Contrary to what every high school teacher ever said about me, I can totally make it in the real world.  Just last night I made myself a nutritious dinner.

 

I’m staying at the Jacksonville Holiday Inn Express.  Florida has decided to cool down to the high 50s, so my plan of sitting around poolside while I wait for my flight home in the morning has been flushed.  Instead, I decided to walk over to the nearby shopping plaza to catch a movie and eat dinner.

By the way, if you saw and liked John Wick, I’m pretty sure you’ll like Chapter 2. It opens with a violent motorcycle chase and keeps going from there.  You won’t have to endure much talking other than just setting up the next sequence of violence.  Keanu’s weapons and fighting skills are excellent in this – at one point it looked like they were just filming him at a three-gun match.  Solid.

 

As I’m walking over to the theater, I pass through what is clearly not a great area.  After recognizing the signs of this being a crappy part of town (gas stations where the attendant is behind plexi-glass, trash everywhere, abandoned shopping carts every 30 feet, free range meth heads, etc), I decide I don’t need to advertise that I’m from out of town.  I’m not terribly alarmed – I’m not deep in the hood or anything, just not in a great area.
I decide my sweatshirt is a dead giveaway that says I’m a tourist.

 

I decide the best thing to do would be take my sweatshirt off and just go around in my t-shirt.  It’s t-shirt weather anyway, so what have I got to lose?

 

I think I need to update my wardrobe.  At least for vacations.

Also, not the sunglasses.  Not sure how I ended up with those on in these photos. I blame watching John Wick: Chapter 2.  It made me want to be cooler than I’m ever going to be.

I’m assuming the rest of the people who fly American have gold plated toilets and feed their purebred dogs filet mignon because the prices for WiFi are bananas. 

$17 for wifi on this flight?  Are you out of your mind?  Two hours of Internet?  The saddest thing is that people are clearly paying it – I’m guessing AA hasn’t been offering this at $17 a flight, never had a customer and are wondering where they went wrong. 
And, given that my flight had a connection, I would have needed to purchase it twice, meaning my three total hours of flying time breaks down to internet at more than $11 an hour.
$11 an hour to watch cat videos and argue with strangers on the Internet. That seems reasonable. 

Are you looking for some non-political entertainment?  Are you sick of 2/3 of your Facebook feed being taken up by political talk?  This post is for you – 100% devoid of politics and completely not about politics.

I’m just kidding, it’s totally a political post.  But I ask you to bear with me for just a few minutes.  This blog is meant to be mostly apolitical and it has been for half a year. However, I do need to take a timeout and acknowledge the reason I can afford to have this little slice of my life be without politics.

I’m white.  I’m male.  I’m straight.  I’m financially well off right now and expect to be in the future because I work in the defense industry.  I have health insurance through my defense industry job.  I like guns.  I’m going to be just fine under the Trump administration, in an icky, short term sort of way.  And almost everyone I see on Facebook complaining that politics is all they read about now are in some kind of similar predicament – they may not be quite as comfortable as me, but most of the people complaining about political talk, protesters, etc have one thing in common:  they don’t have as much to lose as those protesting and talking non-stop politics.

I’m confident when I get pulled over by the police I’ll be treated fairly or, at worst, receive a ticket that I don’t think I really deserve.   I don’t have to worry that my skin color is going to set the officer on edge or make him take a second look at what I might have in my car.

I am 100% certain I won’t need birth control or an abortion in the next four years.

I can use the public bathroom I’m most comfortable with because I am lucky enough to have grown into my body comfortable with the gender on my birth certificate.

My marriage will not be questioned or overturned, no matter which way the Supreme Court shifts.  I won’t ever have to worry that my spouse won’t be able to make medical decisions for me when I’m in a coma or that, God forbid, if we ever got divorced, custody might only be based on biology.

I am confident that I won’t die from lack of healthcare coverage.  I might die because I eat too much or drink too much, but I’m not going to die because I have a pre-existing condition that, without the ACA, will no longer be covered.  For thousands of Americans this is a very real fear.  If ACA goes away without a replacement, people will die.  That’s a fact and it’s being ignored in all the rhetoric.

Along those lines, I don’t fear losing my healthcare coverage because a political party has branded it “Obamacare” instead of referring to it as the Affordable Care Act and is acting as expanding health coverage to 20 million people is somehow the worst thing that’s happened to America.

My family is not going to be torn apart because of my immigration status.  I won’t be ripped away from my US citizen wife and children because I don’t have the proper paperwork which the government has refused to allow me to obtain for decades.
The worst thing that is likely to happen to me in the next four years is another deployment and, frankly, that was likely to happen under Clinton too.

What’s the point of all this?  It’s that if I want to stop thinking about politics, stop thinking about what’s going on, stop being involved in political discussion and protest, I can and almost certainly my life will not change.  I hesitate to call it a privilege because calling it a privilege implies that it is something above and beyond what is expected for all human kind, but at this point, that’s what it is – a privilege.  And I recognize that I have been given this privilege through almost no work of my own.  I did nothing to earn my gender, skin color, sexual orientation, etc.  Yes, I worked hard to get where I am financially, but I was aided by to color of my skin not holding me back.  I was aided by not being a woman.  I was aided by being straight.

And a lot of you out there are in the same boat.  If you’re saying, “I’m sick of politics,” and “Not another political post” every time you log onto Facebook, I ask you to imagine how it feels to be in one of these groups that is scared.  At risk.  In danger.  All the time.  Every day.

I’m not even asking you to go out and protest or even to start in the political discussions if you don’t like them.  I’m just asking you to reflect for a few minutes on the fact that you feel comfortable opting out of these things and what that says about your life.  Then consider how it would feel not have that luxury.  Just think about it for a while and maybe you’ll find you can handle all those political posts after all.

There.  That’s it.  FF is going back to posts about my half-assed farming and falling off ladders.  But please think about what I’ve said.  You don’t even have to agree.  Considering it will be a legitimate start.

During a recent visit to a military installation in our nation’s heartland (definition: states you move out of, not into), it occurred to me that it must be a full time job on these posts to place reserved parking signs in each parking lot.  Anyone who has ever been on an Army post will tell you there are seven or eight reserved spaces at the beginning of each row at the PX.  Sure, the first few are reserved for folks with disabilities, which is great because disabled vets come on post to use the PX and the commissary, etc.  But then there are usually not one, but two spaces for general officers.

Pro-tip:  General Officers are officers in one of the four General ranks.  It is not meant to be interpreted as a parking space random officers (you know, run of the mill generalized officers).  This is an important distinction.

 

Honestly, the odds of two GOs showing up at the same time at the PX seems a little remote, considering there are maybe three on the entire post at any given time.  Then again, after a recent “poor investment” in lottery tickets, I am no longer allowed to discuss odds in any format, so just ignore what I’ve said.

 

Then there will be parking spaces for the post Sergeant Major, Chief Warrant Officer 5s, Drill Sergeant of the Year, Instructor of the Year, Volunteer of the Year, etc.  The reserved spaces get more and more specific and less and less worthy of a reserved parking space all the way down to the spot for 3rd Transportation Battalion Logistics Soldier of the Month.  And while I made up that last one, the rest are all legitimate reserved spots I have seen.

 

The funniest thing is, nobody parks in these spots.  Based on how empty they are at all times, I assume even people who are eligible are passing them up.  Everyone seems terrified to park there, as if the MPs are watching these spaces ready to hem someone up for illegally parking there (they probably are).  But there are a new crop of reserved parking signs I’ve seen on posts in the last decade, and everyone ignores them.  Like, completely and totally ignores them.  I’m talking hurrying your step past a panhandler level ignoring.  I mean an ignoring deeper than you gave your husband the rest of the month when he bought you a gym membership for your birthday.

 

 

Now, to be fair, it’s possible those are two electric SUVs and a hybrid pick-up truck.  I can’t be sure.  But it doesn’t seem likely.  At a certain point I realized they weren’t just parking there to get the closer spots – this was climate change deniers in action.  This was people who weren’t going to let some pansy hippie tell them where to park.  The drivers of these trucks were ‘Mericans.

Sigh.   That’s it.  There is no more to this post.  Just, sigh.