So the new buzz phrase going around is "staycation."  You know, going on vacation without leaving home.  There are all kinds of suggestions and ideas for this concept.  Staycations usually turn into farting around the house and getting on each other's nerves.  I digress.

This week we had our semi-annual Violence Against Women Conference in our home city of Big D!  So it was a "stayconference?"  I'm struggling with what to call it. Not quite the Hawaii experience of February.  The daily temps exceeded 100 degrees.  Summer isn't the best time to show off Dallas but no one really cared what I thought.  I"m sure this is considered the "off-season" for Dallas and this conference goes for off-season bargains. I digress again. Because I actually do have a point!

These conferences are a challenge for me.  They push me, make me think and get me rattled.  We had a lunch (paid) speaker who used the platform as an opportunity to complain about pay inequity on the speaker's circuit.  Seemed odd to me, frankly.  She's still being paid more than I've ever made in my own time as a speaker.  Most of my gigs have been freebies.   Hmmm... She also complained that if a man gets up to speak about violence against women he is viewed as a sensitive, caring man whereas a woman speaking is seen as a loud-mouthed bitch (pardon me).  Hmmm... I've been speaking for about 18 years and only once someone criticized my motives and that was a dumb-headed 15 year old kid!  I've never been called a derisive name ever.  Ever.

Another guy put together a presentation about rape in the movies.  Once he got to HIS point, it was pretty good, but his PowerPoint was awful.  He had so many typos it was distracting.  PLEASE PROOFREAD YOUR MATERIALS!! And he tried to set up the presentation with some sociology mumble that I had trouble following. He was saying that we marginalize certain groups that we find socially unacceptable (tracking, following).  He said that these groups serve a social purpose- latent marginalization (hard to wrap brain around but I'm trying).  Take the poor.  We don't want to be poor.  That is seen as bad but many good things come from having- as Jesus put it- the poor always with us.  The poor can encourage social responsibility and charity (good things, right?).  But he was trying to say that no one wants to BE the poor.

He said, "I'm sure no one's parents said, 'I hope that when you grow up you are poor.  I hope you have to share a single cup with the entire family and carry your waste bucket from the house to the ditch. "  I'm sure no one's parents said, 'I hope you grow up to shovel manure or do the dirty work that the poor do."

I nearly raised my hand (but he was already off track and off his timeline).  While it is true that my parents never told me they hoped I was poor and I was given a college education (which mostly came about by my father's and grandparents' deaths!), my parents did instill a kind of mindset about being poor that was not negative.  They said things like, "There's no shame in being a garbage man or a ditch digger."  "Whatever you do, do it wholeheartedly, no matter how much you think the job stinks."  "Never be above a hard day's work."
And to prove it, I spent 12 years as a cleaning lady, a job clearly seen as something "the poor" do. OK.  I wasn't trying to prove anything. I was serving my family in an honorable way no matter what people think of the job.

Please.  Spare me this elitist, intellectual mumbo-jumbo. 

It might be a dirty job.  But someone's got to do it.  It might just be you.