came_apart_at_Kmart

This article is 8 years old, but the article about a Catholic healthcare provider denying MAID services reminded me of it. i learned about it from a friend who is a researcher of medical/healthcare policy in the US.

Basically, when Catholic hospitals merge or are even bought out by secular providers in the states, the Catholic church inserts language into the contract (the property becomes "encumbered" I think is the term) to require facilities to follow / adopt Catholic restrictions in perpetuity. These restrictions can never be unwound and are generally hidden from public knowledge during the deal.

Since 2001, the number of acute care hospitals operating under Catholic doctrine has shot up 22 percent.

As Mindy Swank discovered, it’s often impossible to know when a secular hospital is operating under Catholic restrictions. Genesis became a zombie religious hospital in 1994, during a merger with Catholic Mercy Hospital in Davenport, Iowa. The trend has accelerated in recent years, as secular hospitals have joined forces with Catholic facilities in an effort to hold their own against insurance companies and to comply with requirements for greater collaboration under the Affordable Care Act. In five states—Alaska, Iowa, South Dakota, Washington, and Wisconsin—more than 40 percent of acute care hospital beds now fall under Catholic doctrine.

It feels incredible. With the organization for 10+ years, in the role for 6+ years. I got passed over for a promotion I was overqualified for because my shithead boss, with his beautiful mind, calculated that promoting me would mean twice the paperwork (having to fill my old position). Who cares that it would have meant a 20% raise and increased stability to me. Not to mention all the attendant exploitation in a anti-labor / zero social safety net state normalizing a continuous stacking of projects and responsibilities on people.... because "where are they gonna go?" The answer might surprise you!

To be fair, I have been feeling the unstable vibes here for a few years and been casually putting out applications for other jobs. Like maybe once every month or so, when some new fresh idiocy drives me to tweak and submit my resume somewhere.

Not even 4 weeks after my application was ignored, I got offered a job in a strong union state in the public sector. And not just offered, they said after the panel interview that I blew the competition away. The way my bosses and overseers have treated me here, alongside the limited bites in applications over the year, was starting to wear me down that I started wondering if maybe they had a point.... like maybe I'm not that valuable. So it feels nice to have someone interview me, look over my body of work/portfolio, and say, "Wow, yes please!" Not to mention, there's a real future for me in terms of formal professional development, job grade advancement, and time-in-position compensation bumps. Because, there's a union in a pro-union state! All shit my previous employer had foreclosed on, because no union and anti-union state.

Anyway, suffice to say, I took it and they are being super chill about remote-until-relocation, offering to help etc. I put in my official notice to my boss 24 hours ago (no response lmao) and workfriends/collaborators who are all sad to see me go, super happy for me, or some combo of both. They all get it.

I am doing what I can for the people I work with to cover their asses with their own bosses, but I know >80% of the plates I've been spinning are going to come crashing down over the 6 months after I'm gone. I tried for years to have get the bosses to support cross-training and redundancy, even under the principle of "what if I die in a car accident?" but they ignored me. One of the reasons I am going so far away from this organization is so the bosses will have no social capital to fuck with me at my new place of employment and try to backchannel / pull strings to get me to keep those things maintained once the angry emails and calls start coming in from stakeholders. Hell, I'm not even telling them where I'm going. They can ask their subordinates if they want to know. LOL

Anyway peeps. I know the job search is the worst, but I had a good story and wanted to share.

i was lost in my own thoughts when this ancient, new grounds web-animation popped into my head. this was originally uploaded almost 20 years ago (October 6th, 2004).

nostalgia for the oldheads, i guess. i don't really get what the inspiration for this was. just another weird, low bandwidth flash animation. i guess the dad is jacked up on the devil's lettuce... back in the days when buying the weed drugs from some guy in the parking lot of an IHOP meant you were literally helping Al Qaeda do more 9/11s.

this isn't new (2016 article by the author about their book - The 4-H Harvest: Sexuality and the State in Rural America by Gabriel N. Rosenberg, Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies at Duke University), but i was reminded of it lately and the popular misconceptions of the rural US and its recent history. i think people here might find it interesting.

The truth is that life on farms from the Atlantic Seaboard to California bore little resemblance to the nostalgic ideal suggested by contemporary imaginings of the family farm. Populations were transient, families were chaotic and broken, sexual taboos were flouted, and the romanticism of “Little House on the Prairie” pioneering collapsed on its first contact with the material realities of violence, deprivation, disorder, loneliness, and longing that better characterized the peripheries of America’s agricultural empire.

High morbidity rates, particularly during childbirth, meant that remarriage was common, and families might be composed of multiple primary couples or even the reassembled components of those pairs once severed by death or flight. Spouses often split over the decision to relocate. Other couples split and separately relocated as a solution to restrictive 19th-century divorce laws. As a consequence, casual, if quiet bigamists were commonplace in frontier communities.

Regardless, many settlers left families in the East and attempted to create new ones in the West. Constituting new families among the scattered and diverse population of the West often involved cross-class and cross-race marriages that would have been unthinkable in Eastern urban communities. Forced resettlement frequently shattered slave families and forced enslaved people to repeatedly reconstitute their families.

Rural people applied a make-do attitude not just to work and family, but to sexual intimacy as well. Camps, bunkhouses, lodges, taverns, and saloons were spaces rife with intimate and sexual relations that directly contravened dominant middle-class notions of sexual propriety: homosexuality, sexual barter and commerce, public and semi-public sex, and cross-dressing and gender fluidity.