What I Hate About You, by Martha Thomases – Brilliant Disguise

November 6, 2010 Martha Thomases 9 Comments

This has been a very difficult week for me.  Not MOTU difficult – I have no migraines, I haven’t been pulled over by the police for living in my neighborhood – but less fun than I’d like.

To start with, I went to the dentist for the first time in several years.  I’m terrified of the dentist.  When I was a kid,  I needed a lot of work done on my teeth:  fillings, braces, and retainers.  I still have nightmares about grown men with masks and hairy arms reaching into my mouth up to their elbows, and not in a fun, sex dream kind of way.  I found a dentist who specializes in cowards like me, and he’s a real mensch, but it was still much much much much too scary.

Then there was the election.  All things considered, it wasn’t so bad. I’m not happy with most of the outcomes, but we’ve lived through the mood swings of the electorate before.  I have an emotional callus to help me deal with that, developed over most of the last 40 years, when very few elections went the way I wanted.

But then there were the personal attacks.

As I’ve mentioned before, I sit on the Board of Directors of an organization dedicated to funding groups that are trying to set up educational programs to achieve non-violent social justice.  When I’m having a bout of egotism (which only happens on days that end in a “y,”  I like to think we are Glenn Beck’s worst nightmare.  Among the causes championed by groups to whom we’ve given grants are counter-recruitment, prisoners rights, labor rights, immigrant rights, women’s rights in the Middle East, human trafficking and more.

I don’t personally like all these groups individually, but I love that they are all there.  The closest analogy I can find is the way I feel when I go to MoCCA.  I don’t like all of the publications being sold there, but I love that there are so many people working to express themselves through art.

Anyway, there has been a big issue dividing the Board for the last three years.  I’m not going to discuss it here, because it’s an internal issue and it will bore you to tears.  However, there is one member of the Board on the other side of this issue from me who has singled me out as The Enemy of all he holds dear.  I’ve received belligerent e-mail from him the entire time, and it has become more and more personal.

This week, he hit a new low.  He Googled my political contributions and has been using my support of Eric Massa as an insult.

Some of this is Leftist holier-than-thou crap, in which any contact with someone whose ideology isn’t completely pure is a sign of political incorrectness.  Some of it is giggling about the way Eric left office.  I’m sorry that happened.  I’m sorry he lost control, or was misunderstood, or behaved inappropriately with a staffer.  None of those are actions I support.

However, I’m not sorry that I worked to elect him to Congress.

Eric Massa was a life-long Republican and an officer in the US Navy when he got cancer.  The experience radicalized him (proportionately to what he believed before), because dealing with the health care system was so horrible.  He became a convert to the cause of single-payer health care, ending the war in Iraq, and other good stuff.

I supported him because he was electable in a district that had never elected a Democrat.  While in Congress, he voted against the Afghan war, even though his President was for it.  I think that’s a good thing.

No, I don’t agree with him about everything.  I don’t agree with any of you about anything.  From day to day, I don’t agree with myself.  But I’m not ashamed of supporting little steps to make things better, while still trying to prepare for the great leaps.

Martha Thomases, Media Goddess, has also donated to the campaigns of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, John Kerry, John Hall, Ruth Messinger, and probably a bunch of other people she can’t remember.