So sorry to hear this. My deepest condolences.

I'm so sorry to hear this. Dear Systematic Chaos. All our love. And to his wife - thank you for sharing this most difficult and heart-rending moment of yours with us. You do not mourn alone.

This canard they try to shove at us all the time - whining and mewling about how unfair it is

that GEORGE SOROS is in there giving money to our side - Oh how awful! How awful!

Oh CRIPES!!!!

Okay, George Soros gives our side a paltry five mill. When he could plunk a whole lot more down because he has it. Okay fine.

The koch brothers on the other hand - spend many times that much on THEIR side. 180 times that much, if you do the math comparing 5 to 900. ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY TIMES THAT MUCH!!!!!!! So then, how is this somehow "equivalent"?

Please show me HOW 5 is somehow equal to 900. Help me understand how that's so. Show me (I'm from Missouri, okay? SHOW me!)! Get me any average third-grader outta their math class on any random weekday morning and have THEM show me that. SHOW ME HOW 5 IS EQUAL TO 900. I realize you are all going by kkkarl rove's "THE math." But his "THE math" DOES NOT ADD UP in the real world.

This is another one of those lovely false equivalencies that the GOP has embroidered onto the proverbial whole cloth. It's like saying a brick is the exact same thing as a grain of aquarium gravel - just because both happen to be hard.

And THAT is how we need to be wording it, too.

THAT is the message, the reality, the FACT of this.

This IS State-Sponsored Rape. Forcible entry into a woman's vagina without her consent is RAPE. Pure 'n' simple. That's WHAT THIS IS.

We're gonna have to amp this UP. CALL IT WHAT IT IS. FORCE America to look at it and see it for what it REALLY IS.

The bad guys have embroidered this as somehow "saving babies." Well, the FACTS are - there are NO babies HERE. There. Is. No. "Baby". Ultrasounds mandated at this early stage in a pregnancy will show this. That there is no "baby," per se. There is a mass of differentiating cells. There's an embryo. And frankly, at such an early stage, the uninitiated (who are usually the ones who are on this most ferociously) might not even be able to tell if this was a human embryo - or a cow embryo or a cat embryo or I daresay even an iguana embryo at this stage, if the image were isolated and presented without context. With a tail, even, at this early stage!

This is STATE-SPONSORED RAPE. STATE-SANCTIONED RAPE. Worse - STATE-MANDATED RAPE. Forcible entry into a woman's vagina without her consent is RAPE.

Forcible entry into a woman's vagina without her consent is RAPE.

Forcible entry into a woman's vagina without her consent is RAPE.

Forcible entry into a woman's vagina without her consent is RAPE.

Forcible entry into a woman's vagina without her consent is RAPE.

Forcible entry into a woman's vagina without her consent is RAPE.

Forcible entry into a woman's vagina without her consent is RAPE.

Forcible entry into a woman's vagina without her consent is RAPE.

I've been melancholy about that all week.

And then, midweek, our son said he may have figured out his first apartment arrangement. Cue the Beatles "HEEEEEE's leaving hoooooome..."

Our daughter's already long gone. Building a very nice and deeply satisfying life for herself and her fiance nearer to his family's business in another state, thankyouverymuch. She's happy. So what do I care, really? That's all I need to know. And I do have the comfort of knowing she left us to move TOWARD something else rather than moving AWAY FROM us. But the flip side of that, as I've realized, is - she won't be back (well, except to visit, that is). Her center of gravity is elsewhere now, by HER design. She's not coming back.

And now her little brother is planning his own exit as well. Just like the Black Phoebe hatchlings in the little nest tucked up under the overhang of our front entryway several weeks ago.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1018750193

casa de calimary is emptying out.

I always say or holler after them "I love you!" whenever they leave. You never know these days. Worst case scenario I want to know that's the last thing they heard from me.

What you said, 1000words!

Thanks, sweetie.

Hugs back atcha.



Seems like there needs to be a bunch of hugs on this thread. It just struck me, reading down through it, how much profound hurt there is. What some of us do to each other in the name of some cockeyed idea of "love." I'd guess the duggars look into their bathroom mirror every morning and see nothing wrong. Seems to me some proof of that manifests in their insistence that the REAL crime here is that their secret was revealed and they lost control of the privacy of it. Now everybody knows what they did. I suspect there's more. Many times by now I've heard the suspicions expressed that this is just the tip of the iceberg, and I feel that way too.

The whole notion of "Iceberg Families" is just excruciatingly perfect. So spot-on it hurts. What's visible for all to see is indeed only the tip that protrudes up above the surface of the water, while most of its monstrous bloated mass balloons, out of view, below the surface. PERFECT description.

Horrible - what humankind is capable of doing to the smallest and most powerless among it. ALL those kids are scarred. Deeply damaged. Makes me wonder what on earth went on in jim bob's house when he was a kid... On second thought, it's really not something I find myself wanting to try to imagine. Too hideous, I'll bet. I look at photos of that family and can't help thinking - "man, THERE'S a world of hurt."

Well lookie there - you made a rhyme!

Love it!!!

What an amazing story, CoffeeCat. Thank you SO much for sharing this pain and this dreadful burden

with us. Thank you for allowing us to see, in however a limited way we can, what kind of path you had to walk, and the insights it give us into families like the duggars. I don't have nearly as much of this kind of awareness as you do, living on the front lines of it throughout your young life. I had a fairly normal upbringing in that regard, anyway. For all her issues, my mom somehow managed to avoid passing on, to me, the battering she experienced at the hand of her rather cruel father. She once told me about the moment she stood looking down at him in his coffin, a few days after he died, and thinking "you can't hurt me anymore."

Your post gives me a lot to think about, CoffeeCat. Testaments like yours, and other DUers' posts here that speak of their own similarly-tormented childhoods, help the rest of us understand. They help the rest of us "get it." Get in deeply profound touch with this. Maybe not to walk in your shoes but at least to be able to follow close behind.

I greatly appreciate the stunning posts in this thread - the courage that you, CoffeeCat, and so many other DUers have shown as you somehow find your way to release and freedom from that horror you had to live with and grow up with. I think you're all calling the duggars what they are and illuminating what they did. Sharing your agony helps the rest of us grow and learn, and suffer with you. The courage! The generosity - that you would open up and share that horror and anguish. And the inspiration you are - for being able to get through it, get past it, and maybe even start healing.

Hopefully you can help guide the rest of us to that healing place as well.

Welcome to DU, Gamecock Lefty!

Glad you're here! And not just because you gave me a shout-out, either.

Hey, let's be practical here. I LONG for the days when idealism really does carry the day. Politically. Spiritually. Socially. Economically.

BUT WE AIN'T THERE.

Or, to put the most hopeful spin on it - we aren't there YET.

And I am, again, very happy to vow that if Bernie Sanders is "it", then I am ALL-IN. Eagerly, enthusiastically, and gleefully! But I want a woman in command, for a change. There is so much going on these days that all boils down to rolling back the progress that the woman's movement achieved during the 60s and 70s. We called it Women's Liberation. Women's Lib. Which meant we the believers or advocates of same became "libbers." It pushed all sides and corners of the proverbial envelope in the cause of justice and equality and fair play and a level playing field for women. Evening things up a little. Applying some corrections, pushing boundaries, defying conventions, challenging set ways and attitudes, rewriting and redefining just a freakin' boatload of assumptions about women. Assumptions that some ahead of my generation by maybe seven to 12 years were breaking through and rendering outmoded and increasingly irrelevant. Like, for example, the convention that a woman's place was in the home. Pretty much exclusively. She was to buckle down to baby-making and home-making. Anything else was not the norm.

As I was growing up, there was this prevailing notion of the "career gal" - the odd woman out, at the office, usually the kind of sassy young exception-to-the-rule featured in a series of Doris Day movies. The "career gal" was the label given to the young woman who did not go straight from college or her family home into the arms (and bed) of a husband to set about bearing the children of her new lord-and-master-in-training. The "career gal" was the oddity, the exception, the other thing that some women were venturing out to do. I saw that in my husband's family. They welcomed me but still, I didn't follow the conventional path. My husband's brothers all had wives who either got pregnant straight away or planned to do so in the first year or two of getting married. I was busy working. They even referred to me as the "career gal" of the family.

We've since evolved enough that the phrase "career gal" doesn't even come up anymore. But women are still, somehow, ridiculously, incomprehensibly under siege. The early fruits of the "Women's Lib" movement included the campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment (sheesh, the opponents decried that women would be forced to go into combat! When we today have women just about everywhere in the military including all the hot zones), Roe v Wade, and more jobs opening up to women. It started in the 60s, in general, with the civil rights and anti-war movements - that by the 70s had begotten the woman's movement. It's because the 60s stirred things up and compelled us to start looking at things differently. There was a whole new post-war generation growing up and coming of age, and looking at things differently. So we had change - which in so many cases is now being rebelled against - on steroids. I wonder if maybe people who didn't want change tried to hold their tongues or cope or understand what was evolving and changing all around them and finally just couldn't deal with it anymore. Which seems to me is what we saw with the rise of the teabaggers in response to the very idea that there'd be a black man in the Oval Office who wasn't the janitor.

Seems to me we're seeing that rebellion against the constancy of change. Change is the only constant. Things WILL NOT stay the same as they always were. Things CHANGE. Things grow, evolve, stretch, stretch out of shape - or stretch into some new and more workable shape. And if you don't change as the times change, and change WITH those times, you become irrelevant. As Exhibit A, I give you the GOP platform with all its regressive, increasingly irrelevant and out-of-touch, outmoded, reactionary planks. The fact that they seem to be growing worse and more extreme and more Neanderthal by the day, I'm guessing, is some pretty good anecdotal evidence of how badly that side of the aisle hates change. How extremely that side of the aisle hates change. Hates being shaken out of their comfort zones. Demands that things be the way they've always been, now and forevermore, amen - despite the changes we see everywhere around us, in every institution, indoors, AND outside, too.

WAY long-winded rant that routes back to why I really want a woman in charge next time. Especially since we finally have a candidate who's seriously and credibly AND REALISTICALLY up to it. Women have YET to be fully-represented, OUR needs and OUR issues fully represented and integrated and responded to, even in this day and age. In the 21st Century forcryingoutloud. And that simply has to change. We MUST outgrow this shit we're in now.

And women's issues aren't just OUR issues - they're EVERYBODY's issues, crossing state lines, races, ages, faiths (and the lack thereof), economic strata, gender identity, ALL of it. Hillary is NOT perfect. So what? I'm not a perfectionist. I like to think I'm a little more of a realist, even if the reality isn't the ideal I'd prefer. And I'm voting for the next Supreme Court picker. So whoever it is, that candidate is gonna have a "D" by his/her name.

No kidding. We have to be very keenly aware of that phrase "common sense."

Or, sometimes it's just "commonsense" as though it was a one-word label or slogan or some manufactured meme. "Common sense" is a phrase that's flung around, like poo, among the wrong-wingers and assorted CONS, in a sneaky, subtle, below-the-radar attempt to make the rest of us think that whatever they're hailing as "common sense" is just that. More often than not, it's anything but "common sense." The bad guys and baggers and other extremists like to ascribe "common sense" to all their cockamamie "beliefs," like trickle-down, the "I'm not a scientist" crap to try to deflect from and otherwise excuse climate change denial, and their constant lament about "punishing success" (rick perry used that just yesterday - DON'T BE FOOLED!!! It's code for the CONservatives' hard-on to keep lowering taxes for the rich).

Whenever they say "common sense," BEWARE. That's a signal that they're trying to put one over on you.