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I have, in the intern, been working for the U.S. Census. It’s fairly routine work- lots of paperwork, lots of calling people, but hey, I need money to pay the bills.*

Today we had an exterminator come to our house to take care of our ant problem. He noticed my Census badge, and started asking questions about why we need the census in the first place (because it’s in the constitution) and telling me that he only put the number of people in his household (then you’re going to get someone to come to the door). It was becoming increasingly obvious that this gentleman was a fan of Michele Bachmann so I talked about what the information was used for and why it was important. I explained to him that the information was used for a lot of really important things- districting of the state and federal governments, genealogical information, sociological information, and information for lawsuits and making sure the Voting Act is not being violated**. Finally, I reassured him the information is confidential.

We went on to talking, and he said that he had the solution for “fixing the deficit”. I said “What, taxing people more?” while my husband said “Cut Senator paychecks?”. He said “No- tax government jobs five percent more. If you work a lazy make-work job fixing up parks for 20,000/ year, you should only make 19,000″.

WTF? I just got done saying I worked for the federal government. Not two seconds ago in fact. We had a brief discussion of the amount of work it entailed, including him expressing concern that I was not allowed to carry any form of weapon on my person. And, without even knowing how much I made, he determined that it was 5 percent too much.

I said “I don’t know, I think we could probably fix the deficit if we went back to the tax rate under the Reagan administration. You know, 50% at the upper end.”

He responded he didn’t like the idea of half his paycheck going away.

I said that the 50% was only income over 200,000 dollars (wrongly, it was actually 175,000). He laughed and said that’s twice as much as what he made. I then changed the subject to talk about my kitty which he was petting.

After he left, I got even more upset at this guy. Not only was he saying that government workers were overpaid (they aren’t) and that someone who’s not making a subsistence wage needs to make even less (20,000 is only 50% over the poverty line for one person, not accounting for relative poverty) but he has the audacity to say this while making 100,000 dollars a year. I’m sure being an exterminator is a hard job, and for all I know, he does his job very well (I’ll tell you if I see the ants disappear). But, all I saw him do is take 5 minutes to spray a can and then spend 15 minutes talking. I know for a fact that maintaining a park takes more effort than that- spraying insecticide is only one of there tons of jobs to do. And him going, to my face, that my labor is not as valuable as the unsteady pittance I made is quite frankly one of the rudest things I think he could say to me.

You know, some day the odds are that I will live in an actual house and make enough money that I will actually have to fill out the the long tax form. And I hope when I get to that age and that level of security, I will remember what it feels like to live in a shitty basement apartment, worrying about when the next paycheck is coming in (and how much it’ll cover) and if going out to see a 10 dollar play is a justifiable expense. I want to remember the burning embarrassment when I tell the local community choir that I don’t have 50 dollars on hand to pay for the dues (and have them pull me aside to say that there are hardship scholarships available for me***). Because that’s the only thing I can think of when people tell me that I make too much money while they’re making way more than me- they don’t remember, or they never were, in my situation.

*Everyone, send in your Census form.
**Seriously, send in your Census form. It’s really, really important that you send in your Census form.
*** It seems like a sick irony that when I have all the time to do the community building stuff, I don’t have the money, and when I can eek out the money, I don’t have the time.

Health care reform has passed the House yesterday (as everyone in the blogosphere is talking about). I feel a little bit out side of this discussion, to tell you the honest truth. This is, functionally, what the Republicans advocated for in 1994. If the Republicans have advocated for it any time in the last two decades I neither see it as a great liberal victory nor the end of America as conservative see it. This is a band-aid over a bullet wound. Blood’s still seeping out through the edges, and you’re still going to die of blood loss, but it’s better than a kick to the head.

But the thing I’ve learned after this whole mess is to firmly, and irrevocably decide that conservatives are evil. It pains me to say this, because that means my friends, family, and coworkers are evil. But, if the word has any meaning at all, “evil” is what they are.

It is evil to advocate for people to die because they can’t afford health care. It is evil to say that money is more important than anyone’s life. AND it’s evil to advocate for shooting someone because they disagree with you (even if you think they’re evil, too).

Conservatives have absolutely no qualms calling me evil. And most liberals go with the “They just have different values” views of conservatives, or, alternately, that they’re just ill-informed. Well, let’s take a look at those “different values”.

According to the work of Jon Haidt conservatives have three “values” that liberals just don’t seem to have: purity, respect for authority, and loyalty to the ingroup. “Purity” is a nonsense value at best- a human isn’t “pure” anything. “Purity” is a great quality for metals, for water, and for air- for humans it edges is into mental health territories of the “precious bodily fluid” type. Real life is messy, trying to make everyone “pure” cuts out life. “Respect for authority” is a fuzzier, nicer way to say “Respect for hierarchy”. They don’t respect scientists in their field (people who arguably earned their respectability), they don’t respect political leaders when they’re the wrong party, they don’t respect anyone in a position of power that the determine to be illegitimate (just ask women CEOs). They also mean “respect” as “obedience”. I wouldn’t consider it respect to blindly do what someone tells you to do- I would call that insulting. What they do enjoy is the kyriarchy- white rich men on top, everyone else filtering through the bottom. Again, this is evil. This is causing harm and hardship to people over completely useless markers or markers they can’t help. Finally, their last value is “loyalty to the in-group”. This “value” is something that is at its best morally neutral (preferring the company of your friends to say, co-workers), and its worst, the evils of jingoism, racism, and pep-rallies.

These “values” have little sub-”values” tailing off them. “Purity” ends up meaning “anything I find icky is wrong” so it becomes “racism” (different foods and music are gross) “sexism” (women’s sexuality is scary and icky so let’s make sure they can’t get contraception or abortion) “heterocenterism” (butt sex is teh icky). “Respect for authority”‘s little sub-value is “gleefully ignorant”. They never have to look up anything because, hey, the right authority figure said so, and doing so makes you disobedient. In-group loyalty is obvious for the sexism, racism, heterocenterism, and religious prejudices, but then it also leads to nice little paranoias from everyone from agnostics to zoologists.

How could desire to cut out life, being against equality, ignorance, and paranoia be “good”? How could wanting to harm others, provided you don’t get harmed or even benefit, but a “good”? These values are wrong, and people who ascribe to them are acting in an evil fashion. And maybe it’s time that people actually started getting called on that.

The Kyriarchy, for those of you who don’t follow a lot of feminist/ progressive scholarship, is “a neologism coined by Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza and derived from the Greek words for “lord” or “master” (kyrios) and “to rule or dominate” (archein) which seeks to redefine the analytic category of patriarchy in terms of multiplicative intersecting structures of domination…Kyriarchy is best theorized as a complex pyramidal system of intersecting multiplicative social structures of superordination and subordination, of ruling and oppression.” What this means is that the various “isms” are intersected and overlapping and far more complicated than just a strict hierarchy.

Sometimes, I wonder about women who seem bound and determined to keep other women down. Or people in minority communities that want to deny rights to other minority groups. Or working class stiffs allying with big business when it seems like cutting yourself off at the knees. Heck, it always seemed to me to be the weirdest phenomenon in the world when feminists are against transgenders or homosexuals are against bisexuals. But, in some twisted way, maybe it does make sense, and that sense would be that if you are both oppressed and an oppressor, it is much easier to identify with the powerful than the powerless.

I’m female, I’m bisexual, I’m fat, and I’m crazy, I’m not-Christian and I’m definitely not rich. Those don’t exactly make me on top of the heap when it comes to rights in the United States. BUT, for all the things that I’m fighting against, I have plenty of privilege I’m coasting on. I’m white, a big one. I’m middle class, I’me educated, I’m mostly healthy, I have no visible health problems, and I’ve got pretty good health insurance. More than that, a lot of the things that count against me are not as visible as other things. If you look at me, with my wedding ring on my left finger, you’re not going to think “bisexual” which is pretty helpful on a day-to-day basis. I can pass as “straight”. No one after talking to me can go “oh, yep, she’s totally bonkers”. And, though in sheer dollar terms, lower class, I’m going to be pegged as middle class or higher by people I just talk to. My clothes are of that style, and my syntax is middle-to-upper class. So, depending on the situation, sometimes I’m going to be more oppressor than oppressed. Some times I’ll be more oppressed than oppressor.

I was thinking about this today when my racist friend* and I were talking about the African-American community. He, of course was hitting all the stock crap, (they are more violent than “normal” people, they’re out-breeding us, yada yada) and I was giving the pretty much stock answers (no they’re not, no they’re not, what in Christ are you smoking?) and I finally came with “Racist friend, seriously, how many black people do you actually KNOW? You live in the middle of freaking white-bred nowhere North Dakota.” His response, was “How many black people do YOU know, if you’re oh-so-progressive”. His retort, while completely dodging the issue, did give me pause. With the exception of a few people I worked with at the thrift store, I DON’T know anyone who’s black. I have more homosexual friends than black friends. Could you imagine being a black person and not having any white friends? It is a mark of great privilege that I don’t have to be exposed to a culture other than my own (though, I wish I could figure out what my culture WAS), and in the same token, it’s sad that we have such a segregated society that’s the case. I enjoy talking to my Somalia coworkers: they told me about things that I had only read about in books, and I did my best to try and explain fundamentalists Christians to them.

I wish the world was equitable so it would be like water. I don’t have to think about getting clean water- it comes out of the faucet. It took a lot of people to get it that way, and it takes a lot of people to maintain it, but for the most part it is just there. I want social justice to be as invisible as clean water- something that you’re grateful for if you stop and think about it, but you rarely do that.

*Hey, if they get to have “gay friends” and “black friends” I get a racist friend.