PCIntern
PCIntern's JournalSome fun today with a RWer and other musings...
Now this one is not entirely unreasonable all of the time, just 92% of the time which, I told him once, makes him in my eyes a Republican Socialist. So he asked me what I thought of the extraordinary security precautions surrounding Philadelphia's July 4th celebration...more on that later...and I told him of course that there'd been a lot of 'chatter' around and that you can't be too careful. Of course we got onto the Pope's visit in late September and he was ruminating as to why this was a bad idea for the city (he's not entirely wrong).
I said to him, "You know why the Pope is coming to Philly, right?" He answered, " Do I...?" I said, "Probably not. You see, the Pope is going to announce the existence of alien life and its contact with the militaries and certain civilian centers of the world. Who better than one of the very few titular heads of an organized religion? Many people might not believe a politician: we all know they lie continuously, but the Pope....now he's NOT gonna lie, right?"
He was stunned...and started laughing thinking I wasn't serious. He asked, "Why in Philadelphia?" I looked around to make sure no one else was around and said, "Because Philadelphia is STILL the REAL capitol of the United States. That Washington business is just a front...we know that there are immensely powerful people pulling the strings and the Command and Control Center is located beneath the Benjamin Franklin Parkway and it entrance is the stairway long closed in the Art Museum which leads down to the subway station that was built but no line technically extended to it from the Broad Street Subway. The huge door on the Kelly Drive side was constructed ostensibly to be able to move railroad cars in but in fact is the entrance for vehicles and other materiel to be placed into the vaulted chasm which lies deep beneath where the Pope himself is going to make this proclamation."
He looked at me as though I were crazy and I laughed and said, "Just kidding." But he spent the rest of the visit looking at me peculiarly.
And I don't blame him....isn't that just nuts?
Or is it?
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Anyway...usually we have a small security operation which consists of a black van with a dome which parks on the Parkway when we have these massive events. This time we have what looks like a military communications station being set up near the Art Museum as you come off Martin Luther King Drive. I've never ever seen anything like it before as a civilian. Also, we have new signage on the Parkway where the July 4th Celebration and the Pope will be celebrating Mass. this signage identifies every few feet on the Parkway by code and one could imagine that if someone needed to be somewhere, you could tell them the exact place you wanted them to be. In all the years I've attended events there - although I no longer do because crowds scare me as I've aged - we have never had any demarcations like these. This should be a very very interesting time here. This is a BFD with respect to these events: to paraphrase the KYW 1060 News Station motto: All Pope, All the Time.
I found myself moved nearly to tears yesterday with the SCOTUS decision...
I grew up as a straight male in New Hope, PA. Those of you who are familiar with the town, know that it was euphemistically termed an 'artists' colony which it was...but it was also a place where gay and straight people could easily live side by side and just conduct their lives in the way in which they wished to live. Interestingly and parenthetically, south of New Hope, on Street Road in Bensalem was a little development called Concord Park where mixed race couples could reside without having crosses burned on their lawns routinely. But that is a story for another day.
It really has been a wondrous week but the ruling yesterday reminded me of something my mother of blessed memory said to me a couple years before she passed away. She said that she had lived through remarkable technological advances: Man on the Moon, transistors, television, central air conditioning, mass automobile manufacturing, jet travel, and the like, but that these advances and their exponential rapidity of growth were to be expected as this is how intellectual curiosity combined with capitalist motivations would evolve. But the one thing which shocked her beyond words was the fact that she had been born in 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution, the daughter of an immigrant from the outskirts of Moscow, and that she had lived long enough to see the fall of the Soviet Bloc. This to her was almost unbelievable. Again, parenthetically, she stated that during the process of collapse, the only Western individual who was right on the mark was, and she used to almost gag when she'd say his name, Dick Nixon, who warned of the subterranean issues which would express themselves upon the release of the Communist Yoke. This to her was the moment of her lifetime that was stunning, more than any other.
Well, I know how she felt, because on Friday, I felt the exact same way: that in my lifetime with this Congress, and with the hate-filled biases which seem to be pervasive, this liberation and granting of deserved-rights to a large populus within this country is almost unbelievable to me, although I sensed very recently that the Court would do this since none other than Ted Olson backed it, probably for nefarious reasons of his and his wing of the Republican Party for whom he does his "duty". That being said, I told my child that this is a great moment in the history of the nation; that since women being granted the right to vote in 1920, and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights bills of the 1960's, this seems to happen ever 40-50 years and this was the moment for this generation. It is just remarkable.
So in my youth, I understood the nature of prejudice certainly as a Jewish youth living in a very predominantly WASP area, but the ubiquitous societal discrimination against gays and lesbians I found peculiar, since where I lived, we all "just got along". As I matured, I came to understand much of the psychology of bigotry and hatred and the psychosexual complexities of mankind, including, but not limited to, repression, denial, and irrationality. I want to say that I believe that my early success as a practitioner was due to the fact that the ever-increasing gay and lesbian and now transgender population of my area found comfort here because I clearly made no judgements concerning the sexuality of the individual: nice people were treated nicely and professionally, not nice people were treated professionally and more formally, regardless of their interests elsewhere. I understood the nature of GRID, renamed more accurately AIDS before most in my profession here and helped many through their long-suffering terminal illness which wreaks havoc intraorally, causing great pain and infection. It was a terrible time but they all could find solace here even while many dentists were attempting not to treat these individuals for (ignorant) fear of coming down with the disease themselves. I consider this ongoing era to be one of the most tragic in the history of the world - such immense loss.
It is therefore for me, a singular moment in my existence which has been tied to the Community for virtually my entire life. I'm so pleased for everyone: the individuals, their families, their friends, and for the society in general, which will benefit immensely from this remarkable moment in time. As my When I was young, I never would have believed that I would live long enough to witness and experience this moment.
I guess I was already having a bad day...
yesterday, Friday, at the end of a VERY long day...(dentists are inundated with pre-weekend 'emergency' visits - the tooth has been hurting for six weeks but "what if it gets worse over the weekend??!" - and I was just worn out from the tumult.
So this guy shows up in the late afternoon, and he hears that I have MSNBC on in my private office with the sound turned up a bit, and he says, "shame that kid had a drug problem and did that..."
I went right to Defcon 1. I retorted instantly, "I don't think it's a drug problem, I think he wanted to kill black people and maybe he really wanted to kill an articulate, charismatic state senator." His reply was, "I don't know about that." My reply to him: "Well, I guess you don't know much about much because before he assassinated the senator and murdered the other eight he said something about his women being raped by their kind. Just like Mr. Trump did the other day talking about people coming over the border."
Silence ensued.
I then took care of his trivial problem and sent him on his way. And to answer the questions:
1. I didn't bring it up, he did.
2. One patient more or less is irrelevant. 200 nice people would be great, one here and there at this stage of my career is meaningless.
3. I'm good and goddamned sick of the RW meme. You wanna do this elsewhere, that's your right and your business. In my business, in my home, I'm not gonna listen to it passively. I dont' HAVE to treat anyone if I'm not in the middle of a case and I sure as hell don't have to put up with anyone's bullshit and lies. Not at age 62 I don't. Nothing ever seems to make a difference in this country: all those kids were murdered in Connecticut and in no time at all there's poison out there that these kids never existed - that the massacre was all a lie set up by the Obama Administration so that they could take the precious guns away. There are no depths to which these creeps will not sink. It's a Nazification of the United States and it's DISGUSTING that it's allowed to persist and grow exponentially.
In Re: "Natural Born Killers":
the two sociopaths always allowed one to survive so that that individual could spread the tale far and wide...
Sick fucks. Everywhere...
The Pope is coming to Philly in September you know,
and the city is going to literally shut down for nearly a month beforehand: construction sites, roadways, manhole covers, postal boxes, the whole frigging city is going to be stopped...no parked cars for some radius of the Ben Franklin Parkway and Center City...the list goes on and on. The fact that he's angered the RWNJ's apoplectically before his arrival isn't gonna make things easier for the security people here who are shaking their heads in disbelief over what is expected in terms of crowds (some estimates approaching five million), the already huge convention of the World Meeting of Families present at the same time, and here's a neat factoid: I have been made to understand that we have rented the largest number of Porta-Potties in the history of the USA - 40,000 of them at a minimum. That, as they said during the Woodstock Movie, is a gigantic "shit detail" for those who will drive those trucks around emptying them...or will they even be allowed to drive those trucks around - you get the idea, right?
We who have businesses in Center City have been placed on notice that we will need to stay in town or forget about easily getting in for a number of days; the hospitals are on Defcon 1 Alert during this, and I have already had people in City Government and law enforcement tell me that they need to get their dental work completed NOW...YESTERDAY, because there is so much to do before the end of September. It is gargantuan in nature and will be something to behold. Several weddings were displaced from the hotels which had contracted with the brides and grooms, and it was TS for those folks and believe me, it isn't easy to get accommodations for rescheduling within 100 miles of here for the week. Several postponed their nuptials because of this with really not all that much time left (according to the 'wedding calendar', if you get my drift.) and there are some really upset families out there.
Now those of you who have never been here: we're not like D.C. or Chicago, or even New York: our streets are really narrow, colonial in size even our major East-West thoroughfares are at most three narrow lanes assuming there is no on-street parking, which there won't be. Don't bother to tell me about Broad Street: it's gonna be for official use only. Remember, there isn't for rush hour every day and we're a mess: traffic jams everywhere all the time. My assumption is that traffic will be forbidden in the critical areas at the critical times. We have some of the least competent drivers in America: picture Bostonians without the competence and the "courtesy". We're all holding our breath and will be relieved "just" to have the Democratic National Convention next year - that'll be a piece of cake compared with this. We had no problems really with the 2000 Rethug Convention which gave us W.: a permanent blight upon the City which is NEVER referred to in polite discussion. It's like it never happened, so this is really our first local national political convention, excluding Atlantic City in 1964, since 1948, when all three were held here.
It's gonna be quite a ride...I saw the Pope the last time he came here in 1979 - before the Internet and social media. As a person of the Jewish persuasion it rankled a lot of my Catholic friends that they couldn't even get near the Parkway but here I was about 100 feet from the stage. I don't think I'm doing that again...
I know who the senior escapee looks like now...
I've been racking my brain but it came to me in a flash; the bodyguard/killer from To Live And Die in L.A.:
I am willing to wager that if you checked this cop's browser history...
it'd be interesting to say the least.
I believe "in my heart" (for you RW trolls) that this guy 'got off' on manhandling this young girl and kneeling on top of her. With all the kids there to be aware of or to pursue, he returned to her with deliberation and abused her physically - she was clearly unarmed and no threat to anyone...not much room in that bikini for weapons of any variety - and he maintained intimate physical contact with her for as long as he possibly could. Thus, I believe that he had "drawn a weapon" besides his service revolver. I personally find his actions not only reprehensible from a law enforcement standard, but as a male, as a father of a child who could have easily been a victim in a similar situation should it have presented itself. That party, with the exception of the two racist women, very closely resembles summer parties in my neighborhood - if the caption had read "Eastern Main Line of Philadelphia" I would not have blinked.
There's something about this whole story which is transcendental from the "usual" ( isn't that a horrifying concept) abuse by renegade law enforcement individuals. I would only add that I almost couldn't believe that her arm wasn't broken from the force which he used to force her to the ground. That looked as practiced as his barrel-roll.
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Gender: MaleHometown: Philly
Home country: USA!USA!USA!
Current location: Jersey Shore
Member since: Sun Feb 22, 2004, 09:01 AM
Number of posts: 25,518
