Anger to the left of me, rage to the right of me ...

With the current political climate of the United States, I find myself struggling with rage on an almost daily basis. The economy is horrible -- jobs simply aren't there. Unemployment has let thousands barely keep their head above water, and yet the standard conservative line is that these people are just lazy and need to go get jobs.

With the lack of jobs, recent collage grads aren't able to immediately join the work force, which will do nothing by harm their future financial opportunities. Banks have enough financial opportunities for the whole world, and in anger, Occupy Wall Street is formed. Yet conservatives frame it as they simply want handouts without working.

We're in 2012, and conservatives are having serious debates as to whether birth control should even be covered under insurance plans -- 2012. And whether a woman has the right to control her fertility (and by default, the path her life goes), is under attack.

Healthcare costs skyrocketing. Teachers are the favorite scapegoats ...

How can anyone not be angry?

And this feels like a personalized anger to me. I wonder if I could keep it more abstract if I only had liberal friends in my life, because then we could share our anger, and direct it towards this big blob known as "Conservatives/Republicans."

But I do have a close conservative Christian friend in my life, and perhaps that makes me anger quadruple. Because I have someone in my life that follows a political mindset that actively harms her friend.

Case in point -- birth control/abortion. I don't want kids, but even if I did, I'd be absolutely terrified to be pregnant in today's political climate. We've got people in Congress saying that women should carry dead fetuses to term because he's seen it work with livestock. We've got people equating those who use birth control as sluts. We had a Republican presidential candidate say that genetic screenings on fetuses shouldn't occur, because that drives up abortions.

Not to mention that pro-life policies are dangerous for pregnant women. I've read too many stories where women choose one thing for their childbirth option, only to have the doctor not only override it, but get court orders that strap the women down so that the doctors can do whatever they deem fit with the pregnancy.

It makes me feel like I'm no more than breeding livestock. Everything I am is nothing compared to the DNA of an embryo.

And then we've got her anti-union tendencies, and her justification for that? She doesn't need a union, because she's a hard worker, and so no one would have any reason to fire her. Right, because no one has *ever* been fired unjustly ... and companies just bend over backwards to offer decent pay, benefits, vacation time, paid lost time ...

And, of course, the ever popular anti-evolution stance, anti-climate change stance ...

I am no doubt turning her into a convenient target, but it's hard not to.