These women only serve to give breastfeeding, something perfectly natural and desirable, a bad name. Why is it that women feel they have the right to breastfeed anywhere and everywhere, everyone else be damned? State law says women have the right to breastfeed in public. Fine. But the Houston Galleria is not a public place. If the owners, or their representatives, in this case, an obviously well-meaning security guard, have any problem whatsoever with what a mall patron is doing, they are well within their rights to ask that patron to either change their behavior or get the hell out. But that's not even what happened. The instigator of this protest was asked only to go to a less conspicuous area, and only after the security guard saw some men watching her.
About 50 nursing mothers gathered Thursday for a demonstration at the Galleria near, aptly, the Baby Gap, where four days earlier Julie Doyle-Madrid said a female security guard asked her to cover herself in the middle of feeding her 4-month-old baby, Will.
Doyle-Madrid said another officer then told her it was the mall's preference for breast-feeding mothers to do so in a less populated area of the mall or in a restroom.
Doyle-Madrid moved but was incensed. She then told a friend about the incident, and she passed the word on.
The outrage soon spread through e-mail messages, play groups and parent meetings until a demonstration was born.
"I think it's a silly thing to be preoccupied with," said nursing mother Melynda Jones as 3-month-old Macy rested on a Boppy pillow while taking her 30-minute liquid lunch.
"We're suppose to nurture our kids. We shouldn't be banned to the bathroom to do it. Who wants to sit in a bathroom for 30 minutes?" she said.
We're also supposed to procreate, otherwise we wouldn't have kids to nurture. When two people decide they want a baby, is the Galleria supposed to look the other way when they go about attempting to concieve on a bench in the food court?
There are lots of things we're supposed to do, but that hardly makes it the responsibility of the Galleria to facilitate every last one of them.
A Tennessee state trooper told Metro police she accidentally shot her brother in the leg during an argument that started over a tub of butter.
Now, with a few notable exceptions, that yellow stuff that comes in tubs is typically margarine, not butter. But that's not the point.
Angelinette L. Crawford, 31, a state trooper since April, told police the argument began about 10 a.m. yesterday when she realized that her brother, Jaison Bilbrew, 19, had lent the butter to a neighbor.
Bilbrew had come back to the Antioch apartment he shares with Crawford and her young son, and Crawford told him ''it was time for him to leave and find another residence,'' Metro police said in a news release.
Already the character of the victim is called into question, as well as that of the neighbor. Due to its very nature, butter is not something that lends itself, if you will, to borrowing. And it lends itself even less to returning. Who the hell wants any part of a tub of butter that has been subjected to untold indignities at the hands of a dirtbag neighbor? But even if you think that butter is something to be routinely borrowed and returned, the fact remains that the tub in question was not the young man's butter and he had no authority to lend it.
The photo accompanying the article suggests that the apartment in question is, in fact, an apartment, not a grocery store. If you need butter, you should go to the grocery store, or the farm, whichever makes the most sense. And if one is so foolish as to go to a neighbor's place and ask to "borrow" butter, it then becomes the neighbor's responsibility to lay the proverbial smack down. People can't just be going around borrowing tubs of butter then returning used butter all willy-nilly-like. It's inconsiderate, asinine, and depraved. If a state trooper has butter in her fridge when she leaves for work, spends the last part of her shift eagerly anticipating the buttered toast (or whatever) that awaits her at home, then gets home to find that her punk brother has violated her refrigerator and granted custody of her tub of butter to a fool neighbor, then she is totally justified in shooting the punk brother.
The moral of the story is: Tennessee state troopers and their tubs of butter are not easily parted. You got lucky this time, young punk. In the future, think before recklessly handing over the butter.
9:02 AM
Wednesday, June 30, 2004
Utter Disgust
You may have noticed, fair reader, that I haven't been reminding you of the days remaining until freedom. There is a reason for this, and quite sadly, it is not mere oversight. For it is with a heavy heart that I announce that I've agreed to stay in my current position until finding another. *sob* I feel absolutely terrible about this. It causes me actual physical discomfort. I console myself with the thought of continued financial solvency and the fact that continuing to draw my ill-gotten paycheck will allow me to continue my magnanimous support of the cosmetics industry. But deep down I know it is wrong.
9:44 AM
