The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Tempest:

bill blum: I learned a disheartening statistic with respect to a job I interviewed for on Monday--- the company received >1100 resumes, for one position, which was advertised for a 3 day period online.

It may not be as bad as all that, though. I worked for a bit doing HR stuff (since we had no HR department) and, like slush, many of those resumes would have been tossed without much more than a quick read-over.

Many of them probably came in without a cover letter (trashed) and several probably had extremely bad cover letters (trashed) or came to the office in some form not asked for - snail mail instead of fax, email attachment instead of plain text - (trashed) and still others would be from epople whoa re very obviously over or under qualified for the job. Easily 90% of those people were never even in the running.

They may have gotten 1100 applicants, but only interviewed a dozen people (which is still a lot of people to beat out for a job... but better!)

Many people probably still care about *witches* simply because what that word exemplifies to them, but that doesn't extend to *Wiccans*, and thus not to any of the practicing people that care about it today.

...I'd doubt anybody would object to having them in the neighborhood.

In my experience, many people DO still object to having wiccans or witches or whatever in their neighborhoods. Granted, I live in the Bible belt (in Texas, but not Houston) which is a major shift from, say, NYC where I used to live. Down here we still have people who shun others because they don't attend the right church. Not because they aren't Christian or even not good Christians, but because they don't go to the right church. Pagans are right out.

There isn't much danger of being burned at the stake, of course, but there is always the chance that you'll get a lot of nasty notes on your door/car (as we did once, but not for being Pagan), or of being ostracized by neighbors, or people telling their children not to play with your child, or even having mud, eggs, or other more solid things thrown at your house. This all depends on how out you are, how vehement your neighbors are, and other factors. However, none of these things is out of the realm of possibility.

This isn't just a southern thing, either. I wouldn't necessarily out myself as pagan to my neighbors if I lived in my hometown of Cincinnati (or anywhere else in Ohio) and certainly not to any of my family. The latter wouldn't be dangerous, necessarily, but would not result in pleasentness.

This kind of reminds me of the conversation I always end up having with people who seem to think racism isn't prevelant in America anymore.

2006 is too far away and, I fear, not enough. This is scary NOW. I'm afraid of the next four years. I'm afraid of the next year. Something needs to be done now and no one is going to do anything.

I'm really kind of angry about this concession thing. Wasn't the war cry that we weren't going to make the mistakes of 2000?

Ohio makes me go OW. I absentee voted (cost me all kinds of money to do so) in hamilton county. Right now all the craziness I see coming out of my home state just amkes me wonder if Ohio is even more insane than i thoguht growing up. Yick.

right now, it stands thusly:

Bush, George W. 2,655,975
Kerry, John F. 2,500,899

This is from 94.88% counties reporting, but probably doesn't include the voters who were challenged and the 71,561 provisional ballots which won't be dealt with for days or weeks.

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