Page Poor Rag Mag |
{THe Skewered Take By America's Publishing Industry} {Or is it the only hope of the poor and disenfranchized on our soils?} |
He lives way out where Jesus lost his sandals. The guy that picked her up hitchhiking to work dumped her way out where Jesus lost his sandals. My foodstamp office is way out where jesus lost his sandals. Oh honey yes that house sounds affordable but we can't go there--it's where out where Jesus lost his sandals." |
Article on the Poor in Natural History, FEb 2004 And then I read an article in the February 2004 Natural History by Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and Special Advisor to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the Millenium Development Goals and I realized how excited I would be that our President seems to get it about world health, if he only got it about American health and I had an income of $30,000 a year to raise my two children on instead of $9,000. The article is called "Why Must the Poor be Sick?" It's a review of a book by Paul Farmer called Pathologies of Power:Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor. It says Farmer has saved countless destitute patients lives in Haiti, Peru, and Russia, and has shown that effective health services, even complex medical regimens, can be put in place in impoverished communiities."His accomplishments have forcefully undercut the flimsy excuses that the rich countries have routinely offered for their inaction, as millions of people die unnecessarily each year in poor countries...farmer has 3 themes..that the poor are not the victims of their sins but of their circumstances,; instead of sitting in judgement on the sick and dying, rich countries should be helping to save them. 2. The poor can be successfully treated and cured of disease, even in the most unlikely and impoverished circumstances. 3, the human rights community should be defending the rights of the poor to health, for without the right to health, all other human rights are likely to proove empty. Nothing, farmer argues, b except practical, physical resources--in ample supply throughout the rich world--is keeping the poor world from undergoing a revolution in health. "Farmer's moral stance is grounded in what the liberation theology movement calls a " preferential option for the poor", a principle of Roman catholic social teaching that enjoins the rich to offer dignity and material support to the poor... But he goes on to suggest..structural violence is the key barrier to escape from poverty. In essence, he occassionally comes close to espousing a neo-Marxist theory, according to which extremem poverty persists mainly because of exploitation by the rich and powerful. (That the rich become steadily richer and the poor steadily poorer) is not true--"Haiti aside--the Haitian experience does not shed much light on the massive reduction of poverty in Asia in the past quarter century, particularly in China and India. ..or even the Dominican Republic.... contrary to the steroetypes prevalent within the bureaucraceis of rich countries and international development agencies, the destitute and vulnerable patients that Farmer comes into contact with are smart, resourceful, and absolutely intent on staying alive. They adhere even to complicated drug regimens,...Farmer's genius was to treat his HIV/AIDS and MDR-TB patients without asking permission from the official aid agencies. They would surely have said no. (using donated drugs and pilfered supplies) Farmer and his colleague Jim Kim of the Harvard medical School demonstrated clinical efficacy in treating those 2 diseases and that drug prices could be sharply reduced through aggressive negotiations. As their successes have become apparant, Farmer, Kim, and their colleagues have increasingly focused on persuading policy makers to make a bold commitment to improved health among the world's poor. Hence, the third theme--that human rights are indivisible--that so-called social and economic rights must accompany civil and political rights. Making such a shift of emphasis would be a sea of change for a community that has traditionally been organized around the defense of civil and political rights alone. '''"Again and again he shows that when poor people are abandoned to their economic fate, merely defending their civil rights will not keep them alive--muc less give them a chance for a dignified and prosperous life....the rich have an obligation to the poor, to help the poor stay alive in the face of structural impediments of lethal dimensions..." End Those who want to be successful must help their neighbors, friends, relatives be successful. Those who choose to live well must help others live well, for the value of a life is measured by the lives it touches. And those who choose to be happy must help others find happiness, for the welfare of each is bound up with the welfare of all.Incidently, the only U.S. Presidential candidate I heard talking like this is Dennis Kucinich. |
"Contrary to the stereotypes," he says, "that are prevalant within the beauracracies, the destitute...are smart,...and absolutely intent on staying alive." What stereotypes? I know, I know, they were enculturated into me, too. |
INTERVIEW WITH A TEEN WHO'S FAMILY IS ON THE EDGE The poorest Americans , it is said, have televisions, VCRs, washing machines, and total nutrition from balanced meals. Or could, if they weren't rotting out their teeth with speed, trading their foodstamps for pot, hocking their tv for heroin. If a single mother can't get a job, there's something she can get: lifetime nursing home care for being too retarded to work, disability from being too pathologically something mental to work, a husband out of the date ads,sober in a facility. And of course any of these options suffices, that is to say, allows us the privilege of checking her off as covered and moving onto the next case. The important, good-will generating ones like the Lost Boys who were orphaned in Africa and walked for days on a march of death before being shipped here in a sort of ying to slavery's yang; or the well-publicized gift of billions of dollars to Africa to attack AIDS, with our leader's Christian right imprint on it:"America will not walk on byand leave her stricken brother lying in the road", an allusion to the parable of the Prodigal Son in the New Testament. An Interview with Mary, a high school freshman who lives in Tampa, Florida. Question: What has life been like for you the past year or two? Mary: I have been very lucky to get into a really good school for the arts with a Creative Writing major.I am starting my third year of Spanish and this summer on computer I am taking a P.E. class so that I can fit Spanish 3 into my schedule and get college credit for it.I am going to be writing my days away in college, with a guarenteed job when I graduate. I'm quite interested. Question: So you anticipate a bright future? Mary: Definitely.I was put in the gifted program in third grade and I see that I am a perfectionist with a zest for challange , and a dedicated individual. Gifted doesn't just mean A's, it takes into account how willing you are to tackle something most people can't . Question: And what will you tackle? The poverty issues? Economic injustice? Mary: I don't ever tell about my family's problems. I write and draw mangas. Question:Why? Mary: Poverty is the air around me.To use my imagination I have to believe it is all equal.In manga there's no poverty, just bad forces.Evil. And the chracters I invent find themselves fighting it although they aren't exactly emotionally equipped--they're usually japanese teenagers who hate homework. Question: So you don't feel that your abject poverty affects your enjoyment of life? Mary: Sure it does, but I go online and read fansubs to forget about it. Question: SO you have a computer and online sevice. Does this mean you aren't that poor? Mary: I think I'm rich. My days are rich.I spend every spare moment on the computer at home. During the 4 hours I ride the bus to school I draw my scenes in light pencil on lined paper. By the time I get home I'm ready to take out the lines in Paintshop Pro and upload the latest installment on my website.I couldn't be happier. Question: Isn't your birthday in 7 days? What are you looking forward to getting? Will you have a party? Mary: I want to ! If my mom's friend will let us have it at his house. We'd all have to meet at the bus stop because there's no way I'd let them see my house or my neighborhood. Question: Why is that? Mar: Are you kidding? You blind? Look at all the weeds, taller than me almost, in my yard. And how the doors and screen doors and ripped window screens are hanging off the buildings, including my front door. The spider webs all over my front porch . When you come in there's that first room so piled with junk no one fat could ever get through. Then you see the ceiling plaster hanging down, the holes in the ceiling--usually something's cut off, like the water or the electric-- Question: What's the problem here? Why are the weeds there and so high, why are the screens torn, spider webs there, junk, stains? Mary: my dad has emphysema and my mom needs a heart transplant. Question: You mean they are too physically frail to keep their home up? Mary: My dad doesn't live here. He and my mom had to get a divorce because she couldn't get Medicaid while they were married and without Medicaid she can never get a transplant.Or the medicines keeping her alive. When she was diagnosed they put her on Medicaid and gave her a pacemaker--defibrillator but then he applied for Social Security Disability and was approved. The day it started they cut us kids and our mother off. The head of the household had to be on SSI which pays $545 a month. My mom also gets $180 a month for each kid. My dad gets $650 a month. Total, they get less than $20,000 a year but it was twice as much as mom can get and still get Medicaid in Florida. In Minnesota you get Medicaid up to incomes of $36,000 a year for a family of 3. We'd be one of 4 making $19,000-we'd get full Medicaid. But we don't have any money to move..so they had to divorce. My dad got into an assisted living facility that's nice but he had to leave his 3 bi g dogs here--a collie, a chow, and a lab. He never has any money to buy flea killer so they have huge bald spots on them from the fleas. The collie has weepy eyes and my dad says he can't afford to take him to a vet. I'd die if anybody saw those dogs--they look disgusting, Question: He can't find them homes with people in a better cash-flow situation? It looks like few have one worse! Mary: He feels like they're his. He cares more about "his" than about loving something enough to give it a better life. Question: So are some of the other problems you mentioned more ones of attitude, then, too? The weeds/ Mary: No, there's no lawn mower, it got stolen. There's no weed-whacker--he pawned it and lost it, my bike too.Everything we owned, he pawned and lost. Question: Spider webs? Mary: I'd call that laziness. he doesn't even give his dogs water.Once a week he fills up a big bucket for them. Then he never refreshes or replenishes it and pretty soon it is only 4 inches deep and their mouths can't reach it from their chains. Question: These dogs are chained? Mmary: on choke chains, 24 /7. They keep digging out and he can't afford to pay anyomne to put chicken wire around the yard where the fence bottom is. So he keeps them chained, it's so sad.Can we talk about Tokyo instead? Question:What about the unpaid utility bills? Mary: There's no insulation so running the air-conditioning costs $400 a month. Question: What? That's impossible. Even a 3500 square foot house would never bring a bill that high..And your house is under 1000 square feet! Mary: It isn't insulated and has very old wiring and probably leaks electricity. Question: No money to fix it ? Mary: Not while 50% of our income goes to the electric bill alone! Imagine what we've got left--phone, $50 a month, internet, $20 a month, water, $75 a month, gas, $60 a month --that leaves $200 a month for food, cleaning supplies, repairs, clothes, gasoline, auto insurance, leisure time pursuits-- Question: You would never make it if you had to pay rent. Mary: We aren't making it without paying rent! I'm not even getting a 10 -dollar bill for my birthday! And 2 days later they're cutting off our electric.They do it every month 2 days before my mom's check comes, and all our mustard, butter, mayonnaise, what ever we have in the fridge goes bad. We can't afford a cooler, or even a flashlight . Question: Why won't the power companny give you 2 extra days , knowing her check comes on the first? Mary: They only extend such courtesies to good customers. because she's been cut off before, and paid late, they won't work with her. Question: So this must be very hard on you. Mary: I think the worst part is, my aunt lost her house and had to store all her stuff here and she left her drunk boyfriend here and he sneaks in our house in the middle of the night and goes in the room my 9 -year -old sister is sleeping in and my mom caught him-- Question: What was he doing/ Mary: Looking for my mom's pain medicine. Question: Can't she call police? Mary: he's like the only person we know who will give our dogs flea-baths, mop our floors, cut our weeds.. Question: Lots of other people would do that. Mary: Not for pills, and that's all my mom has for money. Question:Isn't that illegal? Mary: What choice does she have? This lady my dad owes money to keeps calling child welfare and city code enforcement and telling them my mom is doing illegal things and they come out and tell her to get the electric back on or they'll take us, they tell her to get the weeds cut or they'll take her house.. Question: She can't explain her situation and get some kind of help from some agency? Mary: No, there's no program that helps you if you have trash the garbage men won't take or high weeds or your oven needs repair or your roof leaks or a big dead branch is half fallen over your roof or your electric is cut off.. It's every man for himself. Question: So your life gets worse everytime something stops working--you loose it forever. Mary: yep. So I fantasize. Look, my mom's dying, that's about as bad as it gets, I can't handle more on top of that.They should let her go in peace. This has got to be the most selfish country of the rich ones.I don't want anything to do with such selfish pigs. I think the terrorists were right. These well-to-do Americans are going to go to hell. |
Catholic Social Teaching All I know is what catholic social teaching says to do: 1. resist "compassion fatgue " or living in a state of constant aggravation and select one current issue that speaks to your sense of justice. 2.Get informed.(Expect to swim in murky waters; there are compelling-and conflicting-arguements on all sides.) 3.Own any prejudice. That has the potential of interfering with a decision that seeks the well-being of all. Become even more familiar with your own biases. 34.Take the issue to your faith community. Dwell with it in prayer, scriptures. with friends, with people whose opinion differs from yours. 5.Make contact with groups whose works support your own informed conscience. Sign petitions-make phone calls-donate time and money 6.Make your opinion public. Letter to Editor, House and Congressional representatives.,etc or be a political person. |
Actually any family can be hit by catastropic illness, not covered by insurance,wiping out their savings, forcing someone onto Medicaid. My children's people gave to you , America, There are stickers in every rental canoe on Michigan's pristine Au Sable River offering advice on how to respect the fishermen, adding courtesy the Paul H. Young Chapter of Trout Unlimited. That's my grandpa. He was a very early proponant of catch-and-release. My other grandfather was a railroad union member, his railyard in Kansas City, Missouri so he certainly paid his dues, I would say! The children part of this family --2/3rds of it---have as their grandfather a man who designed and painted by hand and fabricaited and installed the stained glass at Hillsborough High School, The James A. Haley Veteran's Hospital in Tampa, Palma Ceia Baptist Church, the window in the loft and 12 or 16 around the sides of Christ the King Catholic Church, and windows in 100s of other Florida chapels, churches, and temples, including Miami Children's Hospital, the convent in Key West, Our Lady of th Rosary Catholic Church in Perrine Fla, St. Hugo in Miami, Holy Mother of God Greek Orthodox Church in Tallahassee, St. Michael's Greek Orthodox Shrine,Tarpon Springs, Florida, the mural in the post office in downtown Lake Worth, Florida of an alligator hunt by rowboat, and many many other works of public art. The children in this family of three living , subsisting and asking for help and being treated I think inappropriately unkindly for daring to need help, have a father who is alive, disabled, forced to live elsewhere anyway so Mom can get Medicaid .Their combined incomes on Disability--$16,000 a year--is too much for Mom to get Medicaid. He'd be able to help Mom care for the kids, but, not in this looney society, no way. He has contributed one heck of a lot to his own community - he is the designer and artist of beautiful stained glass windows in the area he lived in his whole life--The H. Lee Moffatt Cancer Center at theUniversity of South Florida; St. Luke A.M.E. Chuch in Tampa , St. Andrew's United Methodist Church in Brandon, Florida; St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Plant City, Florida;Hyde Park Presbyterian Church in Tampa (and his dad did Hyde Park United Methodist with artist Joe Escudar ) , 4 windows for the Greek Orthodox pilgrimage destination and tourist attraction St. Michael's Shrine in Tarpon Springs; all the windows at Episcopal Church of the Annunciation near the Anna Maria Island beach in Holmes Beach, Florida , and, with his ex-wife Deanne . and artist Walt McNutt, the altar window at Christ the King Catholic Church in Tampa. No church can pay enough for the work that goes into hand-painted realistic art on glass, Renassaince style stained glass, the Munich style of painting on glass. (Joe Myers also dug painting in Medieval style and the orthodox Byzantine style.) The Myerses were underpaid .They were like monks of lore--they worked everyday, never went far from their "monastary", lived off garbanzo bean soup and Cuban bread and paella when lucky,never got air-conditioning in their humble Florida digs or cars ). To earn more money would mean to give up this, and as Joe said on a news show, "you feel sometimes like you walk with God." Sacred music and classical streamed out of his studio and house beside it on his little residential corner canopied by grandfather oaks near the lazy polluted unswimmable Hillsborough River in Tampa, Florida. Now his only grandchildren live there, and the current sound is coming from Scooby Doo, the movie,-- a fake Great Dane burping. And a little girl on the couch laughing with the same wild laugh her late grandfather had, although she never knew him. A little girl who gets As in art. The mother was perhaps inclined to be a perceptive writer but suffered from infirmities , diease, a heart pumping 1/5 as well as yours does. A poem she wrote at age 17 can be accessed by clicking her photo . The teenage girl in this household also writes well, well enough to achieve a spot, through audition, in the only high school for the arts in the nation's 8th largest school district, in the nation's 4th most populous state , as a creative writing major. Her college tuition is all paid up in the Pre-Paid Tuition program, paid before her mom got sick and couldn't work, the only thing they were allowed to keep and get Medicaid after told she needed a heart transplant to survive more than one to two years and that she didn't qualify for Medicare but could get Medicaid, and medications to better her quality of life, and a heart transplant and anti-organ-rejection drugs the rest of her life, if she divorced her husband and owned nothing worth more than $2000 including cash in the bank and a car and excluding only her home, and, she assumed, her washer, dryer, oven.But she didn't push it by claiming to own those. Her only income could be $548 a month from SSI. You can live, perhaps, but you can't repair anything, and by and by, one day, you can't replace the burned light bulb on the porch for 6 months,and hookers are always standing in the shade that affords away from the street lamps and get your dogs barking and the kids go to school still sleepy from being unable to sleep all night because of the hooker stirring up the dogs. And then, that's when someone the mom has confided in , who the desperate mom hoped was a friend, calls the child welfare folks anonymously and suggests they remove the children from this home because they are always going without electric or water and the children go hungry,--- as if she noticed it, as if she doesn't only know this because the mother has told her this in a plea for a little kindness, a loaf of bread and some milk----. And all the people who would have helped in a heartbeat but cannot because they are deceased , if they can see, see they left something vital undone, and cannot change that, and scream , and shout to us as one, "No! You cannot turn away! You don't have seperate ways! We are all family!Where you leave one suffering, you are Christ- crushing. You won't fit through the eye! You'll blow off of the vine, all dry! " if only, they think, mouths agape like they're the Screamer, we'd each brought more attention to the "dream" of Our Reedemer, had shook the people up , said, look, here's what he means, here, you can't just move up a notch and claim exemptions for your things here. Because you struggle for respect and retirement and your own dreams , it seems there isn't extra money to help your suffering neighbor, brother, your worldwide kin, and still live like your fellow men and hold those dinners you need to do to get that commission, promotion or two and not end up as penniless too. You can't say this , stop it now, you make 8 times these three, somehow; your self-love will not bail you out, it won't soothe His bloodied brow Hurry hurry-love that is radical has to become natural .We are the instrument of the magical. Given free will, we can leave folks to vultures saying they never did much for this culture that if they weren't losers, God would bless them like us giving them nepotist educations and jobs but we rattling bones tell you, God leaves them to your love and if you don't have much of it, you're turning from the One , the God. And all that He has promised you, you're here now giving up while you tell yourself the bit you give is certainly enough being radical means finding new ways to get these needy loved! Now, today, they need you, why do you put them off?" Frantically yell our dear departed,the ones we think are "better off".Give a lot more time and thought, they want to say, to God. And senators voting themselves pay raises equaling 18 grand in only 4 years, for each family that destructs from living on 9 grand will pay the piper very dear no one's a lifer not down here But God's not folklore, His Son's not mythic, or there's too much that's synchronistic. And that's no way! |
For Every Man and Woman and Child that Just keeps On Keeping oN How Often the Poor Lose Their Most Prescious Things Droughts topple once oft-admired thick-girtherd grandfather oaks which tear through the roof ruining sketch and note books with the rain coming in.They used to hang our clothesline and be our shade and friend their canopy of yard-sized shade a bobbin in the wind like glass not really solid but a thing unto it's own a slowly changing living thing and the fat old branches lost their crown of bright new leaves and these fall through the roof and leave nothing , not tv or home movies or diaries or photos one way they lose precious things they just can't seem to hold on to you see it in their things so few. TWO Children are sent to foster families and most of their things replaced with new ones. That they have dozens of heavy notebooks filled with thier own stories and art is of inconsequence; these are thrown away. The family ends up living in a car, most things lost when they missed a storage unit payment, used a candle when the electric was cut off that burned down the whole house, had no air-conditioning so all their family photos stuck together face-to-face and peeled away the pictures on them.... There are uncountable missed photo opportunities, and the kids grow up without photos of 99% of the people they loved. There are no yearbooks, school photos, pictures with Santa. Pets die from lack of inexpensive veterinarian care.Everything that can help pay a turned-off utility is sold cheap, or pawned and lost, including the videos the kids amassed and loved so---childrens' books bring a fair price at used book stores, too... A parent dies sooner for alack of good diet and medical care. The children are removed from the poor home for neglect.Everything that mattered is gone and they must go on, untethered, untied. Nothing broke can be repaired. The industrious people work around bad electrical wiring, broken freezer- door ice makers with rigs that may be poisoning them all, with fungus or a fire in the walls--- There is either toilet paper or paper towels, milk or cereal. bread or something that goes on bread. With no car, the library books go back late and the huge fine keeps the family from checking out books the next 4 years until they can pay the whole thing. They have never had a credit card to rent a video with. They 've never tried 99.9% of the products in the stores that sit block after block , stain removers, cell phones, the latest in tinfoil and snacks and all those ice cream flavors. They've never gone shopping in a store for furniture--it always comes from someone throwing it out. Their bed sheets are so old the corners don't stick, the elastic worn, and come undone nightly as they sleep, revealing the dirty old bare mattress. They can't afford mattress pads. Or socks for rapidly growing feet for kids who keep losing them. Or shoes that fit.. They keep their toothbrushes 2 to 5 years. All the plastic tips have broken off their styling hairbrushes, making brushing hair a very painful experience. .They have 3 empty sockets for every working lightbulb. .They feed their dogs, sometimes, old cereal, a can of peas, white rice and powdered milk and whatever outdated peanut butter that's separated that somebody donated along with a box of Vanilla Wafers with the bottom chewed through and the wax bag too and rodent droppings all through it and the cookies all in crumbles; or macaroni which when you take the packets out if the box you find 3 dead cockroaches between the wax bag and the cardboard. They have to wait for teeth to abscess to get treatment for them and then they can only be pulled..Their indoor trash can is always smelly because they have to throw foodstuffs in there even when they can't afford the drawstring plastic bags. If someone well-meaning shells out $185 for them to get into the Museum of Science and Industry free for a year, they never make it because they never have gas in the car. They don't make it to church although they yearn to. They don't make it to support groups or go to doctors for things they think are minor, like stapling two fingers together with a nail gun. They can't bring friends over because they can't offer cokes and pretzels, can't admit they are so needy. They'd have to befriend their own kind, who understands them and how to restore cutoff electric, gas, and water. In upper class neighborhoods if they pounded the streets begging for help people would lock the doors right in front of them. Street people, however, willingly peel off a dollar for them. The other people think there will come a dollar, if the poor just get to the right places. They blow then off, figuring this is a resourceful if not crooked lot who can come up with a dollar whether they help or not. They have a pet phrase:"Pretend I don't exist and do what you'd have done if that were true." They don't get the dollar that night, or the next day, and if the kids wake late for school, they have to miss the whole day--they have no gas to drive them. FAQ Q. Why is a woman dramatically proving she's a valid member of her society with a web page showing how white n gentile her roots are? Isn't that about as opposite as you can go from what America meant? A. The woman sees daily evidence that her society thinks the citizens in her condition are irresponsible deadbeat losers they wouldn't care to help, given a choice. This is hard for her to understand. She wants to put up a web site for each and every severely economically disadvantaged resident of the planet Earth. Like the collages of faces lost in the Holocaust and memorialized at the national and state Holocaust Museums, the sheer volume of innocent, young, beautiful, humans betrayed by their brethren, brutalized in the enlightened era, would roll behind shuttered eyes at night; the proper horror at the atrocities would load correctly finally into the national collective conscience, as it did for the Nazi crimes. -What happened to America in the 1940's that she was not aware of something so awful going on alongside her ? Was a spell cast upon the people, I mean how were they so dumb, so unconcerned and uninterested in investigating?--Prejudice? Maybe not theirs but someone else's that they feared to contradict? I don't know it's this, but if so we've come a long way quickly, for the agency the government in part funds to give me a housekeeper, shopper, cook, and hot meals daily is called Gulf Coast Jewish Community Services, and is otherwise funded also by the local Jewish community, for all needy people . Meanwhile except for those people touching the raw sore lives of the poor through their jobs and avocations, physical or familial proximity, or because they are them, Americans get angry and defensive when faced with a poor person pointing out the urgent need for improvements ;i.e., the president reportedly counts on churches and charities to pick up all the slack when all these budget cutbacks leave the poor on the table unable to stop the bleeding. He earnestly asks them. "I am asking our churches..". I'm scared he's a megalomaniac and unaware that the houses he's building are card. I'm afraid he is filled with unwarranted, non-substantiated delusions de grandeur. that holds forth that churches are the tarot equivalents of fat chests of gold and precious jewels, that he merely has to ask sincerely , there's enough there. I don't know what they were doing with it before but now these churches have to spend it on the poor, who each need a million dollars for their medical bills and prescriptions, $500 a year for transpo or auto insurance and repairs and gas, $500 a year for property taxes if lucky enough to own a house , a month, for rent, if not; $300 plus a month for utilities, $300 a month for food and supplies like laundry soap and toothbrushes; burial or cremation. We have to decide if we want to take their minor kids away from them or not during what is supposed to be their last winter, spring, etc alive because they can't keep up , or support keeping such families intact with more than ideals. Church at this point has become a 24/7 thing as congregations cope with tedious beaucratic red tape about as well as Lucy managed the donut factory; i.e., whenever they slow down to look at it all, crowds of poor people keel over dead all over their grounds. Anyway, the president mentally shipped all the nation's poverty problems to the (mental folder in his mind) Department of Not Ours. (The Government would think of as theirs ,departments like pharmacy, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfield having chaired and presided over the pharmaceutical firm that manufactures the brand drug Xanax , which a lot of people are on, it may be even in the top ten most prescribed drugs, and many more went on right after the World Trade towers tragedy, that lived in New York, Jersey, etc. (Magazine ads for anti-depressant name-brands in America that feature young women saying "I got myself back" are reportedly sort of "hits"on Xanax, which causes slowed-down, foggy loved ones (employees, taxi- drivers, chauffeurs driving princesses through tunnels)). Back to the quetsion or whatever you call it, yesterday the dirt-poor mom in America saw an interview with Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. in a current magazine at the newsstand, a booklover's mag, in which Vonnegut said that America (everyone liking that word) had gone totally opposite of what it had begun as, to the point where someone he admired came up with some ethical guidelines, and was razzed about it being totally impossible and politically dangerous and where did he come up with it? And Vonnegut said it was word for word the sermon on the Mount. And he wished the guy had simply and beautifully replied, "the Sermon on the Mount."We were not supposed to be afraid to say that, there was supposed to be religious freedom. But right now the trend is NOT to forgive. Our President kept telling us we were going to get Saddam and all terrorists, that we'd settle for nothing less...we're all suing each other so much doctors are walking off jobs until medical insurance premiums are lowered or malpractice lawsuits capped. As Vonnegut contemplated how much more radical than ever before Jesus' teachings are, he noted a good degree of ill-will towards the poor, who were universally considered to blame for their poverty. In 5/5/03 Tampa Tribune, columnist Daniel Ruth is taunted by a reader as a liberal who wants a leveling of the wealth, because Ruth wondered recently if the Governor of Florida could live on $450 a month as he was asking the Medically Needy Medicaid recipients to do. The reader, James Halsey, says,"Your answer to these people who do not desire to better themselves is to tax the doers to death to support these, in general, deadbeats." Ruth says"And try as I might to convince him that folks on Medically Needy are hardly ne'er-do- wells feeding at the public trough, he would have none of it. 'They've wasted their lives,' he huffed. Good grief Giving sick people medicine so they don't die has become, in the minds of some, another liberal welfare giveaway program?" --And so it goes. And so the mom stands up and says we dying people on Medicaid are doers who did, who do, who didn't waste their lives , who desire to do better (you're kidding us about the last one, aren't you? You think we want bloated, embalmed-looking feet and no money chronically for shoes that will fit this increase in size?) We are being mothers, care taking minor children otherwise costing for foster homes, day care, etc. We are raising them as long as we can so that they grow up as well-adjusted , as confident as the security of a good mother's love can offer. Wasting our lives dying? How do you waste your life dying if in your last year(s) you are stone broke and can't do anything monumental , along with physically dying. We can't help sit on the porch or wherever you drop us and do nothing til the "welfare" check comes. It's not like you allow us a car --we may come into the Medicaid program with one but we aren't allowed to earn enough to maintain it and after a few years we haven't one, or the means to begin to save for one (let's see--$4 a month towards that $200 car or- -move back with mom and dad--and use two months' pay to get a car, if only they were alive/weren't on Meals On Wheels themselves/recognized me once in awhile anymore ...) The deadbeats who don't desire to better themselves and wasted their lives are 9 years old, they are 14 with dreams. It's scarey, that people think they know what they are talking about, and don't at all. This guy talking to Ruth has strong negative feelings towards the people on Medicaid , especially, precisely, Medically Needy Medicaid, a program for people making or owning a little too much to get Medicaid under Florida's guidelines but crushed by astronomical health costs. of all the people on Medicaid in Florida, this is the group most likely to have worked all their lives for a living before catastrophic illness struck. That is because to get Medicaid for a catastrophic illness that leaves you terminal or disabled for life in Florida, you can't qualify for Medicare, or you have to take that. To qualify for Medicare, you must have worked at least ten quarters in the last ten years before you applied. Only those who didn't, or who did but didn't pay into our Social Security system, can get Social Security's SSI which is the only "system " "bundled" with Medicaid. Thus, the Medically Needy Medicaid recipients were those drawing regular Social Security disability checks, which income put them over the cut-off point for Medicaid (by $24 to $500 a month ), people with small but real, life- long pensions like of $100 a month augmenting their SSI, unfortunately, etc. The manipulative, immature, rude, obnoxious, thieving, leering carnival workers with missing teeth leering at you , skeletoned by crack or speed, throwing-up-drunk on your new boat seat as they wobble past on their way to pee quite publicly and drive the wrong way down some road and take your sweet sixteener out, the toads , they'll even steal your garden hose if you let them earn money when they beg from the road--- illicit -pleasure-seeking bums he thinks "Medicaid" is a shorthand for "drinks". And it's not. At all. And his kind of thinking is dangerous. It means he is voting half-informed, expressing his opinions while semi-aware of what he's talking about. The local newspapers have both made it very clear , by starting 80% of their 30 columns and articles on it with a (first sentences!) local sob story...H.R. had 3 kidney transplants and is being cut off of her anti- rejection meds next week and says she'll die within a week...P.M. is on her seventh week of chemo and will be cut off and lose the rest of the weeks she was to be treated for optimum success, a total waste of all the expensive chemo and radiation she's had so far. The press hasn't even really showcased any men on the program , so basically all Halsey knew about it was that it provided insulin, anti-organ transplant-rejection meds, kidney transplants and dialysis ( which was what the majority of the men on the program who talked to the press were suffering from), and then, unfortunately, another kind of sufferer got in on the attention and called a columnist and ended up with her story in the news all about her fibromyalgia, her cocktail of 16 drugs it took 4 years to hit on and finesse and now they were telling her to write the pharmaceutical companies who made her drugs and ask for free ones. Sixteen companies, she snorted, although as little as I know from reading local news, magazines, and WSJ at dentist's offices, I am sure all 16 of her drugs were probably manufactured amongst 3 firms which had been 6 firms 3 months ago but some bought up others in an effort to compete in the big 5 ..maybe Halsey read only her tale. how could he read of the transplant recipients left hanging (" something they swore would never happen," a transplant recipient told the paper heavily...) With 2 little kids? Or is he like my father, disease unknown who'd snort,"What difference does it make if it's a transplant or a bull et hole through the brain it's all the same the guy , a drain on those who bear the weight. I 'm not putting grapes and steak on that cheat's plate. Their illnesses are fake you'll get it when one take shoe for a ride." he said , or something like, poor sound pursed through tight lips of hatred white. "How they get away with it is certainly past me. They should be sterilized as soon as they have three." One brazen day I told him I'd had but two but still couldn't afford to keep them in shoes. "What makes you think I was talking about you?" he fumed. "I mean the colored, the wetbacks. .The ones sitting back waiting for the welfare check all month.""Me," I admitted, raising a hand. "You're disabled! You're waiting for a heart transplant! You can't work!" Said Daddy. "But that's who you're talking about--us despicably poor non-consumerists on Medicaid. I'm one. So are all your grandchildren." America stands for don't forgive--get even. Every Sunday paper is thrice the size of the others due to many colorful ads for clothes, furniture, camping gear, patio furniture, DVD players, appliances, tools, plants, gifts for the nearest holiday. America has a store on every inch of every road in Los Angeles County, block after block of stores, all dependent on locals and visi tors having armfuls of money to spend. None of this would fly , M McDonalds across from Burger King, Walmart across from Target, multiple times across town, in Rwanda or Bangladesh. Obviously we have the money here, and do the spending, and need the consumer, and don't need the non-consumer unless there's another way we can make money off him. Those of us who can't, want him to wrap it up, get off our planet. He aint about nothin. In his 30's Jesus lived off others so he could preach .People were more open to his ideas because the Jews of his day were very religious, diverting off into sects of even more religious , patiently waiting, sacrificing religious who were into common ownership and taking care of the poor, orphan, and widow.They actually took them into their communities and cared for them , all their needs. Here and now "they" don't know you exist even if you call on them . It Becomes Harder Not To Become Criminal You need a dollar, 5 dollars, anything bad. You have a lot of prescription meds you have'nt used. The methadone clinic is right across the street. people are bugging you for pills, offering $4 each.You won't consider it the first 50 times, but one day you are so desperate---and you do something you'd never have considered if you made a living wage. You take in work under the table--babysitting, housekeeping, ironing. You let someone turn your water back on illegally after going 34 days without and someone calling child welfare on it. You smoke more cigarettes, a nervous wreck. You don't sell your meds (although it is very hard for some elderly not to fall for it ), no one has under the table work for you, you have no cigarettes--what do you do? Email a letter to the editor. Miss your daughter's poetry reading because you don't have auto insurance and can't afford it or the new tag due this birthday month and don't want to go to jail.Or you drive w/o insurance (illegal). Your phone goes off and you need it --your auto insurance quotes are about to come in as call-backs and to call them again necessitates a mile walk to a payphone and you can't walk a block; and 50 cents for each call to the insurance agencies in the Yellow pages and you have no money-- so you write the phone company a rubber check, hoping you can make it good somehow when it gets to that. Another illegal act you'd never do if not desperately broke. My grocery store was next to the north Tampa public housing project until they raised the projects last month, and when I was buying diapers, I'd find a bag of diapers open and one missing when I'd got it to the checkout counter. You'd find an orange juice carton open and the top fifth missing. Cookies open and 4 gone. But mostly it was the necessities they stold--diapers and tampons , drinks of milk from a carton for sale, carefully leaving the rest there so they could not be busted. It made you think, bless her poor heart, and say a prayer for this lady. Or child--I have seen them send in the children. I could tell so much, but with no credentials or degrees, it would only be read if it were in fiction form,( and good reading). The Other America thinks the poor all hang together, since we (they) (it) lumps the poor together themselves and send them all to the same clinics and hospitals; we end up meeting there. On May 1 at the closest oral surgeon taking Medicaid , in St. Petersburg, Florida, $10 worth of gas round trip from Tampa where I live, I met a family from Ft. Myers, Florida. This was the closest Medicaid oral surgeon to them, too. It had two dentists but one of them stopped taking Medicaid 2 weeks before.Does this make any sense? Those least able to afford it have to make a round-trip 6 hour drive to get an aching tooth pulled, while those on the highest economic level can pick a dentist a 10-minute drive from home ..At my pain doctor's the next day, there were 2 sets of folks from Bradenton Florida and a man from Lakeland. The Bradenton people didn't know each other but soon did, as one unfortunate, very nice, proper, lady had taken a bus to Tampa and was missing the bus home waiting so long to be seen, and there was not another bus til 6 p.m. and then her pharmacy in Bradenton would be closed when she got home.zher appointment was at 10:30 a.m. and she'd rode the Greyhound all day to get there and then sat there past noon so far and going to miss the 1 p.m. bus because the Tampa buses to get her to the Greyhound station only run every hour themselves and she had to transfer once and hadn't even been seen yet . So she struck up a friendship with the couple from her city too, a blond man with a heavy tan and wizened with wrinkles and perhaps too frank, and a pretty white-blonde, his wife, with casual clothes (khaki capris, small blue and white knit top, lightweight light blue cotton jacket ) was stunning, the kind that isn't too made up although they have a bright red lipstick on and lots of makeup, because they do it well and look good with it, a tiny mouth with classic Betty Boop lips , always smiling with sparkles in her eyes. They agreed to take the other one home. So the poor meet. But there are some of us isolated who grew up upper middle class and don't know you're suposed to soak beans 24 hours before cooking them the first time a charity gives us that for our hunger. It is probably assumed we meet in our downtrodden shared neighborhoods but the infirm and elderly don't get outside and the neighbors may not be poor just us or they may be the rotten-egg poor you don't say hi to on the street like my neighbor Hank Carr who kept aiming an AK-47 at his girlfriend's son threatening him until one day he blew the 4-year-old's head off in the house behind the one across the street from us. Then killed 3 cops. Perhaps we meet in line to turn our electric back on or to appply for help with bills, but we don't talk to each other, we have pride, we don't pry. Mostly we hear that the other guy's bleeding while we are getting medical care. He's yelling or upset at the long wait or quality of service he gets and says he is just going to go to his old doctor and write a rubber check--at least he'll be treated with respect. As soon as the methadone clinic quietly opened up near me where I get day old bread--the closest store by me--big signs began filling the Hostess shop's window saying we don't have a public phone, rest room, don't take atm and credit cards, require shirts and shoes, have no money on the premises, cannot change a large bill....having once run a busines just across the street past one small cheesy motel and one house, I empathized with the lady, the only African-American store-owner surrounded by Middle Asian , Turkish, Iranian store owners and doctors. They wanted to use our bathroom all the time too, I told her, and she said ""it's bad, it's bad...the Bible says to treat your brothers like you want them to treat you but . They want too much. They just want too much." We close up against the poor in our minds becasue they want too much, are rude, have mental problems, anger management problems,won't quit unfruitful lifestyles, take their anti-pyschotic meds.We think of them all as a batch. Most of the poor in America are under 16. They are our schoolchildren, not the junkie you lost your car stereo to. I don't know any solutions.Here my daughter is getting lauded by the English department of the 7th largest school district in the U.S. as the second best poet in the ninth grade, and she can't afford to get her school yearbook, with 20 days of school left. |
How Often the Poor Lose Their Most Prescious Things--essay |
More Diatribes Medicaid bums who want to tax worthy people more for more bennies they don't deserve such as stability of electricity and running water to their guess what American house.And fresh fruit and veggies more than one week a month (with rice and cereal for meals 3 weeks a month). They just want too much, too much...for nothing. When Florida Governor Jeb Bush thought he was off-mike with his comments about Florida voters asking for smaller class sizes, and said,"I've got some really good tricks up my sleeve to make them rue the day they asked for that!" No doubt he must have said the same thing, him and his greasy Republican administration, to whatever compassionate Floridians tried to keep floating in the Republicans' sweeping cuts to the longevity, comfort, well-being and dignity of the poor that went down last year to offset revenue loss with the (upper-crust friendly) abolition of state estate tax. Briefly, whereas Medicaid had paid for adults over 21 to get all their teeth pulled and dentures for years, they stopped in 2002. Currently, adults in Florida can only have active (infected, injured, in danger) teeth pulled (no root canals, crowns, fillins, etc), they cannot get replacemets. Deanne was signing papers last week attesting that she understood (as she was finding out) that the extraction of the tooth could cause sharp bony plates to appear through her gums and Medicaid would not cover treatment of them such as filing them if they were cutting the inside lip open; that the extraction could cause permanent or long-term paralyisis of her mouth or tongue or the extreme opposite, unbearable pain because of damage to a sensitive nerve peculiar to the area, and that if this was construed the case, Deanne "understood" that the only micro-neuro-surgeon whatever the specialty is caled in Florida they would pay was at Shands in Gainesville , a 4 hour drive; that the extraction could cause the crown of the tooth next to it to break or come off and Microsoft--duh Medicaid,we're tired and thinking "capital M and ubiquitous"--Medicaid would not pay for the re-cementing or re-sealing , or put that crown back on period; that they would not provide upper or lower dentures or full sets or in any other combo any teeth to anybody. Deanne needed a heart transplant at any time* but first needed to clear her body of a virus only 50% of people can clear, with a drug that would definitely put her into heart failure, perhaps too far to remain on it, hopefully though to a tolerable point, and would not let her blood clot very expediently at all, so being for her a bad time to have surgury or even pick up a kitten;and this condition, with attendant flu, fatigue, and mental symptoms(depression-55% of users), was to last 12 months.To begin it she had to get (and this is taxpayer dollars here--this is how useless taxpayers are )a liver biopsy (let's say $800 or more), tons of labwork,a body catscan (people with defibrillators can't have an MRI, which is gettin state of the art deferrant to claustrophobics like Deanne, but she had to have a catscan, and panicked in the Mars-bound or 25th-century-headed trip strapped into a metal cylinder she seemed to be on with no way to get loose enough or turn around in that body-sized--COFFIN-SIZED-- scale-Challenger shuttle-looking thing ! And they had to start over, lots more torture for her, lotssa money from taxpayers.The interferon cost $1600-2000 a week including 90 tablets a month of Rebetrol and 4 shots a month of Peg-intron-B (or whichever). Deanne was to taake it for 8 weeks without interruption, then get a reading on her virus levels. if she had any virus at all, therapy was considered failed; if she was clear of the Hepatitis C (which she got at Tampa General when she received a blood transfusion after losing too much during surgery for endometriosis in 1985, experience had shown the medical profession that she needed to remain on the interferon 10 more months to effectively lose the virus forever. If her teeth were ok, and she hadn't gone and gone into breast cancer et all by then, she was a heart transplant candidate. Before her 6 weeks were up, so that nothing of the efficacy of the therapy on her could be determined for the sake of intentions to continue being clear or anything, Deanne lost a crown on a back bottom molar, and went to the only dentist that took Medicaid for adults in Tampa,and explained to him that she had just been on interferon but would have to stop to get her tooth pulled or she might have uncontrolled bleeding. The dentist gave her antibiotics and told her she should get all her teeth pulled so she would not have to stop interferon over and over , to have other teeth pulled as they went off because she had more bad ones and Medicaid did not give fillings or root canals.I.e., a tooth needing a cavity drilled and filled would instead have to rot to extraction point but knowing as all did that Deanne would never get a filling, they should just go ahead and pull the teeth with cavities instead of waiting for the inevitable; now Deanne was temporarily off the interferon,and if they pulled all teeth now she didn't have to go off it again. She wondered how much he knew about interferon. He talked as though it was a given that she was to be on it for months; he even puzzled her by seeming to be coming from a place which had her on it for years She could be off of it in 6 weeks, a non-responder, incurable: they knew that fast.Then she didn't have to quit it over and over to get teeth pulled and be better off having her 18 ok teeth pulled than not. He said he was thinking of her,her systemic issues taking precedence over teeth, get all chance of future infection out of the way so she could go full speed with the heart stuff ; she could be back in his office in 3 weeks getting her dentures on, he said. Although the idea of having all her teeth pulled was frightening and she apprehensive ,the appeal of a full, pretty smile in a month and then the interferon and heart transplant all done while she had teeth, was too much to resist.A 4-tooth bridge had fallen out 6 months before and that absence of facial structure for so long had weakened and recede her jawline. once strong and defiant. Now, photos others took of her and sent her were alarming her--Deanne looking like she got in a street fight and the street won. Weak chin,puffy, red sacs under her eyes from God knows what, deflated just enough to look really ugly . Like bruises in the harsh daylight. But vanity wan't her sole motivator; she had teeth on the bottom right and top left sides of her mouth, and the 4 top front teeth and eye teeth,and 9 teeth in a row running across the right and middle of her lower jaw, allowing for chewing ,but only because she had a place in the middle where teeth met, still. Seven days after starting the antibiotic the dentist gave her for the decayed crown the eyetooth on the other side of the mouth went off like a firecracker that wouldn't quit.zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzthe pain was ttoally too much The dentist chewed her out for not getting all the teeth pulled by then. brightly she pointed out that since she was on the wrong antibiotic she could have died after the extraction so it was a good thing she hadn't had the $10 for gas to get across the bay to St. Pete yet. The Medicaid oral surgeon she was sent to was in the next town over, St. Petersburg, an hour's drive from Tampa, the only one in Florida, said a family from Ft. Myers, a 3-hour drive, who'd brought out a teen with an abcess whho was crying in pain.The clinic was without mercy; said they never work on any mouth the first visit, just look , take pictures, plan, and schedule the first appointment of the plan. When she finally did, they wouldn't pull it because it hurt so bad each time the little Haitian dentist tried.She began to insist that the only time Novacaine didn't work (which they were shooting into her liberally) was when the infection was so far gone it was immune to all antibiotics and so couldn't be cleared. They did not pull teeth that were infected,Deanne would have to try one of the few antibiotics she hadn't taken yet and come back, or save or borrow for a root canal/crown ($600-800). The latter a great choice as saving the eyetooth would give dentists a place to anchor a partial someday if Deanne did not desire to get her perfect two front teeth pulled for a full upper plate , which cost $800 anyway which Deanne would never get her mitts on anything like. Back home, having spent $10 for gas for nothing and having no money to feed the kids now,Deanne couldn't tell what to do other than the antibiotic, which she did right until the electric company cut off her power about 3 days later 30 days after cutting off her power for $176 their cardboard courtesy tag (bright yellow for all the neighbors and passerbys to see) said but when she got a ride there, said she needed $366, the next month's bill had become due, so she pissed off the ride, who took her there for "nothing" and was incredulous that the electric company would give a false due amount and then refuse it on arrival . Two days later she'd gotten it, and someone had taken their sweet time driving out to turn it back on, and the seige was over, the air-conditioning back, no more constant miserable soaking wet Deanne too hot to move; just a refrigerator and freezer full of bad food and wormy things already. The second time the electric company said when she called and inquired what she needed to pay to restore service, $315.50.They said it was so much because it was two bills.Deanne sought help from the Salvation Army, still in a daze about her tooth going to ruin her interferon therapy and heart transplant plus kill her sooner; that's how it seemed to be shaping up... The electric company told the S.A. that they needed $ 356.90. No less accepted. Deanne asked the S.A. Family Services department worker why that was, The lady ignored that. The lady asked the power company when Deanne's next bill was due and they said the 29th. "She gets her Social Security check on the first, Can't you wait until then?...Why?" After she hung up, she explained."They're going to cut your power off for 2 days and then you owe them another $35 turn-on fee on top of the bill. That's how they make their money." In paying that bill, The S.A. could only pay $300. Deanne had to pay $56.90 before they'd pay the rest. A she unwrapped the Our Lady of Guadalupe scarf folded carefully in her purse, Deanne was giving up Mary's freshman year yearbook , which she'd promised her all year. She couldn't buy it when it was $55, and now especially since it was $75. There are only penalties for the poor, you know? In every aspect of life we deal with. Late electric payments, late yearbook purchases...dentists costing megabucks in gas to reach while the rich and normal ($20,000 a year up) could see a dentist in town on a dollar's gas... Mama had promised her helpful, sweet, no-allowance money but no grumbling daughter Mary--who helped so much-- the yearbook and then it was clear Mary would not get a single birthday present or a cake ( Rich fare better here again rule-- those making $20,000 up a year for a family of 4 could have a birthday party and their kid would get 15 gifts .The truly poor can't have nothin--they haven't even food for themselves--and of course they're the ones that could use those 15 presents most.) Mary was sad but diverted from 'no birthday" by "yes yarbook" ( which has the only picture of what girls call their "crush" these days she'll get hold of, being shy and not going to like try to snap his mug ). There are ten school days left. Everything is merging to D-Day. Theres'no chance they'll get $75 for a yearbook. On May 10, 2003, Mary wakes at 4 a.m, (her bus leaves at 6:30 a.m. but this is a Saturday) having slept since she got home drom school. "Someone has to give me a ride," she says sleepily in what turns out to be an understatement.She has won 2nd place for best poet in the ninth grade in the school district, the 7th largest school district in the nation.The Hillsborough Council of Teachers of English are honoring her as an outstanding student writer and her writing teacher as an outstanding teacher writer at a spring brunch at 10 a.m. Six hours. Deanne hasn't even gone to bed yet. "No one's going to be awake between now and ten to ask!" Deanne says, horrified. "Mary!" "What," the other side of her frizzing long braid mumbles into the couch. "There's no way to get thee but you have to go!" "I know I have to go, because it's twenty dollars a person and someone 's already paid the forty dollars for me and you to go," Mary said. "Oh great Mary I don't even have bus fare. And for that we'd have to leave now. An hour ago." "An hour ago?" Mary's eyebrows went up.She never seems to be watching "Reba", the only tv show her mother watches, 30 minutes a week: Deanne never sees her looking at it, even when the sounds beg for a peek at the tv over head where she is working on the computer or doing homework sprawled on the couch. yet she's got the comedic timing and automatic loftiness sometimes of the acerbic middle daughter , a bitter, negative, but funny typical teen angst role. Mary won't show too much interest in the show, because she's a perfectionist who intends to be a cinematographer slash director slash producer slash writer and so far not having lived long and just developing second and third and velvet and feather layers to the originaal ones of her cortex , maybe some dreams being washed out leagues under the sea while others grin orange brightly as coral under baby blue waters or a few inches under the bottom of your aluminum canoe briefly as you develope places to store new people and places quickly coming into you like air before your air was through. She in other words immediately thought the Chyenne character played by Joanna Garcia on Reba was dumb. Of course, it's what she plays up for laughs.But Mary is highly critical because Dr. Jay Garcia, Joanna's father, is a name on her birth certificate, so she expects greatness of Joanna (Deanne:"Honey, your name is the greatest name on your birth certificate. Watch.") It's 7:30 now--they have 2 hours to leave to get to the Brunch Expensive , there's probably strawberries and bananas, maybe stuffed French toast because it's the Temple Terrace CountryClbzzzzzzzzzzzz, All paid for--wowee!They wish the camcorder wasn't in the pawn shop but that's where it's been these past 12 months. I'm glad I didn't just get my tooth pulled, mama thinking. mary sleepin' -in a littles.Whose gonna take em? The daddy got no phone this month, there's no neighbors, thev'e no kin.Deanne makes a list but she's falling asleep. Sees Dan's black lab lose and has to call mary awake to tie her up. Sally would pull the pacemaker-defibrillator lead right out of Deanne's heart.Dan had brought that on her with a sneer after she'd told Marina she couldn't have a puppy for her 7th birthday. it was mean, to demonstrate she wasn't his daughter's boss. As Mary tries to catch the big sleek beautful but irascible dog, sirens peal by and animal escapes Mary who wants to sshower so has herarms out in gestures of defeat the dog doesn't give an inch to, or a Little Debbie cupcake the Salvation Army lady gave them.If this takes an hour there will be no $20 brunch and honored daughter anyway. deane has to leave the little one with someone; her mother says Deanne's twin sister, named Big Debbie, just went to bed and grandpas'asleep usually past ten.Will they call a cab and jump out of it a block from the country club? Will they steal a car? Will the rotten welfare mother make Mary squash down as she enters the bus and say she's 5 years old (free fare)like those morally depraved peopled do? Will they hitchhike, old crow and sweet young thing looking like she just come off the farm tall and lithe, mama five-nine and baby five-ten? Do they have a friend ? Mama thinking Mary's friend keri's mom, who works downtown, could take Mary downtown to her dads., and the rest of them, and Dan would sit Marina and take the ex and oldest to the award brunch. It's a long shot , she calls her mom, she thinks about the bus but transfers might make them too late , sometimes, a lot, you've got to wait 40 minutes. stay tuned for the answer to the was the $40 wasted cuz the people were too poor to avail themselves of it? Big Question. |
How many years would you hang on at $9,000 a year for a family of three? What do you earn? The average wage in the United States is $15 an hour, or $30,000 a year. Even a single mom of two ravenous eaters growing 6 inches taller a year can get by on that income; get shoes when the children's feet grow out of their old ones, get the oven repaired when lightning blows a fuse, pull some kind of insured, legal vehicle together. Our imaginations today are going to take away two-thirds of our middlin' income. Today you came to my home and were sickened and depressed. The smell in the narrow stairway up to my place , a mixture of rotting wood, roach waste products, tobacco smoke, and grease, made you take each step gingerly, as if they were part and parcel of an unsteady ladder.As if your foot would go through rotting wood . As though you were advancing on a ghost town. At my door, in the narrow little landing, you frowned when I came out, rather than have you in. Your eyes looked at the entire me impatiently, tthe veneer of civilazation very thin. I wanted to say, what if everything blew up in your face and you were stuck say on a CIA assignment or a Bermuda vacation taking shelter for days in such a place your self? Say there was nothing better in the country, on the desert island, than this house. And you couldn't do anything else but live here yourself. And you wanted to do better, real, real, bad. And then someone looked at this you and treated you like this was you your whole life. Like you never were anybody who lived better or who would live better or who wanted to live better or understood there was better. Like you could improve the building, re-carpet the stairs, take the trash to a dump, but you were too lazy, had too much of a jerk attitude, liked ugliness and depressing places --some kind of alien, not like them, because they'd never get aught dead in your shoes. Like your parents and theirs lived in simple huts with no reading material and you couldn't help the dimness of your wattage and were just a slug with a low I.Q. and zero ability. And you, in your head, at first, when it starts, you're going "look at this curling linoleum, this leak-yellowed ceiling; can you believe they're living like this?I didn't know they were allowed to rent out places this cruddy."And later, when it's even worse, five years on, you don't think anymore that you're getting a short peek at another angle; you think you're going to die here in hell, you are desperate and helpless. Would you want people to feel and act superior to you because this happened to you? Would you survive such a fall so flat on your face ? What if the chances were pretty good it would never get any better? How long could you keep on trudging through such a drudge of a life--would you consider suicide? Would you welcome mercy? Shouldn't anyone meeting you in your reduced circumstances burst into tears for you or bail you out ?Something, something, besides look down on you? What's that all about? Where are their tears? Don't even think about it! This article contributed by Deanne Young |
Retirement Life At its Finest Live the high life in this 1 bedroom 1 bath stilt home with parking, beach access and lake view. Plenty of bass ! No deed restrictions--hurry-this won't last! Only $400 a month . |
What's the joke? Rednecks can't sue or send leaders over for a dialogue on national television about how offended this made them-----there aren't leaders and no one can sue for a group not even readily identified, although many of the jokes are on target for poor, non-professionally employed adults trying to "wing it " and "nigger rig it ". |
Can't Believe We Made It! According to today's regulators and bureaucrats, those of us who were kids in the 30's, 40's, 50's, 60's, 70's or even the early 80's, probably shouldn't have survived. Our baby cribs were covered with bright colored lead-based paint. We had no childproof lids or locks on medicine bottles, doors, or cabinets, and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets. Not to mention the risks we took hitchhiking ... As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags. Riding in the back of a pickup truck on a warm day was always a special treat. We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle. Horrors! We ate cupcakes, bread and butter, and drank soda pop with sugar in it, but we were never overweight because we were always outside playing. We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle, and no one actually died from this. We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then rode down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem. We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the street lights came on. No one was able to reach us all day. No cell phones. Unthinkable! We did not have Playstations, Nintendo 64, X-Boxes, no video games at all, no 99 channels on cable, video tape movies, surround sound, personal cell phones, personal computers, or Internet chat rooms. We had friends! We went outside and found them. We played dodge ball, and sometimes, the ball would really hurt. We fell out of trees, got cut and broke bones and teeth, and there were no lawsuits from these accidents. They were accidents. No one was to blame but us. Remember accidents? We had fights and punched each other and got black and blue and learned to get over it. We made up games with sticks and tennis balls and, although we were told it would happen, we did not put out any eyes. We rode bikes or walked to a friend's home and knocked on the door, or rang the bell or just walked in and talked to them. Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment. Some students weren't as smart as others, so they failed a grade and were held back to repeat the same grade. Horrors! Tests were not adjusted for any reason. Our actions were our own. Consequences were expected. The idea of parents bailing us out if we got in trouble in school or broke a law was unheard of. They actually sided with the school or the law. Imagine that! This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers, and inventors, ever. We had freedom, failure, success, and responsibility --- and we learned how to deal with it. And you're one of them! Congratulations. You're welcome to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids before lawyers and government regulated our lives for our own good !!! |
Getting By in America The poorest Americans , it is said, have televisions, VCRs, washing machines, and total nutrition from balanced meals. Or could, if they weren't rotting out their teeth with speed, trading their foodstamps for pot, hocking their tv for heroin. If a single mother can't get a job, there's something she can get: lifetime nursing home care for being too retarded to work, disability from being too pathologically something mental to work, a husband out of the date ads,sober in a facility. And of course any of these options suffices, that is to say, allows us the privilege of checking her off as covered and moving onto the next case. The important, good-will generating ones like the Lost Boys who were orphaned in Africa and walked for days on a march of death before being shipped here in a sort of ying to slavery's yang; or the well-publicized gift of billions of dollars to Africa to attack AIDS, with our leader's Christian right imprint on it:"America will not walk on byand leave her stricken brother lying in the road", an allusion to the parable of the Prodigal Son in the New Testament. |
Reviews Books Nickel and Dimed Barbara Ehrenreich Barbara, a college grad, PH D sociologist, took low-paying jobs as a waitress in key West, at a Walmart in Minneapolis, as a merry maid in Maryland--and wrote about how she did not get by on the income, no matter how she tried. How she had to seek charity food and got a bag of food where nothing went with anything else--spaghetti sauce without pasta, peanut butter without bread,,, she bravely really suffers in ordeer to bring to middle and upper class America the truth about minimum wage. Movies Freeway starring Reese Witherspoon and Keifer Sutherland This movie is chockful of misassumptions on the part of the middle class about the poor and their offspring. Vanessa Lutz is a strong, moral girl who is considered to be one big loser because her mom is a prostitute and she's been put in foster homes repeatedly but always returned to her trashy mom. "Trailer park trash", she refers to herself. Her daydreams of her grandmother has the old lady in a trailer too, with lawn ornaments like crazy--the nut cases of America.She tries the trust of the better-off but they only hurt her so she begins to depend on herself... |
. Do your actions, policies, programs, support The life and dignity of the human person? Support the family? Not if you are a Florida republican, a non-voter, or have stock in Tampa Electric Company! Did you know that our SSI laws in Florida greatly diminish the dignity of the human?Then because I had to spend my last years on earth begging friends to help me, let us shower at their homes, feed us, give me or a daughter a ride to the doctor-- they are all sick of me and drop me because I have too many needs they don't want to have to help me with til I die. I.e., my dignity has been totally undermined by the unlivable income I am tied to. I am not allowed to make a penny more a month or recieve financial help from any friends or family, or even food. All of that counts against me as income and disqualifies me from Medicaid. How do other families survive on SSI in Florida? I met two who had to divorce like we did to get medical care and medicines to stay alive. Others never did own homes so have been on section 8 housing all their lives (there is a 5-year moratorium on applying for section 8 right now.) Or the father isn't totally disabled too so he can contribute child support. I know I am not alone, the only mother robbed of all dignity,left to cry ourselves to sleep nightly, so bruised from the callousness of the people we begged for help from that day who all like to say "You need to manage your money somehow! This just goes on and on and on! " Or, "Whenever you call I cringe because I know you need money, a ride, or something fixed...or a few buckets of water, and I can't do it-- I don't want to do it. I don't want your troubles. " Or I'll go to my church and hear the lady ahead of me begging for help and turned away because my church can hardly pay their own electric bill and need us to help THEM. And i know they can't help me, either.They say "Have you ever considered moving?" , like i'm stupid. Yes, all rental houses and apartments with 2 bedrooms are more than I get a month, BEFORE utilites. So we cry, and pray, and some doubt God exists, after enough years of it. The SSI rules, the Medicaid laws in Florida undermine our life and dignity totally. I am 100% disabled, for life, yet my society doesn't in any way provide for property taxes in my income or allow me to write fiction or type for others or in any other way earn the money to pay my property taxes, so that when I pay them I have to let a utility get cut off. or two. And to repair my roof, oven, wiring, I have to let my electric and water go off for half a year. And they hold me liable, the IRS does, for my husband's social security taxes yearly incl. the one year he couldn't come up with them, but they would'nt count those same earnings toward my social security and give me Social security and Medicare,which allows you to earn $700 more a month than SSI does. But this isn't just about how well the government takes care of its poor and vulnerable. The electric company too is complicit, meaning all who work there, make decisions for it, and have stocks in it---that company is RUTHLESS. They know I get my disability check the first of each month but cut my power off on the 30th of each month, ruining all my food I do have, like butter, milk, mayonnaise, salad dressing-- plus charge me an extra $35 for putting me through it! This is what I am trying to say: God is going to hold us all responsible. He is not going to say, ok, you all didn't know this so you are innocent. Last night I saw 2 middle-aged men from a religious station, Church of the somesuch, overweight, talking, dressed well, giggling self-conciously, saying this nation is all back- wards and in deep trouble spiritually, the whole world is; then discussing did The Rapture happen in 1867 and was Nero the Antichrist, blah blah. Not how we can now act--get up and act--to give dignity to our disabled poor families--- and how we MUST. Oh, no. That dialogue is not happening. Conservatives write me "I detect anger in you toward those who have it better than you--you are coveting--" No. Wrong. I am caring about you . We all have to make big changes here. it can only happen when we become empty vessels for the Spirit to fill .The Word of God eliminates our ego, it wipes out our selfishness, and it replaces our way of thinking , desiring and acting with that of Jesus. BY living the word, a divine logic takes over, a Gospel mind set enters in, we see everything with new eyes. It is an authentic revolution in our lives. The spirituality of unity, the ambition of shared resources . Justice of economic life. Please think about this, one and all, brothers and sisters,and help to slay the policies that slay our unity and brotherhood. Christ our Lord is every hungry, thirsty person you or I ignore ..watch out! I don't get why every mini-king in a mini-mansion in these zillions of "developments" with two BMWs in the drive doesn't realize his sin is grave and get scared. An ex-friend of mine who lives alone in a 3,500 square-foot -house with three showers in it decided this month to stop being my friend rather than let us shower at his mansion once a week . he didn't want to be considered a jerk for just being paid $17,000 and not wanting to use a cent of it to turn our water back on or otherwise help us, so he stopped being my frind , with no pain on his side-- just ours--- a new electric guitar, etc. on his side--he should be so afraid , man. So afraid of justice. But he loves himself, thinks he's just too cool-- he's already dead.I am so scared for all the people, some so nice, in these royal lives with the his and her sinks and all, while some of their countyfolk are so hungry , losing their kids because they can't pay the utilitiy bills, etc. Why aren't you all scared to death to live like that in the faces of the poor, the eyes of the Lord upon you ? you need to hear it SOMEWHERE. You simply have got to help. The poorest disabled, diseased, terminally ill Americans with minor children are in a living hell of your creation, not ther own. ___________________________ <http://modestneeds.org/> <http://modestneeds.org/> If you want to help someone hurting directly instead of buying fancy office furniture for the charity personnel, Modest needs is a great way. They make the needy family absolutely verify everything pertaining to why they are needy and then pay the bill rather than givecash to them. However they get at leat 1000 more requests a month than they get donors. Please check out the website. At the least you will see how many many Americans are suffering from things like no car to get to work, no electric, eviction--and you'll agree with me that something needs to change. I think if minimum wage was raised and SSI was raised to $20,000 a year , 50% of the suffering in this United States would end forever. Sept 2003 <sallywelovedyougirlmikecomebackdude.html> <2004.html>Feb 2004 <2004.html> click face Going into the Poverty thing Deeper (SOS) <http://mysite.verizon.net/freefolk/willaheartgoouttothese2/i ndex.html> WORST, <Refugees.html><Refugees.html>May <Refugees.html><Refugees.html>2004 <Refugees.html> Survivors Of Us May 2004 <thesecretwar.html> .It is a dusty, dirty neighborhood reeking of tom cat spray and rotting vegetation and garbage.No grass holds onto the sand long and your feet are black quickly when you walk outside.It rains 100 days in a row every summer making for hot stinking steaming weeds afterwards all night.There are bugs galore.. Traffic sends exhaust everywhere because there are intersections every 2 homes. MY 15-year-old's manga, novel, and art <amethyst1.html> My Boarding School <http://www.homestead.com/churchart/sma.html> (Life in Boarding School in 1970-73) Speaking of boarding school. They taught us a simple rule of thumb for if it is moral or not: It's moral if it increases capacity to trust people, gives greater integrity to the relationship, enhances self-respect, gives general attitudes of faith and confidence in people, fullfills one's potentialities and gives one a zest for living. It's wrong if it increases a distrust of people, spreads deceit and duplicity in the relationship, builds barriers between the persons involved or between them and others, encourages un-cooperative attitudes, diminishes self-respect, and dwarfs individual capacities. .It's a shame our videocamera has been in hock for most of 3 years now. We don't even get to try to live, laugh at ourselves. it's soooo depressing, liking books and magazines and cable tv programming and filming your cute kids and not getting to do any of it for 3 years and finally recognize that you never are, you have to stay this broke till you die--it's the law. What are they keeping me alive for if this is the pathetic quality of life I cannot take an opportunity to better without losing my medical?I feel like I'm just here to make my kids' lives miserable, right? Would you make any child of yours live off $3000 a year TOTAL incl elec. and phone and running water , clothes and food and medical? You make each of my 2 kids live off that, and me off the third $3000 you give us annually. You couldn't do it. But when after 7 years of it I need new beds, sheets, pillows, towels, washing machine--you say it's my mismanagement of money and walk off.Please dont. I don't want you to go to hell. Please. June 2004 <DeadEndRowed.html> To Gov. Bush Our Very Hardest Time Ever Even tho he had an apartment with tv, ac, and hot shower and bed, this war veteran spent every night with us in our tent or his van while we lived compromised in a home without electricity for 7 weeks, after we were banned from his (65 and older or 55 and disabled greatly only) place, protecting us with his piece while we lived in the open air one lot from a main hooker corner. He's on oxygen now from severe COPD with 17% lung capacity. And our brick May 2004 |
1. The economy exists for the person, not the person for the economy. 2. All economic life should be shaped by moral principles. Economic choices and institutions must be judged by how they protect, or undermine the life and dignity of the human person, support the family, and serve the common good. 3. A fundamental moral measure of any economy is how the poor and vulnerable are faring. 4. All people have a right to life, and to secure the basic necessitites of life such as , food, clothing, shelter, education, health care, safe environment, and economic security . 5. All people have the right to economic iniative, to productive work, to just wages and benefits, decent working conditions, as well as to organize and join unions or other associations. 6.All people to the extent they are able have a corresponding duty to work, a responsibility to provide for the needs of their families, and an obligation to contribute to the broader society. 7. Society has a moral obligation, including government action where necessary, to assure opportunity, meet basic human needs, and pursue justice in economic life. 8. Workers, owners, managers, stockholders, and consumers ae moral agents in economic life. By our choices, initiative, creativity, and investment, we enhance or diminish economic community life, and social justice. 9. The glbal economy has moral dimensions and human consequences. Decisions on investment, trade, aid, and developement should proect human life and promote human rights, especially for those most in need wherever they might live on this globe. |
The Catholic Framework for Economic Living |
It's moral if it increases capacity to trust people, gives greater integrity to the relationship, enhances self-respect, gives general attitudes of faith and confidence in people, fullfills one's potentialities and gives one a zest for living. It's wrong if it increases a distrust of people, spreads deceit and duplicity in the relationship, builds barriers between the persons involved or between them and others, encourages un-cooperative attitudes, diminishes self-respect, and dwarfs individual capacities. CHECKLIST for George and Jeb Bush |
Mary won first place for poetry for the 10th grade by the Hillsborough County Teachers of English and is to be awarded today, May 1, at a banquet at the Temple Terrace Golf and Country Club. .Her parent(s) had to pay $20 two weeks ago to attend with her and did not have it although we had it by today but they could not issue a ticket for us this late so no one could go with her to see her honored. The poem is about a little boy trying to be proud of all the hoopla surrounding his soldier dad's death while the poet wonders if he'd rather be the son of a soldier than the son of a father. The poet is the daughter of a Vietnam Vet (pictured here and elsewhere on this website). I am proud she won first place in the 7th largest school district in the U.S. but ticked off that there were no allowances for purchasing tickets to attend the ceremony for parents paid minimal money the first of each month so they are broke mid-month and on . such as disabled Vietnam Veterans. The association publishes a fat book of the winning poems and fiction and non-fiction by first and second place winners of each grade that we will get, at least. But to make this sweet shy girl eat alone, attend alone where all else has family is---well, she's used to being ostracized, thank God.She's resilient still. Philisophical. Marina is being tested for gifted IQ and honored today with a picnic with all the county school safety Patrols at Medard Park . They toured a Sheriff's boat and onr of those vehicles that handle contamination, etcc. She got a 5.0 on FCAT, the second higheat score in 4th grade. Mary got a 4.0 and is in the 89th percentile for reading comprehension and the 98th for math.There is only 99 so one per cent of 10th graders nationwide are smarter in math. What makes these accomplishments amazing is that the girls accomplished them while living under extremely stressful circumstances--no electricity the past 7 weeks, moving from Daddy's nursing home to the van to the tent in the yard to the house with candles to the tent again when the house had a flea infestation after not being vacuumed for 6 weeks and Daddy nearly got kicked out of his cheap penthouse efficiency at an old folks facility for having us there most of two weeks.He can't afford to live anywhere he has to pay for water and electric at and has a 13th floor panoramic view of downtown, the river, bay, channel, university rowing teams and the flat north of downtown area all the way to the Sulphur Springs water tower near our home.So mmany huge buildings, man, and empty downtown streets at night, and you could hear the homeless under the bridge from his windows nightly. It had to be hard on the schoolkids in our family to keep moving around with backpacks at the ready with mostly nowhere to go. And the fleas killed our 20-year-old cat Livonia and our 14 year old Maine Coon cat Pooh (see pet section of this website) , one the day before my 50th birthday and one the day after.We couldn't fix it--we were srounging napkins from restraunts for 2 weeks for toilet paper and cleaning needs. Eating nothing. The kids knew these pets their entire lives. It was a severe blow. Then three kittens we loved died too. It left us 9-cat folks with just 4 cats. That turned to 3 tonight when one insisted on breaking antiques till we let him out to meet his destiny with a car. He had a serious death wish, boy, yowling nonstop to go out and darting out whenever the door opened.I concluded he was not good pet material. The pressure lowered for me with the loss of all these responsibilities. When the electric finally came back on today though I found I had irrevocably changed as a person . I didn't recall how we lived--that the vacuum belt had snapped just before the power went out and hd to be replaced, that the TV ran on a remote, where the remote was after 7 weeks of no one using it, --it took me 7 hours to realize I could go online again!The house has a layer f crud over it due to being humid and open ( no window screens) 7 weeks. It seemed abandoned and an old lifestlye we'd moved on from long ago. I even forgot we had a porch light. The death about here just slayed me.The wetness and dirtiness of all archival papers and photos and art and knick knacks was sickening. It's hard to pull a home back from ghost town status.I went to ER with confusion, disorientation and unable to sit up or walk after bad diarrhea the night before in the grocery store 3 times just buying cat food--I think my defibrillator went off.The kids spent half the night there and went to school very tired, then had to live 2 counties away at their grandparents a few days. Yet they pulled off all this achievement at school. We're not "back home" because half of us died. But we go on.Appreciating that we lost no human life. Big photos of Marina looking at you from a sleeping bag on an overnight field trip to the Florida Aquarium hang in her school lobby... We'll have to fall back into rhythym here....I got lots of responses to this website , the parts on Hank Carr and Bernice Bowen, and my grandfather's fishing gear, all positiv. And as always, three emails asking where Debra Baxter is today, which is my big question... ( the ten year old British actress star of the 1964 movie "A High Wind in Jamaica"). Wonder if she ever looks herself up on google and sees my site---I love that person so. Like so many---about 3 a month write me. all looking for her. But she's not anywhere. I still can't read a whole newspaper (me? Who reads 4 a day incl. The Wall Streeet Journal and Sunday NY Times?) I am too agitated. But I'll be back. I've FAITH AND HOPE. I can tell you a few things only I've seen. I know the American Indians must have had dirty fingernails because I found that you can't keep the dirt out without hot water and they didn't have hot showers or baths either.Their feet would have been black a lot.Squatting on the ground to eliminate is hard on siatic nerves.Moths and other insects must have been busy on their feather headddresses. I'm ready to live more normally now should God want me to...I've seen enough of this shit. Excuse that I'm French... I wish I could addd photos but to ensure my hard drive wasn't stolen I took it to Dan's. Good choice as our house was broken into 2 nights in a row.Dan thinks by a homeless person seeking shelter as nothing was taken. However there did happen to be nothing to TAKE...........I;ve had enough living like bombed out refugees. Now I want normal American middle class .... may get that coutesy a weird fluke I can't tell about.Let's just say God is wild about keeping me putting out my writing. Thank God. Let's Live Again, Livonia Rubble {Found after our show blew out} The house is a little different now come see how the carpet's been pulled and we tred old bare drywall-splattered boards and thin Indian rugs that don't reach, by 2 to 4 feet , any corner and they're a palest pink and lavender, the newer one blue violet and salamander, it's something you've got to see the radical change it makes I guess because we aren't going artificial any longer but embrace the pain and have comfort in our poverty by memories of the Poor Little Match Girl, The Little Princess, The Five Little Peppers all living with floorboards such as we. It's not so ugly;;;;; much more offensive to the eye was the dirty beige carpet we could not hide and couldn't afford to have cleaned , hiding a path of finey filtered sand (Florida's version of dirt) under it's padding in a big "C" along the walkway everbody used to get to and from living and dining and only doors-to-outside room to the bathroom and bedrooms and kitchen and back to the couch and tv with your food. Now a wood floor I can sweep right if this weren't free verse I'd have to say with a broom . But now I can say with my socks I pick up all the dust and I take it to bed. Where it goes then I've not thought about yet. I never recall it when I am awakened by the school bus braking on the corner out my window while my good old gifted bimbo sleeps beside me on the decrepit old mattress I got before I had any kids and the oldest soon turns sweet sixteen I mean it's old and i hear you're suposed to replace them every 5 years and pillows, three,and of course you've seen all those sheets and bath towels at KMart, Target, Walmart, Penny's, Sears.....there'd be no market like that going on if these necessities lasted a dozen years.America knows people need new towels and bedsheets periodically over their lifetimes but if mom is disabled and puton SSI she can kiss new anything ever a backwards goodbye cuz it's already out of her life. After 3 years of all her income going to utilities and housing, and no way on earth to reduce these costs , and needing new just about everything,she has nothing but grief. She's learned all alone to pioneer their own relief. An $8 toaster finally afforded 2 years after theirs died gave the kids toast as snacks again , toast and jam or cinnamon sugar, growing kids starving between school's end and dinner, in a home where snacks like carrots and apples and celery and raisins and crackers and ice cream and chips did not enter. For the children that new toaster was like every day was Halloween. She got in and out of a tent perched on a trampoline with a sciatic nerve and rupttured disks and despite the ugly scene the chest-high weeds in place of grass the unrelenting heat and humid, bug-filld air to breathe and lingering smells of cat spray and spray paint from the body shop across the street who spray at night when environmentalists sleepwith a sore arm where her pacemaker- defibrillator runs through the underarm muscle and over her shoulder like a taperecorder, videocam and Secret Agent little guns like a super hero action figure with massive joints of plastic boulders she carried around their nomadic days across-array of their old ways cortizone and antibiotic cremes deoderant and streams of tp squares from restrooms she used and, from fast food joints, napkins intemperately ripped from metal holders and quickly zipped inside her purse with disposable forks and spoons, sugar, ketchup, even pepper. Toilet paper worked like crap cleaning the big round glass table she'd got from her mother --little fibers clumped up, seperated and lay everwhere. When she tried paper towels instead they did not go with problem bowels or hemmorhoids or wiping runny noses even. leaving ragged sores because they're styled to clean floors. Of course there's no affording both, you know, or there wouldn't be the problem. This is not Jill trying to tell her horse from Jack's so shaving all the hair off the white one. This is the lady who played the piano in the Peterkin Papers, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table here. Newspaper is what her poor Afican-American maid used when she hadn't paper towels, swearing by it even whenshe finally proudly had some. She watched how the homeless newly housed survived, putting jeans on a chair before the oven on high and broil both and door open wide so the jeans would bake dry. Handwashing her youngest a uniform blouse or jumper every night in the bathroom sink, greatful for quick-drying materials for garments. It was as intuitive for her as it was for you , Luv, to stand back and watch her young eat while dying for every bite the rest are sharing. You loved being in the bedroom the lady and little girl shared, because they were always talking or playing a game or reading to each other and it was what you lked, peace and unity, and you'd curl up amongst them happily, these people filled with love for one another and you, scolded and worse by society's watchdogs, perhaps seperated forcefully and permanently for crimes of impropriety and child endangerment because the lady has always slept with the baby, now ten years old. Sick, they judge with no knowledge , and the mother says don't care about them--we're here together all of us and that's the only part of life that really matters. Come back to us now , Luv, for that hasn't stopped, though we scattered we're back now, this would be home, were you part.We're all waiting you know for your pace through our hearts.You set the pace, Luvvie Lady, for female humans and felines to clasp together souls losing nothing for it not common sense,intelligence, their mental balance, their no-nonsense approach to life, not losing a thing they had but gaining a new dimension . A beautiful, powerful photograph of a rose in an ink-smelling magazine becomes a real rose with a luscious perfume. A guitar part you've heard over and over for decades comes on the radio,or in a concert you attend, with the full-band sound,drums amd cymbals, bass and sax, harmonica, pedal steel, banjo, piano, lead and rythym guitars, flute a bit--- WE didn't have a thing but a cat who outlived all the millionaire's cats by 5 years or 6 and it would have been 50 but they got her oh Luv must you know this? I hope you return --I'm counting on it. I 've got a few stupid mistakes I must fix before you die or something. Like get that flea-infestation out. Get that carpet up and have plain floors. Let you get out--open all windows and doors. Include you in the plastic grocery bags of essentials that came with us to crash at the apartments of others, our van and at last after Grampa bought us a flash- light our beds, corners dark open windows attracting a hundred sizes of bugs and a green frog who jumped on my face in the dark, one foot sealing my mouth and one wet and gooey on my cheek with such a wide footprint I thought it had to be a snake winding round my face and I threw it at the wall and it jumped right back on me as I raised my candle, saw what it was, and removed my glasses to wipe my eyes, and was saying "It's just a frog, you guys"--and on the rim of my glasses, knocking them to the floor.Poverty gave us some silly times as we females got lodged in that bedroom door. As well as the awful ones that we don't want no more. The Puerto Rican executive who locked the doors of her clean new minivan after eyeing me at a red light , sloshing water out of the 6-gallon paint bucket my tall sweet teen daughter and I carried together a half mile up the 100-year-old brick streets in our ragged, soaked moccasins,her eyes met mine. I was just looking at life humming, mildly curious, as I think all terminally ill who konw might be. You have been seperated from these people, you see. They are part of the world you won't see.They'll know if there was life on Mars, and who won (or stold) the Presidency. You won't. You-all no longer have in common a presumed future of greater than 20 more years--you've left their path. They can't walk yours--I thought they could empathize pretty much but I've learned since that they simply can't. It sounds easy: imagine you've just been told by doctors you can't live over 2 more years without an organ transplant you don't qualify for. Everyone has their own fantasies of how they'd stoically take such news, not tell anyone, or handle it so beautifully they'd be a role model for millions and inspire a movie. But when it comes years after you ever clumsily, romantically , while the hormones for adventure and sex were spilling over out of control thought of your reaction to such news and were satisfied with what was surely going to be your honorable response, or when it comes only months after on a day you aren't ready for such bullshit, man, and it doesn't go away it's all there to stay from the moment it even got half-way into your brain like knowing even though you've never thought about it that Livonia won't be coming this way. After those days where only you and God exist and any holy people who want to take His place and save you, and somewhat sometimes and sometimes all the way, your loved ones exist in your haze especially your children and pets, to convince you you're still on their plane, you see everybody around you. The person pushing your hospital gurney laughing, clowning and running down the empty hall with you while her companion cracks up, sending him back to get a paper you're telling them fell out of your chart when they grabbed it while hopping bowlegged around the gurney, accepting the stack of papers he hands her when he puffs breathlessly back, although only one is yours, ignores your repeated insistances that 99% of those papers now in your thick file aren't about you, even when, craning your head upside down for 20 minutes, you eventually make out a man's first and last name and that he is 66. (You're 46.) THis changes nothing until the surgeon picks up your folder while adminstering valiium intraveneously to you because the nurses are reporting that you are extremely agitated , claiming your files were switched by hospital personnel. The surgeon eads two paragraphs and bellows"I can't operate on this patient! Her blood can't clot, her blood pressure is way too high,she just took more Warfarin this morning," he sizzled, disgustedly dropping the book."Why did you take an anti-clotting drug today? Didn't anyone tell you.."He said to me, all this hatred of my stupidity on his face. "I didn't," I said."I 've never taken Warfarin. I've never been prescribed it." "You prepped the wrong side," he was telling someone , his eyes rolled to the side like the usual Crucified Christ's ."We're removing nerves in the right wrist," I yelled,"No you aren't!" I was suposed to have tendon sheaths removed from my left hand, which was frightening, as I ama lifelong writer without a typewriter, andit took much reassurance for me to trust them with my left hand. Nerves seem more involved in writing than tendons -- painful scar tissue for infinity or a chronic ungodly nerve pain or paralysis are some side effects of surgury around and on nerves. "I cannot operate this day in light of your hypertension and that you took a blood thinner today." I was getting stern lecture unwarrented so I said to man,"I didn't take any blood thinners in my life ." "Then why would your chart say you did?" "Why does it say I'm a 66-year-old man named Edward Fontana?" "This isn't your chart!" "I've been telling everybody for 20 minutes.." "Who did you tell?" This was not a bedside manner showing. "Every single person that prepped me,walked by me, brought me here,---" "And none of them told ME?" He turned to all and sundry he could get the ear of."Why didn't somebody tell me this patient had the wrong chart?" Silence. Doctor, to me:::"Point to me someone you told." I pointed to the anesthesiologist's nurse, who was the third person in our little triangle there, everyone else busy way elsewhere. She'd been trapped reading something. WE all three knew she hadn't opened her mouth. So Doctor asked me, instead of Known Liar, "What was her response when you told her these were not your medical records?" "She said that if there was anything wrong with them, you would see that right away , you were the doctor and the only one who could read records. I said I could read them upside down from here and she said you were the only one who understood what the records meant and so the only one who could tell if they were wrong or not." "And?" said the doctor glumly. "And?"I anded. "What happened afterwards? Anything? Did you tell anyone else what you told her and what she responded?" "She said something else," I said. "She said I couldn't possibly know if my records were wrong because I couldn't possibly understand them. She said a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. She like really scolded me see she caught me trying to see the medical records on the post behind me. " I sort of waved my strapped down arms at him.They flapped. I leaned my head all the way back off the bed to show how agonizing it quickly gets to be reading upside down. The doctor and a now-present, anxious head something lady tore rabidly through the files. "This is you, 46-year-old pleasant Caucasian female--" "Yes, some of it's my files. Some of it's what the orderlies who raced me here picked up off the floor by thedoor of the room before mine. I think they knocked it on the floor to begin with, They made quite a breeze when they passed through." "Many of these ARE your files," the doctor was saying, preventing me from going on. He wasn't gettig it."How did you know some of these weren't your files?" He demanded and the suspicion was sudden and certain in his eyes. But of course. There I sat with my right wrist prepped for surgery, IVs in the left hand, that lead they keep in there to give you anything quickly through, all on the wrong side, setting him up for a big fall. Why didn't he read my records front to back before stepping up to the plate? If that old dude had good blood pressure and clotting would they have really operated on the wrong hand? Look how far they'd gotten towards that. As I protested strenuously and continuously that they had the wrong records and hand they got the IV s all snuggled in the wrong hand and never told the docotr what I said. The next people I saw was my roomate, an old lady going for the attention of the hospitalized. Doctors:"There is absolutely no reason to refer you to a cardiologist, Mrs. Rainma. This is nothing to do with cardiology. You have emphysema. As we just explained to you for 25 minutes. And have learned from your doctor you know all about it.Now, we are referring you to your doctor, to see him within 24 hours." Mrs. Rainma:I don't have no docotr1" Doctors:"Mrs...R...we just spoke to your doctor at your request, remember?" Other doctor:"No that was the cardiologist who sent her here." Mrs. R::"They won't send me to a cardiologist. That;s why I'm here.' Doc:"Who won't send you to one?" Mrs:"The insurance." Doc:"Who's the doctor we talked to?" Mrs:"I don't know. ' Docs:"Who's your pulmony doctor? Who treats your emphysema? " Lady:"My primary doctor.He won't let me see no one.." Female doctor:"Mrs. Rainman, your primary doctor is doing all thr right things, so you are getting very good treatment. Everything we showed you here tonight you are familiar with already. You are doing great." Mrs"I know how my emphysema is. I came to get my heart problem diagnosed and cured." Doc"Well then you're all cured because you have no heart problem." Mrs R:"Then why am I in a heart ward?On the heart sugury ward?" Lady:"We didn't have enough beds in regular cardiac care so you're in cardiac intensive care but there's nothing wrong with your heart and we're moving you to pulmonary if you aren't released tonight." Mrs,M:"Released tonight! I can't be released tonight! (Horrified beyond any possible reason.) Doc:"Why not?" Mrs."I haven't even had--you all ran so many tests on me you totally stressed me out. I never had a minute to call my familiy to tell them where I am. No one could possibly come for me that soon. " DOc::"I thought you reached a sister. I rememeber you refused to have the x-rays until you reached somebdy and finally you had them and somebody said you found your sister." Mrs.R:"Ha! Her answering machine, maybe! I aint had any contact with any of my people.The need to tell you before you release me too. About how my heart races too fast." (Doctors mumble, loudly reiterate the game plan and diease as emphysema, leave. Mrs. R pulls curtain all around her bed, blocking roomate's view of downtown hi-rises and quiet channel to bay of Gulf of Mexico. Thus secreted, older woman begins series of telephone calls to everyone she knows. The following is the typical content) Mrs. Rainma:"Johnny? Johnny dang it when are you gonna git home from that stressful job that awful place? This is your mommy;; I don't expect you to call me backin time before the phones here close at 9, I just wanted to let you know so you won't worry. I'm in the hospital now dont get alarmed your old Mama's gonna be alright remember your dear Daddy always said she's tough as nails and she aint going no place til she's ready. Don't forget that. Anyway its just a little spot they found on the the uh xray on the heart so I'm in the coronary care intensive care unit I don't know how long they was talkin bout sugery but I don't want none of that noise.But I'm gonna be fine in the end you'l lsee baby but if you want to come out and see me here like everybody else is doing--goodness so many came already--well, you don't have to go out to a florist and pick out a $35 arrangement or any of that nonsense --the hospital doesn't allow live flowers.If you really must, and I could sure use some cheering up and you know what cheers me up, there's a gift shop right here with just the most darling things! " And I watched the young nurse I shared with Miasma handle the fraud gracefully, listening to her obvious lies with a never tiring "Wow!" and lots of supportive statements. Knowing I would have at least told all others near Mrs. Rainbull how she was playing this up for attention, visitors and gifts and not even telling her loved ones she was probably being released before morning, I wondered where such a young, cute, cool personality got so much class and graciousness yet still kept her cool so cool. There was no one around her to impress. She was being herself. Like she impressed God and herself and that's all she even thought of impressing, making airs and acts unnecessary and most of her holiness go unnoticed (except to God). I could die if she was there as I went out. She was cool. One of the ten people Iwas glad I lived cause otherwise I'd never known of them. Then I see her book, her PDR for nurses, and her name is on the edge of all the pages. WARE. I already know her first name--she's my nurse.As I see her last name, I cannot but see number 4 or 5on my list of 10 people I'd always cherish having found on this planet with me, a little girl of that name I taught at a preschool 22 years before.She was a first-rate five year old, just like she is a first-rate nurse. We were too close, and the headistress told me i had to distance myself from here. She had taught me everything, told me not to worry about so and so's tantrum, he'd get over it--the inside scooper, so to speak. She shone at the suggestion of being my helper and would take my hand as I scurried across the playground to see some crying kid who'd insisted on going up the slide while a crew was coming down it, eventuating in a shoe to his eye. While I thought of my own questions (Why would you keep looking at a shoe aboutto smack your eye? Did it hyonotize you?Or did you just like expect Ian to have such control over his foot it would stop short a micromililiter from your face, and you wanted to watch it?), Miss Ware wagged her tiny finger at the offender and said "Now now you know you can't climb up the slide. If you don't use the playground equipment right you can get very hurt. THat's exactly why I didn't want you to climb up the slide wrong. Now you've gotten hurt. Can I see? Does it hurt very much?" With the concern so easily readable in perfect angelic faces and so mistakenly unnoticed in swarthy, disabled, dirty, plain, unshaven, ugly,depressed,stressed,misshapen due to broken-off teeth, hardened by hard life faces.She'd be so sincerely bent on making their hurts better, applying the bandaids for me after carefully washing her hands in hot soapy water to her wrists. I figured her mom--who was raising her and her sister Frances alone--was a nurse. But students are yours for only one year, and then, no matter how out of proper bounds your affection or adulation of a child went, you never saw or heard of this kid again, and had no way to change that. You simply had to remember, bittersweetly. But if remember you did, and she turns out to be your sweet cool nurse during your complicated surgury 22 years down the road, you'll feel a lot better about going into that surgury. Hey--you just saw one of the Top Ten! One you were certain you'd never see again. (Of course. when you tell her after surgery who you are, she can no longer be your nurse, for she knows you. And argue it out with her--she stops you by remembering she loved you and suddenly you didn't care about her anymore and it broke her heart and she cried and didn't want to go back for awhile. (Why do sometimes the people I love best cry over me while I'm a blind mess? I think of a letter I got from young Bob West posted elsewhere on this website written about 1979--when he thinks of me he gets so sad, he's even cried. More than you know, Deanne.He was right. I'd no idea I'd touched him at all. ) When you learn you re at the end of your movie or novel,to put it politely, |
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