The idea middle America has is that the poorest class of Americans are not taxpayers, were not taxpayers , did not have
taxpayer ancestors, and certainly only took took took from taxpaying loyal Americans , for years, maybe decades, and their
mamas for decades before them (understood their papas went unknown).
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!
