Over the last 10 years or so I have watched as a friend has worked hard while raising her wonderful son after a painful divorce. Through hard work and perseverance she has gone from a chain stylist to establishing and operating her own salon. It's a nice shop in a middle class neighborhood and she can be proud of herself.
While I was waiting I also had the chance to read a couple of mainstream magazines. Check out this article from Time Why a Christian in the White House Felt Betrayed.
And from skimming through a couple of others, it became painfully clear that the average hair salon patron has greater awareness and a much higher level of maturity when it comes to sexual issues than does George Allen. Issues like sex trafficking.
While George Allen pretends to be offended by realistic fiction, human sex trafficking takes place right under his nose.
No, this is not partisan silliness. Human trafficking is the third largest and fastest growing criminal industry on earth. And one of the hubs of activity is K Street, home of George Allen's lobbyist friends.
It is the responsibility of legislators not only to read about uncomfortable matters, we rely upon those legislators to separate fact from fiction and do something about it. We count on them to address sordid issues like human trafficking for sexual - and other - purposes. And we count on them to do so with a modicum of goode taste, not hire people to plaster irrelevant excerpts on our living room TV screens. Can we no longer expect that our legislators learn the fundamentals about real world problems, figure out solutions and find ways to implement them?
Affected moral outrage for political gain is not just irresponsible, it is a big part of the problem. We've seen this before in legislators whose themselves became obstacles because their personal limitations rendered them incapable of getting their heads around the scope and dynamics of the silent epidemic of incest and sexual child abuse. Ingrid wrote about Allen's lame "record" on women's issues. In 2005 Joe Biden along with 58 co-sponsors in the Senate introduced a bill to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act. George Allen was not one of them. H.R. 3402 was the version that later became law. Allen just is not a player in the realm of women's issues, and it is hypocritical for him to dream up "women's" issues now.
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Ordinarily the general conversation in the salon revolves around boyfriends, children, husbands, parents, where someone went last night, what's going on next week. All surface and sparkles. But this time it was very different.
About two years ago my friend reduced her prices to keep the volume up. This morning it was pretty busy there, but when I asked her how things were going, she said that business had really been dropping off.
"Everybody's cutting back these days, trying to make ends meet. Everybody." A little pause, and quietly she said, "It's tough."
So I asked about her vacation trying to lighten things up a bit. Usually she and her sister's family do something fun for a change of pace. Instead she told me about a hair show that she attended. More than I wanted to know, but it was plain that a vacation hadn't been in the works for them. She didn't want to come out and say that she couldn't afford a family vacation this year.
The older woman who was sweeping up received a phone call. She learned that to get her car repaired would cost $2400. She was talking about taking out a loan to pay for it. A younger woman there said that if it was only $1000 she would have to walk.
Another stylist was talking about an event she had attended. It was a fundraiser for a friend who had cancer. The problem was - the friend had died. They held the fundraiser anyway to help out the family. It would have been rude to probe about all of the particulars about insurance and so on, but from where I sit these kinds of fundraisers are becoming more and more common.
There's more but you get the picture. Unlike George Allen, Virginia women can tell the difference between fiction and reality.