How often the poor lose their most precious things.

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 .They feed their dogs, sometimes, old cereal, a can of peas, white rice and powdered milk and whatever outdated peanut butter that's separated that somebody donated along with a box of Vanilla Wafers with the bottom chewed through and the wax bag too and rodent droppings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 pwerson 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.