Why I need you to think before you vote

So, I want you to do something with me. I'm going to take you back, not too far back, but back into some recent history.

2005 to be exact.

You don't need too many details to picture me, because I'm pretty typical. In fact, I fit nearly every majority in America. I'm white, I'm Christian, and I grew up middle class in a small town in the South. So really, white Christian girl, I'm sure you've got a frame of reference for that. We're everywhere.

When the year 2005 opens, I was a college educated woman living on my own, working full time for just enough money to pay my bills and cover my debts, but not enough to save any money.

I was doing okay, making ends meet somehow and all that. And then I got engaged! Shortly after announcing my engagement, right in the midst of planning the wedding and my move to the other end of the state, I was let go from my job.

Have you ever looked for a job when you know you'll be leaving town in less than six months? Nobody wants to hire you, and they certainly won't pay you enough to pay off student loans, credit card payments, rent, and grocery bills. Forget health care.

So for six months, I had to live off of the kindness of family and friends. My student loans were deferred, racking up interest while I couldn't pay them. My credit card bills were suddenly only getting paid at the bare minimum and their interest rates spiked up to almost 30% APR. My credit rating was taking a slow nose dive, but through the generosity of family and friends, along with my fiance, I survived.

I got married in September, and I moved to where I live now, in Northern Virginia. Because my work history was suddenly quite spotty, and I had no reference from my last job, I ended up taking a retail job with a company I had been working part time with for years.

I don't remember how long it was before my insurance kicked in. I don't even remember if I got insurance through my job or my husband's. I just know that for most of 2005, I was without health insurance because I either had no job, or I was waiting to be added to a new policy.

In the meantime, I was a newlywed. A newlywed with a difficult financial situation, and a job with little to no security and odd hours. This was not a time where we could have properly cared for children, even if we wanted to start a family. In addition to that, I have a very long family history of cancer, and thus I take whatever option I have available for early detection.

This may come as a shock to a lot of Americans today, but there was only one option available to me that would help with this situation: Planned Parenthood.

At the time, it wasn't even a difficult decision. I needed health care and cancer screenings. I needed to take control of my body and my fertility in order to make sure that we could recover from the bad situation I had created that year. There was only one place that offered those services in my area, and that was Planned Parenthood.

So, I'm going to remind you of what I said in the top of this entry: I am a white, Christian, straight, middle-class woman with a Bachelor's degree. At the time, both my husband and I were employed full time. And I needed the services of Planned Parenthood, because there was no other way for me to get what I needed to help make my future a more stable one.

The reason I bring this up to you is because both Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have clearly stated that it is their mission to take that away from every American women. They can frame it however they want, you can make whatever excuses you want, but this is the reality: defunding Planned Parenthood, denying access to birth control, and not allowing women the rights to make their own personal choices is going to hurt women like me.

You can talk all you want about abortions (which is not what Planned Parenthood does, I tell you from personal experience and known FACT that this is not their mission) but you're not stopping abortions (which are legal) but hurting women and men who want to make sure that they're ready for children before they have them.

You can say you're limiting birth control from "whores" and "sluts" but you're also denying birth control to married couples who want to plan their children so they can give the next generation the brightest future possible.

You can say that people can pay for their own pills, that there are other options out there, but there aren't. In many places, places I have lived, places I have been, there are not other options.

If you're trying to imagine the type of woman who goes to Planned Parenthood, the type of woman who needs birth control, the type of woman who will be severely hurt by Romney and Ryan's proposals, then here you go, I'll give you that image again:

I am a white, Christian, married woman. I married a man I had been dating for five and a half years. I grew up with small town values and a middle class life. I might just look like you, or your daughter, or your cousin, or friend. Generally every choice I have made with my life is the choice that conservatives are saying I should make.

And I needed Planned Parenthood.

So when you vote for Mitt Romney, or you support those who wish to defund Planned Parenthood or limit access to birth control for ALL women, I want you to know what you are doing.

You are voting against me. You are walking into that booth and you are saying that you are okay with hurting the majority of American women in order to hurt the ones you don't like.

You are vocally stating that all of these other women are acceptable collateral damage to whatever it is you think is worth this. The media, the pundits, the politicians, they're trying to make this about something else. They're pretending that a certain type of woman goes to Planned Parenthood, that a certain type of woman uses birth control. I am standing here right now telling you that they are wrong. Every type of woman goes to Planned Parenthood. Many types of woman use birth control.

And those women are the ones who will suffer if Mitt Romney is elected.

Don't forget to check the "supernatural rewatch" tag to see all the posts in this series! Scarecrow: On the one hand, the actual plot of Scarecrow sounds pretty lame on paper. But somehow this episode really works, and it delves into a lot of great aspects of the world. Plus it has a surprise visit from William B. Davis, which is always nice. By the end of the episode we're back to a girl being in mortal danger and having to get saved by the brothers never to be seen again, but hey, we had a good break there, right?

The things this episode does best actually don't have to do with the main plot of the townspeople and the bad demon of the week. It's about Sam and Dean, and their relationship with their father. John Winchester's phone call at the beginning highlights the differences between Sam and Dean perfectly, and while I was trying to give him the benefit of the doubt that was the start of my intense dislike for John. Sam might be a little unrealistic with his wants sometimes, and yes sometimes you just have to listen to authority and they know what's best. But Sam very rarely, if ever, asks for anything out of line. He just wants to be informed, and given at least the semblance of a choice. And he wants revenge on a demon that killed his girlfriend and mother, who can blame him?

With this episode we also get the appearance of Meg, who is so obviously bad news from the moment you meet her that I'm hoping the creators weren't even bothering to try to pretend she was just a normal girl. Because if they thought the reveal at the end was a reveal, they're kind of naive.

But you can't sell the demon of the week short either. He's pretty terrifying, and I was especially impressed when it didn't go exactly as I expected either. I think the story was really built on the acting, and everybody in this episode did a good job. Stories about a small town that secretly sacrifices people for their own prosperity aren't really uncommon, but this one was a very well done version.

Faith: I absolutely loved this episode. I'm not even sure I can explain why, but it was amazing, even if it did have our token chick of the week. I forgive her because it was Julie Benz. And also because she never actually asked for the brother's to help her, she was beyond their help, really.

Dean goes through a lot in this episode, and while I partially was disappointing that the "Dean is going to die and that is traumatizing" emotional arc for Sam consisted of the first what, fifteen minutes of the episode? At the same time, the emotions that Dean was forced to deal with were much more interesting anyway. He can't figure out why he's still alive, and doesn't want to deal with the fact that he was chosen to live, or what the cost of that miracle was once he discovers it.

Then he also has to decide if it's okay to save the girl or not, and it's one of the first times we've seen him so conflicted, even if most of it wasn't expressed completely in the episode. You could tell that the emotion and the feeling was there. Hats off to Jensen Ackles.

There's a lot of seriously good storytelling and character building going on in this episode, not to mention the layering of the mythology of their world. Now that we know that death can be controlled, even at great price, who or what will go after that next? How long will it take before the brothers start to wonder if that's a power worth having if one of them is hurt? How will Papa Winchester react if he hears about it (since he doesn't really react to Sam's phone call about Dean at all, that also begs the question, where was he and what was going on?)

This episode is so very much like the best of the classic X-Files episodes, and I mean that as a high compliment.

Just do a quick double check

Warning: This post features a long discussion about suicide/suicidal thoughts/suicide attempts.


I'm kind of in love with Tumblr right now. It's a fun site, and I like that there's lots of silly pictures from things I love.

But it's also brought to the forefront my frustration with people repeating and proliferating lies, or stories without citations or any reason to believe they are true.

Sometimes, it's something ridiculous and silly. An image of Sigourney Weaver landing a nearly impossible basketball throw in an Alien movie is captioned that it wasn't a special effect, she really made the shot, on her first try.

A lot of things about that seem too good to be true, and in this case I knew that she actually made the shot but that it hadn't been on her first try. The kicker though? The actual cited source for the image, the video the image is actually TAKEN FROM, starts out with a slate. The slate clearly reads take four.

The evidence that the caption was wrong is RIGHT THERE. And yet tens of thousands of people have reblogged the image and caption, and probably now are convinced this is the gospel truth and will repeat it to others.

Oh well, another one for the heaps of fake on set information in the history books.

But sometimes, the errors are actually kind of dangerous. In another hugely popular post, a person posts that "a journalist" interviewed every person who had jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge and survived. The post continues that every single person, all of them, with no exceptions (they're very clear on this) realized after they jumped that all of their problems could be solved except for the fact that they just jumped.

Maybe the intention of this post is good. But there is almost nothing about it that's actually true.

A journalist did talk to a lot of people who attempted suicide and survived. Including several people who jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge. I'm having trouble finding the article again now, but I've read it. It's a very poignant and moving read. But the conclusions are not nearly so simple and uplifting as "everybody realized they could solve their problems."

At least one person who survived jumping returned to jump again. The quote about realizing everything was solvable is actually attributed to only one survivor. Others had different things to say, different experiences, and different reactions. You know, because they are human beings.

The conclusion that the article reaches is actually layered. First, they show that a suicide barrier on a bridge or popular suicide spot will drastically reduce suicides OVERALL. Opponents of suicide barriers on the Golden Gate frequently say that people will just "go somewhere else" or "do something else." But they won't, and there's a variety of ways that's been proven.

Second, they show that there are different types of suicide attempts and that the people who attempt different methods actually can be categorized, somewhat. Obviously there's nothing that's always 100% (part of what made the original post a red flag, the use of "every") but in general certain methods are favored by people who become suicidal on an impulse, rather than a long standing and deeply rooted issue.

That's vastly oversimplifying, but the theory is basically that some people (SOME) are actually suffering from an impulse control issue, and that by making it more difficult for them to satisfy that impulse (via a barrier for example) then you actually give them the time to think it over and get past the point of the impulse. Those people, when they survive, are rarely again faced with the same situation. They don't attempt multiple times.

Others have suicidal thoughts coming from a very different place, a place where it becomes a planned and premeditated act. Those people are much more difficult to save, and the article didn't really get into that because it wasn't what they were really talking about. But they did point out that basically no one who fits that category would say that the moment they felt they were going to die, their problems could be solved.

There's real harm that is perpetuated by repeating this false story. First, because it misrepresents the authors actual intent and their conclusions. Second, because it equates mental illness to a "problem" that you can just "solve" or "get over." Mental illness is a medical condition that needs medical treatment of some kind. It's not just a silly little problem, any more than cancer or diabetes or Parkinson's is just a "problem." You can't just solve it or get over it, any more than a person with MS can just think positively and be well again. The myth that mental illness is just a state of mind that can be controlled is literally killing people, and ruining lives in America every day. And even by trying to help them with this quote, you're contributing to that.

Lastly, imagine a person who has attempted suicide multiple times. Who has never felt this moment of epiphany that supposedly "everyone" has. What exactly is the message they're going to get from this quote? They won't find it uplifting or helpful or nice or kind or anything. They'll see it as another sign that they aren't doing something right, that if they were "normal" they wouldn't feel this way because "everybody" feels that way.

So really, the long and short of this is simple: check your source before you just start spreading information around. If something uses a generalization, LOOK IT UP. Anything that uses words like "always," "every," and "none" should be suspect. Over Independence Day, a picture circulated with a story that the real Statue of Liberty was meant to be black because it was supposed to be about slavery. That was completely false on every level, and yet people were latching onto it and saying "UGH! Americans and their RACISM." Listen, Americans can be pretty racist and our history is full of it, you really don't need to make something up, just look at Woodrow Wilson and get back to me.

Don't believe everything you read, be a smart media consumer. Learn how to look up corroborating articles and read the cited sources. Don't be lazy, learning and reading is fun anyway! And you'll learn even more new awesome things!