"Undermining my electoral viability since 2001."

Yahoos, Crapping Up My Life

Ever feel the need to apologize for other people? Maybe it's a neurosis of some sort, but I often feel that the actions of other people reflect upon me as a fellow human being. It pisses me off, not out of some bleeding heart empathy with victims -- though there's a touch of that -- but because I feel like that's just one more roadblock that's been placed in front of me having better interactions in my own life.

I take man's inhumanity to man personally. War, bigotry, harassment; these are all things that tend to happen to other people, but we privileged straight middle-class white male Americans ignore the effects on our own lives to our peril.

I'm so sick of hearing about, witnessing, and being impotently enraged by sexual harassment. One girl at our housewarming party last weekend had a bad story about being the only person on a bus with some pervert dipshit as the driver. I've heard many more like it, and worse too. There's nothing I can do about it but get mad and feel like that just one more fucked up man out there attacking the foundations of trust between the sexes, one more man who's crapping all over women and making my life harder. One more man's shadow for me to escape.

And just today I read about this:

Yesterday, an openly gay Dean for America staffer who attended an event for Congressman Dick Gephardt in Iowa (as is common practice among campaigns) was pushed and grabbed by Gephardt staffers, one of whom derided him as a "faggot."

Here's what the AP wire has, and here's a much more detailed article with multiple quotes from both sides.

I know Hunter, the staffer in question. I met him when I was up in Burlington; he sat around and listened to me prattle on and on to a reporter for the NYT Magazine and then recommended the poem "Kuba Kahn" for me to read. He's a class act, and the fact that he got treated this way brings up similar feelings as the harassment story above. Two yahoos in Iowa attacking the foundations of trust between gay and straight men -- to say nothing of the foundations of trust between Democratic political campaigns. Two asshole men crapping up the world and making my life harder.

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