with 5 minutes of the terror a person without insurance feels when they know that something is seriously wrong but don’t know if it’s wrong enough to warrant possibly missing a house or car payment. I’m willing to bet that most of these people haven’t spent very much time without an insurance net. Certainly not with a serious or chronic illness, either in themselves or a family member. Certainly not while having just enough money to get by. It’s so easy to protest and condemn when you’re comfortable, well-off, and secure, isn’t it?

On Health Care -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

I was totally planning to talk about something other than race and racism today. But then I read this post about residential schools and the subsequent fallout in Canada. And it got me thinking about the long term impact of racism on our community and the half life of such a virulent disease. (Some of the comments also pissed me off, but again we’re back to context and respect and I’m just not in the mood today.) And the fact that even though reparations for the descendants of slaves has been a hotly debated topic for years now, no one seems to be willing to make reparations for the effects of racism itself. I’m not even talking about cash (or the famed 40 acres and a mule) moreso I’m thinking of steps being taken to heal the damaged thought processes that have become such a part of our society.

Obviously we can’t change what’s being taught at home. But, what about investing in teaching history properly with all the facts from K-12th grade instead of letting college be the place where people (those who take the right classes and pay attention in them) get a clue about race relations throughout history? Or spending less money on jails and weapons and more on targeted social programs and funding quality schools for all? Access to quality medical care and decent food couldn’t hurt, especially if we stop criminalizing poverty and start trying to eradicate it. There is so much that could be done to actually level the playing field and benefit everyone. Racism (and the other ‘isms) will destroy society if left unchecked so let’s vaccinate our children.

Mind you, none of these ideas are new and none of them are going to fix what’s wrong right here and right now. But, if we took a long term view and we set a stage for our kids where diplomacy and respect trumped “Those people are all X” and “We have to protect our way of life” then just maybe 200 years from now there won’t be a need for conversations about whether or not people forced into schools dedicated to destroying their culture and their language were abused “enough” to qualify for reparations. Possibly we could be a society that doesn’t think assimilation is the key to success. Maybe (and I know this is a big maybe) we could stop bigotry before it starts and really turn this into a post-racial, post-classist, post-sexist society?

Curing Racism…wouldn’t inoculation be easier? -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman