Meet Patria, Minerva, or María Teresa Mirabal – Dominican sisters who courageously opposed the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo in the 1950s. The three sisters, along with their husbands, participated in constant underground political actions against Trujillo’s regime, and came to be regarded as symbols of resistance and feminist icons known as the “Butterflies”. Even multiple stints in prison weren’t enough to stop their activism. When Trujillo’s government assassinated the sisters in 1960, it sparked a massive public outrage, which was among the catalysts leading to Trujillo’s own assassination just six months later. Now the Mirabal sisters are commemorated every November 25th by the United Nations, which declared an International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women in their honor.
“Let Mister Mustard prepare your bath. …simply take two or three
tablespoons of ordinary Coleman’s Mustard; mix it with a little cold
water and stir it round in your bath.”
I found out that if you give your tomato plant adequate water and fertilizer you run the risk of it never flowering because consistently comfortable conditions convince the plant that there is no environmental pressure to spread and reproduce.
You can literally be a helicopter tomato parent and grow a spoiled directionless manchild tomato plant.
When I want to go for a drink at a bar where I know the crowd will be overwhelmingly straight, I take great strides to ensure a look that says I’m both sexually unavailable and attempting to convert you to a new religion.
Can Planned Parenthood provide hormones to transgender people? And if so, what are the costs?
Why yes, yes we do. There are an increasing number of Planned Parenthood health centers that offer hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for trans clients. (Cost will vary depending on your insurance and Planned Parenthood health center policies.) Currently, the Planned Parenthood health centers that offer hormone treatment for trans folks are:
IMPORTANT NOTE: OBTAINING HRT THROUGH PLANNED PARENTHOOD DOES NOT REQUIRE ANY SORT OF PSYCH DIAGNOSIS OR SEEING A SEPERATE ENDOCRINOLOGIST. IF YOU LIVE IN THESE PLACES AND WANT HRT, PLEASE SAVE YOURSELF A FEW THOUSAND DOLLARS
TELL ME THIS ISN’T AN IMPROVEMENT: “My learned opponent’s proposed changes to our health care system will - whether by design or by accident - have the effect of dismantling the most important and cherished parts of our social safety net, and are easily revealed as part of a system of creeping normality, like the tears of my enemies gradually filling all the mason jars in my house”.
Yes, that’s right, it’s obviously the worker’s fault, not the systemic and pervasive problem of crony capitalism. Duh.
Let me tell you some fun stories, OP.
My best friend has a degree in early childhood education AND teaching home economics (there is an actual name for this degree, I just can’t remember it right now, she would kill me). Yes, she has an ~actual degree from a university~. I know it’s hard to believe, because we so adore thinking that everyone making minimum wage are barely high school graduates (as if there’s anything wrong with that).
Here’s the thing though, she can’t get a job with her home-ec degree because all of the things she could be teaching (culinary arts for example) are being cut from school’s budgets. So they’re downsizing those teachers, not hiring more.
So she uses her early childhood education degree, and she works at a preschool. Bear with me. I know it’s more fun to pretend that the only low-wage jobs in our country are in retail and fast food. Because it’s easier to look down on the people busting their asses to make sure you can shop and eat.
She teaches her students their letters and numbers, how to write their names, counting and sharing and art. She gives her students a solid foundation to be able to enter elementary school.
She makes $8 an hour.
In the city she lives in, depending on what preschool she works at she could make anywhere from $8-10 and hour. It’s not a matter of skill, it’s not a matter of ‘rising above’. There is no above in a preschool, unless it’s the director. And someone making $16,000-$20,000 a year and working 40+ hours a week doesn’t really make enough to go back to school for their master’s degree just for the hopes of making $15.
Before I got into my current field I worked at a different non-profit. Oooh, that’s right. A Non-profit organization. With my degree. I actually did ‘rise up’. I rose up as high as I could withing that organization. As high as ANYONE could, actually, without being either the Executive Director or Assistant Director. I went from making 7.25 to making 8.25. That’s right. I rose as HIGH AS I COULD GO and was still only making a dollar more than minimum wage.
That wasn’t because of my skill, or my drive. I rose from the most entry level position to the position directly under the assistant director in THREE YEARS. But it didn’t matter because greed is everywhere, even in non-profits, and the AD and ED were making six figures a year while the rest of us were starving. The AD and ED were also the only people in the org allowed to work full time. This wasn’t because there wasn’t enough work, this was because they didn’t have to give us any insurance if we didn’t work full time hours.
Greed is everywhere. THAT’s why people don’t have living wages. Corporations are making billions of dollars a year, their employees are getting their food from food banks.
Look at caregiver pay. These people are taking care of Nana and can’t afford to live. remember that next time you complain about staff “Ignoring” her. Understaffed, overworked, and minimal wages, and they have licenses and certifications.
The entire state university system in my state is preparing to strike for a 5% wage raise because the average faculty salary is $45,000 - which works out to about $22/hr, taking winter and summer breaks into consideration - for 50-70 hrs/week of work.
These are people with Masters and PhDs, people who worked their asses off to get to where they’re at, people who work their asses off on and off the clock to provide an education. These are tenured professors who have worked ~10 years without a raise.
Don’t even get me started on K-12 educators.
The way capitalism treats caregivers is obscene and repellent.
