Stuff I need to get off my chest

First of all, a disclaimer. Sometime throughout December, the mild itchy patch on my neck (which I blamed on my scarf fetish) turned into an insane full-body rash so severe that I was having to get up three times a night to slather more Eucerin on it. It looked kind of like a puffy sunburn. So my doctor’s put me on a 13-day course of Prednisone – just to put that in perspective, the time that I woke up with my eyes swollen shut after a Bible School hay ride, I only got a seven-day course.

As much as I love how Prednisone works so quickly to knock my over-reactive allergen responses back into line, I HATE the side-effects. Increased appetite (like I need that!), insomnia and what the pharmacy warning label euphemistically refers to as “irrational euphoria.” Translation: if ever in my life I skip off to Vegas to marry a tantric biker that I’ve just met (or something), most likely there will be oral steroids involved.

I bring it up because, if I should seem a little…forceful…in the next two weeks or so, that could be why. Knowing that this is how the medicine makes me react, I try to preemptively avoid any obvious stressors. Unfortunately, that’s not so easy to do these days.

Since I’m all irrationally euphoric, I’ll go ahead and jump on what Jon Stewart called the new “third rail” of American politics – Israel, WTF??? American politicians who refuse to tell our friend, our ally, to stop frakking bombing U.N. schools and preventing the Red Cross from getting to injured children – WTF??? See, I have this friend, one of those friends that is my friend because we’ve always been friends. We’d walk through fire for one another. But when she does something I think is stupid or self-destructive, I tell her so as gently as I can. A true friend doesn’t kiss your ass – he or she tells you when you’ve crossed the line.

So, I’ll go where apparently no one in our national government is willing to go: Israel, you’re being a dick. In 60 years, you haven’t been able to convince Islamic extremists to stop trying to kill you by using military means; what makes you think missiles will magically start working now? All you’ve done this week in Gaza is create another generation or two of suicide bombers who, thanks to our spineless government, are going to come after us, too. And for the American politicians in both parties, shame on you for your knee-jerk approval of anything and everything Israel does, no matter how heinous. While I’m at it, shame on the media for not pushing these guys harder.

The national media have also been shamelessly slow to get to the news of the coal-ash spill outside of Knoxville, Tenn., right before Christmas. (The New York Times finally covered it this week.) Quick question: if some power plant dumped tons of toxic industrial sludge over 400 acres in, say, Long Island or Southern California, how many Anderson Coopers would still be on-site three weeks later? How many news magazine covers would it hit? But no, it’s only rural Appalachia, so the media brain trust has determined that the search for the Obama’s pet dog is infinitely more important.

The national press was also slow on the news that a Bay Area Transit Authority police officer shot and killed an unarmed man on New Year’s Eve, news that CNN discovered just yesterday. The Oakland DA is investigating, but fortunately we have cell-phone video of the entire incident. BART police detain Oscar Grant and his friends in a train station, and then you can clearly see one officer push Grant to the ground, kneel on his back and then a few seconds later pull his gun and shoot Grant in the back. Also this week, a Texas police officer shot Robbie Tolan in his own driveway.

In both cases, the victims were black and the officers white. Is the media soft-pedaling these stories because they go against the narrative that Barack Obama’s election defeated American racism? And they are soft-pedaling. While the Bay Area media is all over the Grant case, neither story has been reported with any thoroughness. The CNN story on Tolan is particularly frustrating. It suffers from that inverted-pyramid/don’t report the questions if you don’t have the answers-style of writing that drives me batshit crazy. Dear reporter, here are some questions for you: Was the officer in fact hiding in Tolan’s bushes, or did he follow him from wherever he was driving into his neighborhood? Once Tolan’s family came out of the house, wasn’t it clear to the officer that this suspected thief frakking lived there???

As pissed as I am at the press in both the Grant and Tolan shootings, I’m even more furious with the police. I LOVE cops. Every police officer I’ve ever dealt with personally has been courteous and professional, and I have enormous respect for the work they do, and the dangers they face. But how do these officers think they can do their jobs when the people they’re sworn to protect have learned to fear them? Every officer knows that you only pull your weapon if you’re prepared to use it. In other words, if a situation isn’t severe enough to shoot someone, then don’t even take the gun from its holster. That’s why most police officers go their entire careers without firing their weapons outside of a shooting range. There is nothing that either Grant or Tolan could have said or done short of pulling a weapon themselves to excuse what these officers did. They’ve just made it harder on everyone else who wears a uniform.

I’m pissed, I’m in a throw-the-book-at-them mood, and I’m not sure the ‘roid rage is entirely to blame…