What a day what a way what a life The usual. Lightning blew out our oven 4 summers ago. On SSI you can't repair or replace an oven. Every year people adopted the kids for Christmas and asked what my dream was and I said an oven. Never came. Perfume and work clothes with shoulder pads did. As if someone with congestive heart failure can use perfume and wear that kind of clothes to the E.R. So we have no oven. Last week lightning blew out my tv. Since then, we've had no idea what is going on in the world. Dan found out last night there is a hurricane coming this weekend. I had no idea! I am tired of living in the lightning capital of the US on $560 a month, the average income back in 1952! Tampa is the highest concentration of lightning in Florida, the lightning capital of the U.S. It gets 25 direct hits per square mile . You are suposed to unplug all appliances and not use the phone or run water , each lightning storm. It has had a lightning storm every day but 2 since May 21, 2004. It is Sept. 1. That is 100 days straight, just like last year, when it stormed exactly 100 days straight. Who wants to sit and have no computer, tv, phone, or cooking for 6 hours a day for 100 days in a row????? Not someone so poor it's their only escape, internet and tv! So I want to get out. I will never look back. I met a lady on SSI like me. Unlike me, she didn't buy a house and own it free of mortgage by the time she fell disabled. Unlike me, also, she did not sue someone and get a quarter million (before the lawyers took all but $142,000) after she realized she would never work again. So I was able to rennovate my home and get a $16,000 van free of payments, something those poor people can never do. Or I'd be in her position just like her. She lives in a s---hole. A shack with one room. The refrigerator is in the same room as the bed. The bed is a bare matress. I know how that is, having had one set of bedsheets for the last 3 or 4 years, for my bed, and one for one daughter's bed. This lady has none. She was wrapped up in a comforter so dingy it was colorless and foul , something you or I would never touch without gloves on let alone find comfort in wrapping ourselves up in. Her house was strewn with crud. Every surface was a filthy mess of crap collected. She had no car, no phone. her rent is $440 a month of her $560 check, which is rare--most places rent starts at $600 a month here. Most people on SSI can't make it without Section 8 (HUD) housing vouchers. There has been a 5 year moratorium on applying for section 8 for 5 years. Meaning each year they say you can't apply for 5 years, the waiting list is so long. It never becomes 4 years, then 3, etc. it makes no sense. Till you read Catherine Fitts' story on the Internet. She was the undersecretary for HUD under Clinton who was awarded for finding more money in HUD, then told to leave it alone by the Bush administration because it was a slush fund to pay CIA agents who did not want to be found directly on a CIA payroll and thus exposed for what they were. She argued that the taxpayers voted to give HUD that money for the poor, not the CIA . That she felt she was accountable to the taxpayers for the use of that money. The Government quickly had her bank accounts and assets frozen and took her to court saying she was caught taking a bribe. When she was exhonerated of that they quickly threw a new charge at her the same day. Without showing any proof. You know, a facetious lawsuit. The kind they pretend they don't want anyone to file so they won't let people sue the fastfood industry. When the case would come up they'd have no proof and she'd be cleared again, just to have another charge lodged. And I mean over and over on and on for 6 years now. All because she wanted to help the poor. She found out that jerks were making millions off Section 8. They'd bid on bundles of vouchers, 5000 at once and more, get them. They stood to lose their mighty income if people actually moved up and out of Section 8 housing. Couldn't have that! So they made it so if a family got a raise or extra income ( a teen went to work part time to help out, etc.), of say $50 or $100 a month, so they could finally join the world and get cable tv or internet or repair their washing machine or whatever, they immediately lost their voucher and home and the extra income was not enough to offset the $300 a month or more higher rent they suddenly had to pay on a different home. There would go all the advantages to the extra income. There still was no way to get cable, internet, or their own laundry done at home! She said that these millionaires wanted it to be like the old Russia, the govt. keeping these folks in substandard life for 70 years apiece. That was the only way they could stay millionaires--counting on x amount of poverty-stricken Americans that long. And --you guessed it--they subtly at the same time push that idea of the rugged American individualist, the guy with money, versus the lazy poor people with the lack of initiative who want to live off free handouts instead of working. That's not it at all. Why would we want to live our entire lives never getting cable tv or internet or the opportunity to do mini-loads of laundry at home? Plus the poor work harder than the rich, who don't hand - wash all their clothes and dishes, ..you get the drift. The rich even have maids. The poor afraid of work? Their whole life is one big drudge. These people don't believe in God. They couldn't and do what they do. Yet in 1995 , 98% of Americans in a poll said they were going to heaven when they died. It must be that Baptist thing, where Jesus died for their sins , even the ones they are about to do next year, so they can do them, it won't affect them. You know, those people who scoff that Catholics don't believe in the Bible or they wouldn't think you had to be good to get to heaven? As if Jesus didn't say the way was rough and thorny and few traversed it? Anyway, so I meet this woman on my income. Her other $120 a month goes to electric . She has to live off church hand -outs for food. There's no way she'll ever get a phone, a car, a anything, even bedsheets. How do I know? I'm here. I can't get bedsheets, postage stamps, toliet paper, fix my leaking roof, fix my broken washer , replace my oven blown out by lightning. My house has no siding but tarpaper and no insulation in the attic so my electric bill is $350 to $400 a month, my water bill is the same as everyone else's in Tampa--$78 a month for water, sewer, and trash pickup, my phone is $50 and my gas to heat my water is $50 a month. If you've added it up, it's more than my total income and I haven't even fed myself yet, let alone my 2 kids ages 16 and 10, let alone clothed us or gotten paper towels, dish soap, shampoo, peroxide, bandaids, laundry money and so on. In this lousy neighborhood, men cruise for hookers and crack addicts stroll looking for vacant dwellings to invade, so you have to have a dog (dog fod, flea killer...). I've raised 2 little girls , both with IQs of 126, give or take 2 points, for the past 4 years with no oven or stove, only a microwave to cook with. Do you know how much that limits your meals? Do you know how well that enables you to teach two future American women to cook and bake? There's no eggs. Grilled cheese. Pancakes. french toast. Baked anything. Why is SSI so low? I can't believe this poverty is artificially designed so millionaires can continue to make millions off a segment of the poor. They can't help it if some of us don't NEED housing vouchers--they can't make exceptions, they have to keep it straight across the board to herd as many of us as possible into these Section 8 things. SO guess what is happening.There aren't enough houses under $560 a month in the U.S. And don't forget, electricity, water bills have to come out of that $560, too. Since it takes over 5 years to apply for section 8, and average of 2 more years on the list waiting for a voucher, there are millions of families who are homeless. Why don't you see them all over, marching, begging, sleeping under bridges,organizing? Because if they ask for help, their children are taken away from them. Every time. Remember when I told you someone sent the Child Neglect folks and cops here saying my water was cut off? And I had 2 kids? My water wasn't off, because somebody had illegally turned it back on. The police said if it or the power had been off, they would have had to take the kids. You should have seen these 3 strong, strapping, healthy grown men in my little kitchen taking turns peering into my new , non-working, clean-as-a-whistle wall oven with flashlights. For roaches, I guess. Once a lady who had ants and had her kids taken was said in the paper to have an "insect infestation." They couldn't say ants--we all get those. They had to keep it general to look bad. Once a maid who came here from a social services agency tracked dog poop in on her shoe ( not from my dog, from something outside my yard) and told her boss I had animal feces on my carpet. With my oven, I'd been waiting for months to get 2 healthy men here at the same time so they could pull out my oven and see if it was just a fuse I could replace, and finally I got two men here, and they won't pull it out so I can see! They said it wasn't their job to help families stay together. I said "WHAT? What is The Department of Children and Families here for, then?" "Solely to protect children from neglect and abuse," they said. ********************************************************************* Nobody knows this stuff but the poorest citizens. Why don't all those people in $250,000-$2,000,000 homes know this? Could it be a plot? No? Then why did Jeb Bush, who plans to be President the 8 years after his brother is, so other brother Neil Bush, best friend of Osama Bin-Laden's brother, can continue to deliver us to the bad men of the world, tell his "base" ( in silk ties and suits like his bro George's base) that he is going to make sure people on Medicaid in Florida pay more out -of -pocket fees for their medicines and doctors, "because it's time they learned, like the rest of us had to , that not every thing in life is free?" Like we on Medicaid are just lazy freeloaders content to live off the system , which is so providing we get by fine, thank you very much? Why is he perpetrating a myth, an ugly lie? Why isn't he honest with his constiuents? In Florida, the only people over 21 years of age who can get Medicaid have to be on SSI. The only people allowed to get SSI are the totally disabled. It doesn't mean we never worked. I worked all my life. I didn't qualify for the other kind of Social Security because I had my first pregnancy exactly 10 years before I had to apply for SSI , so stopped paying Social Security while I stayed home and my husband worked alone, making double the minimum wage. At her birth I came down with peripartum cardiomyopathy. It went undiagnosed although all the hallmarks were there ( cardiologist called in because my heart went so funny in labor, too tired to bathe baby or clean tub or hang laundry for rest of my life---) because we had no money to get x -rays and see specialists and believed the doctor who thought it had to be "post partum depression." At the birth of baby 2, however, 5 years later, I got way worse. That's the rule with this disease. Have a third and you die. This time though I insisted on help when she was 3 days old and had a good doctor (Dr. Jay Garcia, father of actress Joanna Garcia who plays Chyenne on Reba on the WB network) and he sent me for an x-ray and the radiologist said I had all the hallmarks of congestive heart failure. Dr. Garcia's office called me and told me to go to E.R. immediately but would not say why. I panicked. I had a newborn. I couldn't leave her with her dad. She was being breast fed. So had the first. He knew zip about bottles and formula and was too dense to be able to learn that all on his own, with dyslexia.. We may have been broke, too. He had a dead mother and I had a crazy one so there was no one to help him. I said I can't go in a hospital now! Please can't I just see a doctor? Finally they called back and said I could see a family internist only. So I did. And that quack said "The report they faxed me says you have CHF but you are too vibrant , too young, and too thin to have it so I'm going to say you have pneumonia." Three weeks later they took my baby as a failure-to -thrive. She'd lost weight since birth. Immediately they gave her formula she gained weight. You better believe that first they wasted a lot of dough going up the wrong avenue, testing me for drug abuse. Finally the pediatricians said ,"mom, you look terrible. Why do you have dark circles under your eyes and why are you so sluggish ?" I said,"I don't know. My doctor said I have pneumonia." They said,"when?" I said ,"Three weeks ago." They said,"Did you have a cold?" "no." "Cough?" "NO." "Fever?" "NO." "Congestion?" "No." "Elevated white blood cell count?" "no." "Mom," they said,"You don't have pneumonia. You better get to a doctor." But I couldn't afford one. 2 -and -a -half years after she was born I suffered sudden cardiac death. I was lucky--I was one of the 5% saved, by a defibrillator. There was a fire station 2 blocks from my house. ( The same one Hank Carr took his boy to that fateful day Hank killed the boy, 3 law officers and himself.) I was one of the 2% of those who recover w/o extensive brain damage. That's why I know there's a God. One reason I know. And that he saved me so I could tell you all this. No one f--ked around this time. State-of-the-art everything. At one point they came to me: "Did anybody ever tell you you had congestive heart failure?" And every minute of my visit with that young doctor ( who had since run over and killed a little boy with his jet ski) came back to me clearly. I immediately sued. And won. My attorney said it was unheard of for anyone to settle within 7 months like they did. He said I was charmed. He was Jewish and I told him Jesus did it and I still know so. I had paid property taxes for years and continue to . I had paid income tax, social security tax--but you have to have paid social security tax in the last 10 years before you apply for disability, and I'd stopped paying 10 years before. I think that had a part in why I won the settlement. I would have applied in time, had I been diagnosed in time. But Jeb Bush is pretending that the people on Medicaid never worked, never paid diddly squat in taxes, get everything free. He's the one that gets so much free. Imagine him going into a store or restaraunt and not getting told his purchase is on the house. Come on! But the Republicans believe him. No one has time to look into this stuff themselves. Why would such a responsibility-holding guy lie? I am just lucky I got to remodel my home and get a decent vehicle that's lasted 7 years, without car payments every month. Or I would have been homeless years ago too. My kids would have been taken years ago too. My life would have been way over. I probably would have killed my self. And you wonder why these people are on drugs? Of course I lost my Medicaid and SSI as soon as I won my lawsuit and had to pay Medicaid back $5,000 to boot. Then I had to pay all my prescriptions, doctor bills, etc including expensive pacemaker-defibrillator check ups, EKGs, and echocardiograms. Jeb Bush is flat out lying to you all. I also paid full cash for my first daughter's birth, both the hospital bill and obstretrician's. Believe me, insurance companies negotiate for discounts people paying with cash don't get. How can the hospital show the insurance co. they are getting a discount unless there is a higher price on it all to the non-insured? I did pay my way in this world. Time I learned every thing isn't free my butt. I'm the one who knows! I can't develope the photos we take at Christmas until June! I know better than any of you ! The Bushes are very sick snakes. The devil. |
Deanne Young here |
The Unexpected Memoir of September 2004 {Deanne Louise Virginia Young,Esq} |
You've seen on this site how I am a descendant of the Browning family ( of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett the poets, and the one who invented the machine gun ,) didn't you? And we were aristocracy back in 500 A.D.? And i qualify as a Daughter of the American Revolution? Well, here is an email I just sent a friend last week: Hello! This is to share about mankind's inherent kindness. With a fever of 102 almost I had to find food just now as I sent off the wheels last night and a heart med I'm on twice a day has to go with a full meal. We have cans of corn and green beans but are super sick of eating them all the time. I had no plan, other than hoping the man across the street whose mail I'm getting was back to pay me the $10 promised. Wasn't, so I kept walking. Boy is it unmercifully baking hot out there. I walked down the quiet side street to a gas station -food store and asked a brother getting air in his tires if he could spare a quarter. He gave me all his change. I walked past a funeral home to cross the street to an Amoco -with -snacks type store and asked a brother there getting gas if he could spare a quarter, which he did. Then I walked up the busy highway , stopping for a coughing fit right across from the car lot trying to get my house. I had to lean on a hot hot metal fence pole and choke , tears streaming from the coughing, and cough and cough--and the man trying to get my house drove by slowly, gaping at me. I almost but didn't wave.You know somebody but it's wrong to wave to them. This complicated world! Then I passed a white man at a bus stop with a lot of shopping bags and asked if he could spare a quarter. he said "no, I work for everything I get." The next place was a car repair place with 3 Asians sitting on the curb. I asked one if he could spare a quarter and he gave me a pocketful of change, then so did his companions each do so. I walked back to the first store and counted it--$6.08. I got milk, cereal, and 2 Dr peppers for the kids and I as I thirsted so badly. sweat dripping off me. The cash register wanted exactly $6.08. I'd only approached 6 people and gotten that much money. Other than the man who thought he gave me advice, everyone I asked helped me out. I had never figured for that to happen in all my years. I thought as I walked home how neat it would be to be a millionaire and do that walk and give each one who helped me an envelope with the Lord's prayer and 10 one-hundred dollar bills in it. I bet they'd help bums forever after that. Speaking of bums. They always stand in one place with a sign, maybe they should move around like I did. Which brought to mind how my ex always gives them all his change as we wait at the light they stand at. it would so make me mad if we'd just returned from pawning something like our only tv and see him give it away. I thought then how I'd have said ,sorry,brother, I just came from the pawn shop myself. But that's not what they are asking. If I just pawned something I have a little bit of cash and could too spare some. So see my ex is not this one-dimensional bad fellow. He has more intrinsic kindness than I do. Well, my first bumming experience and I feel good because I didn't just sit here wanting but used my two feet and GOT. We ate when I got back . We have air-conditioning. We are blessed. make no mistake about it. Did you notice how I say sometimes that God's generosity will not be outdone. I use it wrong but I mean if I get our needs unexpectedly I know the big bucks due that day were not to be in the first place. The people never returned for the stained glass today. I'm glad I sent Dan off or he'd have pulled it early today (they'd said, "have it out when we get here late morning as we'll be in a hurry") for no reason. He, by the way, went to his brother's to help him fix a boat engine in the heat to earn supper and was paid $5. I got more for doing nothing! I read the front page of the paper at the store (haven't been able to get one all month) and saw that --oh,it was USA Today, which had Linda Robak in it recently--there are 1.3 million more poor than a year ago.A million more uninsured medically making 1 of every 8 Americans . The federal poverty level for a family of 4 is twice what the three of us get. And I saw a cool obit for a man with my thing--CHF and pneumonia, which killed him in 2 months (the pneumonia): It was like, "Owen Kenneth died of CHF with hospice on watch. Under a bullheaded exterior lay an impatient but loving interior. He loved his family, food, t.v., food, the Bucs, food, the Gators, food, Tiger, food, his dog Buster, and food. He was born Jewish , and he liked to say Jesus was his cousin. He loved us all. His remote was cremated with him." I 'm going to compose me one. Christ the King Catholic Church said I could have my funeral there although I never went there. (That beautiful window I helped design and paint and install.) The pastor left so I don't know anymore , but they paid that water bill last December and when I opened the latest one recently expecting $78 due, it said I paid $70 and owed 0 and had a balance of a few hundred dollars. I think it means the church picked it up and paid extra on the account. Maybe they said if you are ever going to cut her off call us first? But my life is filled with such wonderment. I hope yours is too. I don't know why anyone helped a 50 year old bum soaked in sweat like they all did but I prayed for each of them . (I held an ice cold soda to my forehead all the way home.) {musical note, musical note} Jesus is just alright oh yeah{musical note} ( I know it's a song but on paper it looks a little --derisive but it's like praise when sung)I feel blessed! Well I pray you had the operation and that's why you don't call--I certainly hope so. Take careful-- Love Love is all Around |
I will trust my father in Heaven. He will take care of us . He must be saying, actually, that this is best, not to get caught in a home or dependancy with Dan or my sister . He must be delaying blessing our life until we get this picture. The scenes could mean that. Maybe that's all they mean. I can handle that. I will trust, since I obey His commandments, pray for those I should be sick and tired of the crap I get from, and believe steadfastly in His presence and guidance and plan for my life. Yes, it's alright, everything is alright. God who is love has sent many signs of love all my life. I'm fine. Don't worry about me. This must be my indicator to move on without incorporating Dan into the move. maybe God has a true love waiting for me. It's a great new day, I can tell. We can't get to Mass (It is now Sunday, August 29, 8 a.m.) but we'll shower ( in case they cut off water, electric, gas tomorrow) and we can't watch TV or get the Sunday paper or eat but we'll do homework and hand wash Monday's and Tuesday's school clothes and trust steadfastly in the good Lord our God.There is a miracle in my life. I believe. For every drop of rain that falls, a flower grows... |
