Bless Your Heart Dennis Hastert

Festive Rant in honor of the sentencing of Dennis Hastert. Vivid illustration of reasons RantWoman could use an editor and MAYBE should try a different PR tack about life in her own Meeting.

Obligatory text-in-graphic, via @DaveWeigel

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/prosecutors-add-crushing-details-hastert-allegations


RantWoman, how are your sex offenders?
[RantWoman does in fact sometimes field questions like this. usually there are multiple interesting threads of the conversations.]

 

MY sex offenders? You mean the formerly incarcerated known offenders who are now valued members of our community?  Meeting’s sex offenders? Guess what they get to wait in line for attention while RantWoman’s inner blowtorch shines in other directions.

 Bless your heart Dennis Hastert. Thank you so much for being sexual abuser of the day. How refreshing to have you a male politician interested in boys are available to take our minds off the nauseating trail of disgusting history that now tumbles out every time RantWoman hears the name Bill Cosby.

 Bless your heart because my Twitter feed says it’s National Child Abuse Awareness Month, which of course covers a whole bunch of things besides sex abuse, but it’s perfect alongside news about your court case.

 Bless your heart, sir, for trying to pay hush money, for trying to structure the payments to evade banking reporting requirements and for telling stories that did not add up.

 Bless your heart for the young men who have come forward and who get to relive your behaviors toward them every time the prosecutors have to detail the facts behind what you have been indicted for.

 Bless your heart for walking us all through the painful experience of facing behavior that should not be hidden, abuse of trust and authority, betrayal of responsibility to youth. 

 Bless your heart for making RantWoman wonder whether this history of abuse somehow played out in how you served the country as Speaker of the House, third in line for the Presidency. Hasta en las mejores familias.

 RantWoman is sorry you are now ailing, and Bless your heart is the best RantWoman can do for prayer.

 But bless your heart because your story also reminds RantWoman of sex abuse very close to RantWoman, of enough threads to keep a large number of mental health professionals in yachts, that is assuming anyone receiving services could sustain yacht payments. And that does not count one mental health professional who, RantWoman has learned, ai-yi-yi, was arrested awhile ago in connection with a creep one out internet sting.  

Bless your heart for one person dear to RantWoman who has an official “crazy letter” but who has come far enough in her spiritual work  to recognize both that she is well off and that others need to be held as they continue their recovery.

 

Bless your heart for email and other electronic emanations from someone else: threads in the narrative have shifted in ways RantWoman has to guess indicate encounters with mental heal services that actually help. And please excuse RantWoman for being an arrogant bitch around people who find the Still Didn’t Get the Memo Committee on Email Immoderation daunting: yep. The ONLY reason RanWoman draws the conclusions she draws is because she takes the time actually to READ and consider responses to the communications in question.

 Bless your heart for RantWoman’s longtime school friend who really thinks she ought to be able to read Nabokov’s Lolita, on account of it is supposed to be great literature and all. Never mind that RantWoman’s friend received decidedly inappropriate attention from the Jr. high band director and that somehow is for better or worse saving her from what is in fact a pretty creepy piece of literature.

 And Bless your heart for the choir director from the other high school. RantWoman wonders whether the community might actually have been able to handle him being gay; they definitely should not have had to deal with him molesting students. RantWoman has other friends, male and female who have been abused by teachers. Bless your heart for reminding RantWoman of their stories.

 And bless your heart for showing up in the news around RantWoman when RantWoman isstill trying to dodge a call to truth telling. RantWoman has in fact told many of these truths many times. RantWoman has collected SOME evidence both of being heard and of her Lightalso speaking to things others’ hearts. And yet, RantWoman is called AGAIN to…to SOMETHING, something more than clearness committees with people who have repeatedly silenced her. Please hold RantWoman and everyone in the vicinity of her psychic blowtorch in the Light.

 Bless your heart, Friend around whom RantWoman spent MULTIPLE months trying to get you to hold worship sharing with a certain committee about what it means to be in her Meeting’s sex offenders among us announcement. For RantWoman’s faithfulness to her Light, RantWoman got to listen to said Friend debrief about a small part in another Situation involving end or relationship Drama as well as a teenager caught up in his adults’ challenges. Trust RantWoman, what you needed to debrief about was a SMALL part of the situation. RantWoman is happy to have listend to your distress but still pissed off basically to RantWoman’s ear to have been told to go away afterward. Oh, and said committee was removed from the official announcement. Upon reflection about rantWoman's own experience, Rantwoman would also say that tidings of such matters do not automatically seek out or find the committees officially designated as responsible, a point RantWoman's psychic blowtorch is being more present about that is suitable for this blog entry.

 

There is such a long trail of further silencing connected with all that, RantWoman is pretty cluntly just in “shit happens” mode, with further allusions to Ben Pink Dandelion’s observations: sometimes people who have absolutely NO gifts in topical areas should collide with roles every now and then so people appreciate the value of having the roles filled by people with the right gifts. RantWoman also notes that said Friend is so clearly called to some strands of witness Rantwoman considers really really important, particularly teaching environmental science to students from countries with no tradition of environmentalism that RantWoman feels particular call to forebearance about other shortcomings. RantWoman feels call to forebearance but RantWoman so far is not entirely successful about actually extending it. Shit happens --and people keep coming to worship together!

 

Meanwhile,

--RantWoman is still holding in the Light the story behind RantWoman’s recent post about the Queen of spades and pastoral care.

--RantWoman continues to wonder what is it about her face that causes people to be able to tell her about their restraining order issues.  

--RantWoman guesses she is supposed to be grateful just to have language for the problem of getting quite triggered recently when a former physicist, a deceased member of RantWoman’s Meeting came up in conversation on one of RantWoman’s non Quaker email streams. The former physicist went to work in a social services role. List memories included words that exactly matched RantWoman’s memory and the name came up because of circumstances when the person who first mentioned the Friend was a child, in particular something that probably looked entirely reasonable to all the adults but that made one set of issues worse for the then-child. RantWoman sorted all this out and then filed it in her “gee this is one reason this person is hard to work with and why it is important to keep including what she contributes” file. RantWoman also took note, when checking history for another reason: the then child as a young adult was one of the founders of the Friendly Neighborhood Center for Extreme computing. Talk about more call to truth telling and crip solidarity.

 

But seriously, how are your Meeting’s sex offenders, the ones you know about?

 One has a very sweet love story: he and hs wife recently celebrated their 26^th wedding anniversary. Other than that, this Friend is part of a group of released offenders who regularly speak in the community. They speak with COMPLETE integrity of their past and also of the critical need for prison reform in WA. RantWoman hopes others will feel called to join this work particularly since the work will also involve a call to show up for racial justice, including working with burning concerns for different communities.

 

And the other one you know about? He is now a registered voter and a member of Meeting. For reasons having NOTHING to do with any violations of all his different conditions, discussions of his situation has a couple times gotten entangled in circumstances he has nothing to do with. RantWoman has no sense of whether there is anything to try to smooth over about those circumstances. RantWoman also thinks this thread is not the best place to speak of other gifts, except for one point: RantWoman is glad other people have FINALLY also indicated encounter with the point that it is not reasonable for anyone to expect this Friend to solve everyone’s anger trigger restimulation issues ever. But help with such problems does sometimes happen sometimes well, we are all ministers of God!