July 27, 2011
1. Newblog2011: 07/27/11 More Police/Erosion of Society
This morning, while I was sitting at a bus stop, a state police car drove by.
Soon after that, I got on the bus. During the next few minutes, here’s what I saw out of the bus windows:
--A Berlin police car, with a police officer in it, parked in an almost empty lot on the left side of the road.
--An orange road cone which seemed to have been attached with a stick to an empty stretch of grass by the side of the road. I’ve been noticing that sort of thing around in a few places. The stick gets put into the ground, and then it gets threaded through the top of the cone and secured so that the cone doesn’t move.
--A state trooper car parked on the right side of the road.
While I was observing all of the above outside of the bus, a conversation took place among some women a few seats in back of me. When I had first gotten on the bus, I had heard a young woman talking about how she’d settled a dispute with her live-in boyfriend. The gone the way that she’d hoped it would, and she talked about that for a while to the woman in the seat opposite hers. All of a sudden, a third woman’s voice began:
Third woman: My fiancé doesn’t let me touch the stove.
First woman (pause, and then a chilly tone): Is there a reason for that?
Third woman: He likes to cook. The other night, he made Reuben sandwiches. They’ve got bleu cheese, hamburg, some other kind of meat, and cheese. They are so good.”
The first woman’s voice sounded small as she attempted to restore her conversation with the woman to whom she’d been speaking when I’d gotten on the bus. Soon, the first woman started talking about making Alfredo sauce. Her voice got louder as she went from talking about how she melts the butter in the pan to the fact that she prefers to use cream rather than milk, and then she hit the crescendo of her retaliation against the third woman as she talked about the cheese she puts in her version of Alfredo sauce. In addition to using the word “cheese” what has to be a record number of times within a 30-second interval, she talked about how she once used a block of cheese to make Alfredo sauce.
The third woman hadn’t said anything since the Alfredo defense began. Perhaps the first woman didn’t feel that a mere silencing of the third woman was enough punishment for the third woman’s attempt to upstage the previous conversation; by the time I exited the vehicle, the first woman was talking about adding bacon to Alfredo sauce.
What has happened over the past year isn’t empowering to women. It has encouraged women to mistrust and to abuse one another, to fight amongst themselves as the big harassers try to impose male dominance upon the entire world.
1. Newblog2011: 07/27/11 More Police/Erosion of Society
Copyright L. Kochman July 27, 2011 @ 10:14 a.m.