Barack Obama’s response: “We’re supposed to stand up to discrimination. And we’re sure as heck supposed to stand up clearly and unequivocally to Nazi sympathizers. How hard can that be, saying that Nazis are bad?”
I firmly believe that not only should we raise the minimum wage, but we should also create a maximum wage. There is no reason in which an orthopedic surgeon, which is the highest paying doctor will make an average of $464,500 a year, while the top 10 CEOs earn well over $33 BILLION a year. If we even so much as cap their earning potential at $1 billion, which is more money than anyone should really need to live a happy fulfilling lifestyle, then it would force them to put that money toward the company or be punished. This means giving their employees better health insurance, giving them more vacations, better wages, paying for their college or their children’s education, creating more jobs, and improving the functionality of their companies. Perhaps even force them to invest in the communities they are serving.
For those of you who are still skeptical… let me put it this way… the highest earning CEO “earned” $156,077,912 in 2014.
Let’s boil this down. There’s about 52 weeks in a year. Let’s say that he works 40 hours a week. So a total of 2,080 hours a year. That’s $75,037 an hour. The median HOUSEHOLD income in the US is $50,502 per year. He’s earning 1.5 times the amount per hour than the average household makes in a year. That disparity is absurd.
To put that even further into perspective, the average NEUROLOGIST earns $219,000 a year according to a 2014 statistic. Every single one of the CEOs on the 100 highest paid CEOs earn at least 93 TIMES the amount that a NEUROLOGIST makes.
Something needs to change. People shouldn’t be starving for the sake of someone else’s greed.
My wish for every writer in 2018 is that you all finish every WIP you got lingering around.
May your words flow freely, may your characters come alive and may everyone love your finished story when they read it.
I feel very strongly that if historical romance can give women a happy ending, it can give queer people a happy ending. M/f historical romance doesn’t tie itself in knots over the likelihood of the rake having syphilis, the terrible dentistry, the lice, the prolapsed uterus after multiple pregnancies, the prospect of death in childbed, or the horrifying legal discrimination against married women. We don’t close the book on the wedding scene reflecting that the heroine can now be legally raped, has just lost all her property to her husband…and would be vanishingly unlikely to obtain a divorce. Historical romance readers aren’t stupid; we know this stuff, but we choose to believe our heroine will be one of the lucky ones. And I don’t see why we can’t extend that happy glow to other stories, too. If women’s lives don’t have to be blighted by social oppression in romance, neither do those of people of color or queer people.
Moreover, human nature doesn’t change. A lot of what we read about LGBT people in history is appalling because the records we have are the legal documents, the newspaper reports, the accounts of people who were victimized. We don’t generally have the hidden stories of the people who lived under the radar…. But we know…people we’d now call gay, bi, trans have always existed and [that] as a matter of statistics plenty of them must have lived and died without ever coming to the law’s attention. Which is not to hand-wave the horrors of the past but only to say that horror isn’t the only story, and it’s not an acceptable reason to deny marginalized people their happy-ever-after.
“What we strive for is not tragic love — we strive for happy-ever-after, every one of us. The best way to stick it to these men and women who have made such an immense mistake in the world is to show all of us how we can be happy — to live out our happily ever after.” – Sarah MacLean
Dale Hansen is a fucking treasure. He admitted he was a childhood victim of sexual abuse in the hopes that it would encourage others to come forward and seek help. He has been an ardent supporter of scholar-athletes and of gay players in the NFL and of trans athletes.
“I’m not always comfortable when a man tells me he is gay; I don’t understand his world. But I do understand that he is part of mine.”
Musings of a Yankee Countess 