The dog that chases cars and finally caught one

My Sunday movie was Breaking Fast. The story takes place during the Muslim month of Ramadan. I’m a bit familiar with the season because the Detroit region has so many Arabs. During Ramadan a believer is not to eat or drink between sunup and sundown. At sundown there is a feast to break the fast. This is the story of Mo, short for Mohammed. He lives in West Hollywood and is gay. His family is cool with it. At Ramadan one year his boyfriend Hassan, who has a homophobic father, says he must return home (somewhere in America) and be a good son and marry a woman. Mo takes it as rejection. At the start of Ramadan the following year Mo goes to a party and meets Kal. He’s American, though grew up on a military base in Jordan, so can speak Arabic. Since a military base is not a great place for a gay kid Kal hung out in the kitchen and learned to cook Middle Eastern foods. The two take a liking to each other and Kal shows up every evening so Mo doesn’t have to break the Ramadan fast alone. There are complications, of course. I enjoyed this one. There is another positive aspect – Mo and Kal are not teenagers. Since Mo is a practicing doctor I’m pretty sure they’re in their 30s. I enjoy a story where the romance is between adults and being gay isn't something they struggle to figure out. It's a given. I’ve mentioned that since the Supreme Court has overturned Roe several state legislators are itching to tee up same-sex marriage and contraception so these conservative justices can take a swipe at them too. Rebekah Sager of Daily Kos reported that Jonathan Mitchell, the guy who came up with the abortion ban law in Texas (the one that left enforcement to bounty hungry citizens), has come up with a new target. He wants to make it unlawful for the Affordable Care Act to cover the cost of Descovy and Truvada. Most readers who aren’t LGBTQ won’t know what those are. They’re drugs that can significantly reduce the risk of getting HIV. They’re called PrEP – pre-exposure prophylaxis drugs. They are recommended for everyone who is at risk of getting HIV because that little virus is still out there and can still be deadly. And it can infect more than gay men. Mitchell has a case ready to go. His plaintiffs are “Christian” and therefore are not willing to buy health insurance that subsidizes PrEP drugs that encourage and facilitate homosexual behavior. Sheesh, they want a world that is so pristine, in which all possible cooties have been eliminated. It reopens the possibility that an EMT paramedic can see a bleeding man, realize he’s gay, and refuse treatment. We’ve been there and we don’t need to go back. Notably missing from the rights for which Clarence Thomas invited cases he would like to overturn is interracial marriage. It’s missing because Ginni Thomas is white. But that won’t stop Sen. Mike Braun of Indiana teeing up an interracial marriage case for the Supremes to struggle over. Not long after Roe was overturned there was news of a 10 year old girl who had been raped and was now six weeks pregnant. She lived in Ohio, which has banned abortion. She had to travel to Indiana to make it happen. Kerry Eleveld of Kos reported as this news came out Republicans scrambled to discredit and undermine the story. They’re both trying to say the story is a lie and trying to figure out some grounds on which to prosecute the Indiana doctor. Eleveld says Republicans are like the dog that chases cars and finally caught one. I recently bought clothes. Slacks (jeans in cooler seasons), tees, and polos. No way am I fashionable. I’m also retired and have no one I need to impress. Even so, in my last two jobs, academic and corporate settings, I wore slacks and polos. In the winter I added a sweater. The only time I wear a tie is when I perform or attending a wedding or a funeral. So I’m rather clueless about the world of fashion and especially what is called fast fashion. And it sounds like I’m not missing anything. sophialburns, a Daily Kos Emerging Fellow, wrote about how it developed, how it works, and how harmful it is. The harm is because the premise is one buys clothes frequently and only wears them a few times (wasteful of resources) and the garments are inexpensive and made in Asian factories (workers are exploited). One can be fashionable on the cheap. One of the claims of fast fashion is that it makes fashionable clothes available to poor people. This author quoted a thread by Lakyn thee Stylist, who explains it succinctly:

That’s the thing about critiquing fast fashion: it makes the people who can’t afford better defensive while those who actually buy fast fashion the most use its accessibility as a shield. “What about poor people?” Fast fashion is keeping them poor. The problem is, while defending the poor’s right to new and trendy clothes, the poorer (mostly) women of color in the global south who make the clothes for pennies a day get shafted. Poor in Western countries often starts at “unable to consume like the middle class/rich.”

Ayesha Rascoe of NPR talked to Eve Fairbanks about her book The Inheritors: An Intimate Portrait of South Africa’s Racial Reckoning. One thing white South Africans said sounds a lot like what I hear from conservative white Americans. Fairbanks said:

Apartheid persisted long after the vast majority of other African countries freed themselves from colonialism, and the justification that the white regime used was that, look; maybe this actually honestly isn't that just, but frankly, we can't give it up, or else we'll be rounded up and killed in revenge. And I realized, you know, it was one of the most surprising things, was how burdensome and painful psychologically it could be to white South Africans that that did not happen. You know, these people policed South African Black townships in this very - pretty brutal way, and they justified it as necessary to themselves. And if it turns out that it wasn't necessary, it just makes you look, like, not only immoral, but foolish. And it really deepens the kind of gravity of the sin that was committed.

Fairbanks said those fighting white minority rule looked at the white parts of the country and thought that’s what would be coming for everyone. But the poor areas of the country had never gotten resources and it would take a lot of those resources to match what the white government had used to make nice places for white people.