Wednesday, February 04, 2015

Leggings and restaurant sanitation

If you follow Facebook, and maybe if you don't, you may know about the youngish woman who forswore ever wearing leggings again, out of respect to her husband and to avoid arousing lust in other men. Her YouTube video went viral and even made national TV shows. As one who wears leggings a lot, my first thought was that if a mid-seventies woman in leggings arouses lust in men, let them enjoy it.
I read a piece today by a journalist who essentially wrote, "Get real. Get serious about the real problems of life." She quoted a series of horrifying statistics--the number or children left orphaned by ebola, the number of people being starved, tortured and killed in various uprisings, the number of women raped in such uprisings, the number of children in America living below the poverty line, and so on. After each terrible statistic, the journalist wrote, "And you want to talk about leggings?" Powerful stuff.
It reminded me of our busy Republican Congress. They've been working hard at doing--well, let's see what: passing the Keystone Pipeline bill, which the President has already promised to veto and which most sane Americans oppose because of it's enormous pollution potential to the world's environment, America's water supply, our "bread basket," etc. Compassionate fellows they are, they have voted to slash Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security benefits plus knock many children off their parents' health insurance. Oh, and let's not forget they are on the 50+ vote to repeal the ACA. Not fast learners. In their wisdom--or is it greed--they have voted to sell vast lands owned by the Apache tribe to a foreign corporation--these lands are pristine and absolutely gorgeous with rock canyons, etc., the best of America's Southwest, not to mention that they are sacred to the Apaches--and, I believe, granted to them by treaty. But we won't let a little thing like a treaty bother us.  Speaker Boehner is again threatening to sue President Obama--can't remember what for this time, but I know that eats up taxpayers' dollars at a fantastic rate. The House is waffling on the question of mandatory vaccines--many of them are old enough, as I am, to  have lived through the terrors of the polio epidemic and surely they all know about the 1918 influenza epidemic. And they're waffling?
And the latest idea I like, from a Republican senator who, trying to make a point about too much government control, suggests that we allow restaurants to opt out of the law to make employees wash their hands after using the bathroom and before returning to work. There'd be a whole lot of restaurants I wouldn't be eating at! But of course we can't allow women to opt out of laws that rob them of control over their own bodies.
What a mess this country is in. Want to talk about leggings?

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