Desert Ramblings - Vol. 3 - 2 VITs - Very Important Things

[v...@yvonnenavarro.com]

Hello everyone.

I have two things to ramble about, and both are so important that I don't even know which to put first.  So I'll just jump right in:

THE FIRST VERY IMPORTANT THING:

In just about two weeks, on May 9th, I'm going to get up at 2:30 in the morning, go to the center of my little town, and walk with a bunch of other people as part of the American Cancer Society Relay.  I can't think of anyone who hasn't been touched by cancer, either by personal experience with the disease or by losing someone who has.  Over the course of my life, cancer has taken my Uncle Garlon, my LJ friend Richard, acquaintances Al and Cookie VanderSluis (husband and wife, who died from different types of cancer only a few years apart), and my very good friend from Rudnick & Wolfe, Dorothy Harrington.  My grandmother fought off cervical cancer before chemo was ever invented, and here and there in my family tree the disease pops its head up before being, thankfully, beat down.  My beloved Chanci, a Dane/Lab mix I had for 10 years, succumbed in 1991, after being whittled down, in a single month, to little more than a bag of bones that had to be carried up and down the stairs.

That's the bad news.  The good news is that we are constantly searching for and finding ways to combat all the forms of this horrible disease, and we will not stop.  Not now.  Not tomorrow.  Not ever.  So if you can spare a few dollars-- literally, ANY amount-- please be sponsor me on my ACS Relay Page here: 

http://main.acsevents.org/goto/yvonnenavarro

Thank you... and thank you, again, to the people who already have!

THE SECOND VERY IMPORTANT THING:

So I have to ask: Would you think that being fair is good... but only for SOME people?

On Wednesday, April 23rd, the Senate failed to pass the Fair Pay Act. What was almost worse than that defeat were the out-of-touch, old-fashioned-- and downright insulting-- statements about women. Senator John McCain (come ON, Arizona!), who didn’t even come to vote, said that instead of legislation allowing women to fight for equal pay, they simply need "education and training."

Lilly Ledbetter, whose Supreme Court case led to the creation of the Fair Pay Act, didn't need "training". She needed Fair Pay.  Women today make up 56% of college graduates and nearly half of the labor force in this country. Yet women make only 73 cents to a man's dollar, and mothers only make 60 cents, for the exact same job.

Please sign the petition below in support of the Fair Pay Act. And for good measure, send Senator McCain your resume. Our goal is to send him 100,000. Think he'll get the point?

We Need Equal Pay for Equal Work--it is good law, make it enforceable.

http://www.momsrising.org/fairpaymccain

Here's where it gets personal:

The above is taken almost word for word from a Fair Pay Act website. What you'll read below, what I HOPE you read below, are my words, my story. An absolute, God's truth slice of my past:

When I was 18, I worked for a real estate firm in Chicago called Frank M. Whiston & Co. I was an accounting clerk, and I made $380.00 per month, BEFORE taxes. For this $380.00 per month, I opened, counted, and reconciled rent checks from various Chicago properties. Eight feet away from me sat a young man about the same age, and his name was Ray. He did the exact same job that I did. And for this job, Ray made $500.00 per month. He was single, so having a "family" wasn't even a flimsy excuse. He made more than me because he was a man. Period. And while I always found myself borrowing a few bucks from my coworkers every week so I could buy cigarettes (I was a smoker back then), the amount that Ray made more than me each and every month would have literally paid my entire rent.

That was in 1975. Come on, people of America. I really thought we were past that sh*t by now.

But thank you John McCain, who has informed me in no uncertain terms that I do not need equal pay for equal work. I need education and training. May I take this to mean I need MORE education and training than my male counterparts to do the SAME job so that I can earn the SAME amount of money?  Perhaps, then, my male counterparts would like to PAY for that education? If being a woman means I am not entitled to equal pay, then being a man should mean men pay more taxes. Pardon me, but both make the same damned amount of sense.

If you are a woman, please go to the link above and sign the petition. If you are a man, before you close this email and forget about it, think about the women in your life. Your mother, your wife, sister, your daughter-- all of these women whom you claim to care so much about will be faced with this. It affects the woman in the next cubicle who struggles to make daycare payments and can't afford family medical insurance. It affects the friend from work you have lunch with in the plaza-- you know, the gal who brings her lunch most of the time and who can't afford to go out to lunch while coworkers of a certain gender eat out 4 or 5 times a week. The world would be a better place and politicians like McCain might actually wake the frack up if their male counterparts added their voices to the "THIS IS NOT FAIR!" scream.

It's not hard to figure it out.  Fair should be fair for everyone, not just a few someones.

Thanks for reading this, and for your support.

All best,

Yvonne Navarro

Web:  http://www.yvonnenavarro.com

LJ:  http://yvonnenavarro.livejournal.com