Chapter Thirteen:Ready......, Aim.....,

"Don't fire until you see the whitewalls on their minivans"

The Monica Year had been an embarassment.

Monica's serotonin levels were so chemically elevated, she couldn't see the wrong in anything she had been party to even though the consequences of her actions were tearing the entire country apart. She was pharmaceutically altered into an "everything is fine" state of mind which she exhibited during the way-too-long interview she did for Barbra Walters.

Bill Clinton was President of the United States. He could not accept responsibility for the massive messes his actions had brought to bear on our country without agreeing that he had perjured himself and was therefore unfit to hold the Office.

The Media and the Administration could not hold the two main characters in the Monica Year saga accountable for their actions, but someone had to bear the blame. The Soccer Moms were an easy target.

After the 1992 election commentators for the Left noted that the wise and ever-diligent-for-their-children's-future Soccer Moms had been the deciding factor in electing Bill Clinton into office.

The commentators for the Right offered that the too-busy-with-the-carpool-to-pay-attention-to- political-matters Soccer Moms were the detrimental factor in electing Bill Clinton into office.

From 1992 and again in 1996, polls indicated that women had voted predominantly for Clinton. Less than a third of the eligible voters cast a ballot. So that if we say that approximately 30% of 1/6 of the population voted for Bill Clinton, that is not very many people, certainly not enough to make blanket judgements about all women and all Soccer Moms.

The commentators for the Right were basically correct in their assessment. However, most Moms do make attempts at informing themselves on issues and voting matters. We have to rely on the Media to provide us with unfiltered, unbiased, factual information on issues and campaigns to base our decisions on. Sound bites is all we have time for sometimes.

Unfortunately, the Media capitalized on this fact and fed the Soccer Moms Sound Bites slanted to favor Bill Clinton. And so the Soccer Moms voted for what they thought would be best- a man who was not an evil Republican. The clear message was that a vote for any Republican was a vote for:
-not taking care of our children
-eliminating the school lunch programs
-ensuring that our kids got dirty air to breath and dirty water to drink
-ensuring that we would leave our kids a depleted and polluted Earth
-ensuring that neither we or our kids would have a Social Security System to umbrella our retirement age
-not taking care of our parents (or rather our having to take full responsibility for them as they aged and/or became ill)
-ensuring that our parents would have to suffer financially and possibly be forced to eat dog food
-ensure that our parents health benefits would be cut and we would have to pay for their care

-not taking care of our Civil Rights and those of our children's
-ensure that the Religious Right would enforce their believes on the entire country
-ensure that Affirmative Action would be dismantled and that minorities and women would never get job placements again
-ensure that the burning of Black Churches would continue and actually escalate( as was proposed by Bill Clinton, himself from a pulpit in an AME Church during the 1996 campaign)

Dick Morris writes in his book, Behind the Oval Office, that the stragegy for the 1996 campaign was to deluge the public with just this type of information an entire year and a half before the campaign. He proudly takes responsibilty for this winning method of indoctrinating the public towards his client, Bill Clinton.

He says that it was very expensive, hence the need for the massive fund-raising that brought about our getting into bed with the Chinese and other "we'll hate ourselves tomorrow" types of activities the Administration involved themselves in.

Even if we don't necessarily agree with the littany of accusation the Democrats levied on the Republicans and even if we recognize how ridiculous and thinly veiled their attempts were, there remained a nagging doubt, especially since the Republicans never bothered to counter the claims. Some of them are really outrageous and the Republicans should have been willing to counterpunch and at least appear as though they were interested in the political process. Instead they came across as unwilling and uncaring.

But, why should the Soccer Moms be held accountable for the actions of the man, Bill Clinton, who frankly, is guilty of false advertising. As consumers we did not exactly get what we assumed we were buying in to?

Soccer Moms continue to be the only ones being blamed for the Monica Year. The Ford Rodeo SUV magazine advertisements suggest that we should not try to look like Soccer Moms and that their product will eliviate our PR problems.

Commentators speak with disdain of the possible fiasco the Soccer Moms will bring about for America if they again ignorantly go out to vote in 2000.

Why should Soccer Moms be blamed for playing by the rules of the game set out by the Politicians and the Media? They are responsible for a large part of the formation of our decisions.

Human time and energy is a commodity these days. We barter them for financial gain. There are so few women in our society that are willing to sacraficially give of their time and energy- even to their own children. It is heinous that any one of our elected officials would choose to undermine any person who is opting to put the enrichment of their children before thier own desires.

Because of the failures of the American Educational system, we have to add to our children's education if we expect that they will be ready to compete with the children from school districts that were more financially able to provide cultural and/or physical opportunites.

And so we carefully balance our finances so we can afford the extracurricular activities and carefully balance all our schedules to make sure we slight nothing or no one. We put in CEO days at work and home for PEON pay. We get it all done!

We are busy about the task of creating what will hopefully be a generation of children who will be capable of getting us out of the many messes todays society will leave them.

Politicians really do not want to displace even one more mom from her post of taking care of America's children who deperately need them. They need to find another scapegoat for their problems. Try looking in the White House!!

@Jenni Vinson June 5, 1999