The world is a big, scary, corrupt, expensive place.

Esther's down for the night (those words still feel so good, even after a month!) and I don't have to go crash myself for another hour and a half. The hubby's out at his softball league, so I actually have a sweet, sweet window of time all to myself to do things like post a substantive entry on my blog, one that doesn't have to do with my daughter or the agonizingly uninteresting minutiae of my life.

Specifically, a substantive post on the general fucked-upness of life in the world at large. Fucked-upness at every level. Let's start at the state level. I'm actually a resident of Rhode Island, the place where I (mostly) grew up and then wound up returning to because at the time real estate was cheap and I wanted a house, not a condo. The big news here is that Harrah's Entertainment has roped in the Narragansett Indians into its scheme to plop a great big disgusting casino in RI, in dumpy little West Warwick of all places. Unfortunately for Harrah's, there's laws reserving all game-of-chance activity to the RI State Lottery. So what do Harrah's and the Narragansetts do? They hire a lobbying firm to come in and convince the state to *amend the state Constitution* to allow for gambling by other entities. This is wrong on so many levels. Among other things, it's a huge abuse of Constitutional process to exercise the amendment process to allow for private entities to muscle their way into a market that doesn't want it. The Narragansetts, as the familiar local "face" to the issue, keep pushing the many jobs that will be created and the many millions of dollars in revenues that will accrue to West Warwick and to the state of RI. Certainly the city and state could use some extra cash. But you know what? I could certainly use a spot of extra cash myself, and if I really wanted it badly enough I could go stand on a streetcorner in South Providence and prostitute myself to get it. But I don't, because I have morals and standards that tell me it's just wrong and beneath me to do that. At the state level, gambling is much the same thing. No matter how bad we need money, we shouldn't be stooping to allowing a soulless outsider corporation like Harrah's come in and make gambling addicts out of who-knows-how-many hundreds of Rhode Islanders to get it. And however many millions the state (and the Narragansetts) may get, it will be peanuts compared to Harrah's take.

Of course, I work in Boston, and I lived there for almost six years while attending law school and for my first couple of years in practice. Surely everyone's heard by now that a 3-ton piece of concrete tile fell off the ceiling of a Big Dig tunnel and crushed some poor lady to death. This Big Dig project has cost the taxpayers of Massachusetts and the nation something like $15 *billion* so far, is not even really that close to being done, and has been marked by shoddy work and corrupt insider deals at every turn. Governor Mitt "Carpetbagging Gayhater" Romney himself said that he couldn't reassure drivers that they would be safe going through the tunnels. I've rearranged my commute to get off the highway before the tunnels start, and to drive through the Boston downtown city streets until I reach my destination. I wonder just how many of my own personal tax dollars went into the Big Dig? I wonder if anyone, anywhere, will ever be held liable for the massive waste, for the endless repairs, for the loss of a mother's life. I'm not holding my breath.

OK, now the national level. The religious right is taking over. Abortion may still technically be legal at the federal level, but one state after another is instituting laws to outlaw it and gambling on a successful challenge to Roe v. Wade before the new, Bush-ified Supreme Court. Practically speaking, abortion doesn't exist in many states already because the doctors who provide the service have been terrorized away. Meanwhile, political debate focuses on issues like gay marriage (eek! quick, outlaw it before the gays take over!) and flag burning (because the American dream can't possibly be expected to withstand the burning of one of its emblems) while the cost of living escalates beyond the ability of more and more people to keep up. Sure, Congress is boosting the minimum wage to $7 an hour. Whoop-dee-fucking-do. You try making ends meet on $280/week before taxes. Oh yeah, and the increase is being expressly tied to a *decrease* in estate taxes for the wealthy. That's fair, right?

And finally, the international level. What do you all (my nonexistent readership, that is) think of the shitstorm going on in Israel, Lebanon and Palestine? That is surely some fucked up shit, my friends. Of course, as a Jew, my position should be clear - Israel is justified in taking any action it needs to take to protect itself. Except that's not how I feel about the situation. I'm really not sure how I feel about the situation. I know perfectly damned well that Israel was established by Jews going in and forcibly herding the folks who had lived on that land for thousands of years onto, essentially, concentration camps in marginally habitable lands. Sure, the Jews had a biblical claim to the land. But the Bible was a really long fucking time ago, and scholars aren't all that sure to what degree it constitutes a reliable source of historical information anyway. The people we now call Palestinians had more of a right to be there, I think, than did the Jews at the time they came in and established the state of Israel. Kinda like the legal concept of adverse possession - if you openly occupy someone else's land as if it were your own for long enough, eventually it becomes yours. I freely acknowledge that I am a very bad Jew for not supporting the state of Israel. But honestly, I can say that I understand why Hezbollah exists, why its members want so badly to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. It's cowardly as hell of them to do their dirty work from the interior of Lebabon, and their terrorist techniques are unforgivable, but God help me, I understand why Hezbollah exists. I don't see a cease-fire happening. I don't know how this conflict will end. But I keep seeing the news footage of that horribly burned 9-year-old boy, and the six-year-old girl full of shrapnel who lost a foot, and the woman screaming "where are you?!" into her cellphone while her husband's body lies blown up a hundred yards away. Ultimately, I think this is all Israel's fault for the wrongs it did to the native population during its formative years and ever since, and it makes me feel ashamed to be a Jew.

And the Iraq situation is way past horrible. We had no business going in there in the first place. The WMD's didn't exist. "They" knew there were no WMD's, but fed us that line of bullshit to keep us quiet while they charged ahead. And yeah, I know all about the human rights abuses, but where were we after Tienanmen Square? No, folks, this was about oil, and about funnelling government contracts to well-connected corporate behemoths like Halliburton. And look where it's gotten us. We've destabilized the entire region - that is, trashed what precious little stability was there before. We've driven up the cost of oil, resulting in increased gasoline costs, resulting in increased costs of goods and services, resulting in more families' inability to keep enough food on their tables. Thousands of American soldiers have died - dare I say it? - in vain. For one man's vanity. Thousands more returned alive, but physically and/or mentally damaged. And we're stuck there. Stuck in that desolate place, where we are entirely unwanted and where our people are in constant deadly danger. Committed to spend billions of dollars on the project for an unknown number of years, with no end in sight, and no exit strategy. I wonder how many of my tax dollars have gone to support the war?

Back in college, in the early to mid-90's, I minored in Middle Eastern studies. I found it fascinating, this glimpse into such an entirely different culture and history. I also took one and a half years of Arabic, by far the hardest language I've ever studied. If I had stuck with it, I'm sure I'd be able to speak, write, and read Arabic by now. As it was, I knew enough about the Middle East to know that it would be a huge mistake to go into Iraq before our military went in. Me, with a handful of undergraduate coursework from ten years ago under my belt. I went to peace rallies, to last-minute no-war demonstrations, one of them my last political act before I took a job in the federal government and became the largely apolitical creature I am today. Because I knew it was going to be like this. So did anybody who knew even the tiniest little bit about Middle East history, culture or politics. But not the administration. They applied American morals, American tactics, American values, and American greed to a completely non-American situation and promptly sank America in quicksand up to its ears.

The reason I gave up Middle Eastern studies is that I realized, as an American Jewish woman, I would be pretty much unwelcome - and likely unsafe - in any of the Islamic Middle Eastern countries. What was the point of studying the fiendishly difficult Arabic language if I couldn't actually experience living in the countries that used it? But now, older and wiser, I wonder where I would be if I had persisted. I'm certain there are plenty of jobs Stateside for Arabic speakers. Could I have been doing something that might make some sort of a difference? Oh well - coulda woulda shoulda. Instead, I'll just sit here and be powerlessly angry about the situation.

I look at my daughter, my sweet little sunshine girl, and I wonder how all these things will affect her life. Will her daddy, or her uncle, or her beloved cousin, be drafted to go fight in Iraq? Will I be able to afford to send her to college? Will she lose someone she loves to gambling? To a Boston tunnel collapse? Will she be able to keep a roof over her head, food on her table, a car in her driveway? I don't have a lot of hope that her generation will have a real shot at bettering its lot in life. Isn't that the American dream - that our kids can hope to achieve a little more than we did, and their kids achieve yet a little bit more? Yes, that is my problem - I am losing my faith in the American dream. And I want to be able to promise my child something better, but I don't know what that is.