Rant #3,100: One Day At a Time

Today, the Ranting and Raving Blog hits a new milestone.

This is Rant #3,100, and it is almost hard to believe that what started out pretty much as an outlet for my writing, and my thoughts, has reached such a lofty number.

But it has, and I am very proud of that.

Why have I been able to do this weekday column since Monday, May 4, 2009?

It is because I am always full of ideas, always not intimidated by a blank page, and always ready to take on subjects that others simply won’t talk about.

Look at yesterday’s happenings … we had that school shooting in Nashville Tenn., where a “woman” supposedly shot up a religious school in an elaborate plan that was thought out to the letter.

I sampled four different news outlets, and only one prominently defined the shooter as transgender.

One outlet brought it up at the tail end of the report, almost as if they were saying that it had as much importance to this case as the variety of deodorant the person used.

Two didn’t even bring up this important facet of the shooting—continually calling the shooter either “a woman” or “female,” with one even speaking to some psychologist about the rarity of women participating in such acts.

Only one outlet said it the right way, stating that police had reported that this person was transgender, and they said it within the first couple of sentences of their report.

You see, you won’t get that type of insipid reporting here.

I tell you what is on my mind, and I have no trouble telling you that this individual was transgender, because I do believe it is a major part of this story.

The media does not want to insult the LGBTQ community by reporting that the person who did the shooting was transgender … but by doing this, they might be not insulting that community, but they are insulting the intelligence of a majority of their audience, which wants the facts, blemishes and all.

I won’t do that to my audience here, because I do believe that you are way smarter than that.

A while back, someone called me a “critical thinker,” and I do believe that that is what I am. I report what I see, again, with warts and all, and I do not hold back anything.

I can do this because I am not shackled by the current tenets of the media, which holds back critical information because it does not want to offend anyone, and thus, rarely gives you the full story about anything that they are covering.

Someone else called me “the most honest person on the Internet,” and yes, I do feel that I am just that.

I don’t hold back on anything, whether I am talking about a horrid situation like we had in Nashville yesterday or even when I am talking about a piece of fluff like the wildly untalented Elizabeth Hurley.

Sure, I probably missed my calling.

I should have been a newspaper writer, or a TV reporter, or something like that.

But way back when I was 22 and fresh out of college, I went for such positions, and one of those interviews stands out to me even all these years later.

I applied for a reporter’s job at I think it was the New York Daily News.

This was 1979 or 1980, the world was beginning to change even back then, and the interviewer flat out told me after a short interview, “If you were a black woman, I would hire you on the spot.”

He told me to go to the New York Post and try to get hired there.

It just never worked … if this type of behavior was foisted on me today, I could sue for millions of dollars … back then you just brushed yourself off from such vermin and moved on.

I might sound like I am bitter, and perhaps I am.

I was always qualified for what I wanted to do, but I was always at the wrong place at the wrong time.

I never had it easy finding a job, never had any contacts, never had any doors opened for me … I often had to really embellish and elucidate on certain things in order for people to be interested in me, but even when they showed indifference, I never gave up.

And when I lost my last job due to the mishandling of the company I worked for for more than two decades, I continued to wipe away the vermin and push on, but I was older and it was simply more difficult to do.

So with nothing going on with me for more than a year, I, at the very least, had this Blog that I could go to each and every weekday, and treat it like a regular job that I got paid for.

And now, with just a remote job under my belt, I still open my weekdays after breakfast writing this Blog, and I owe at lot to its existence for keeping me sane during very insane times in my life.

And I thank you, my regular readers, for helping me to keep afloat, too.

Without you, I would simply be writing for myself, but I do feel that there is a silent majority out there who might not agree with everything that I say, but agrees with enough of what I say to make me your voice about certain subjects.

So thanks, and onward to Rant #3,200, which might come about in September or October of this year.

Onward and Upward!