Oh Lord Vee, I have several desk-shaped dents in my forehead. I know if this thread gets old Anthony wil say 'OK folks, back to business please' but oh my, it's so very, very relevent to SO much. Yes it's chit-chat but it dawned on me yesterday that gosh it's tied in with my personal PTSD etimology in a big fat way. Am I too old to say 'OMG'? The Wisconsin thing- those f***heads. If someone would please explain to me how that was not an example of patent fasicsm ( spelling all shot to heck this morning please excuse ) I'd like to hear it.
This all flattened me to the point of quite literally setting off a series of flashbacks- the courtroom, smug lawyers, the safehouse, the futility of the power structure. My head went there without me-it was an awful, awful day. Yes, poor me with a roof over my head and fighting a muffin top from being well-fed with 1.5 million homeless children strewn about America's streets. No idea why it just did. I think it's partly because it's that and even my parents, who have to gracefully face dying at the moment while we try to figure out how they can DO that while not having to give up everything they own, worked for all their lives, inherited and even sit on, for God's sake. They're not exactly poor people either, but quite well off 'upper middle class' in point of fact. They're both quite ill with staggering medical bills so could lose it all-have nothing. Then that safe house I was in I found out recently no longer exists because of cut backs on a state level. It had been privately funded but some state thing with our new nazi of a governor ( whose first single official act was to wipe out the meager subsidized adult health care program we did have here ) oblitortated it's existance. If that had been when I needed its shelter well, there I would have been somewhere in the crosshairs of someone who wished me dead. I lost my son, daughter in law and grandson to the UK. I'm so sad- it's a blow. Gosh I miss them horribly. They left because they could. Yes,they love Scotland, my son is in a terribly specialized field and was offered a challenging job within it there. The real reason was because they couldn't bear to live here anymore-wished to be in a country where people by and large seem to be the reason the government exists, where health care is for everybody, where you don't step over the homeless bodies and if you carry the passport you're not the target for the kooks who feel Americans need to pay for the damage done to the planet. He's a dual citizen, having been born over there so my grandson is also. They told me when he was born he'd have to give up his duality eventually but I found a lawyer who said that was nonsense 'they' hand out because the Yanks don't like people taking their education and taxes elsewhere. Well, my son left. I do not blame him. He'd rather face the higher taxes there, where they GO for something valuable than here where it's mostly the middle and working classes who support the excesses of the wealthy. So it was all too much yesterday, cumulating in the flat statistics that there are 1.5 million hungry, homeless children sleeping in cars, alleys, whatever in this 'wealthiest country in the world' and noone knew.( and no, the parents of these children interviewed were not drug addicted scum buckets. They were laid-off workers or working people just not able to meet all their bills ) Another signal that the American people are NOT 'told' what the hell is going on. When we are we do not tolerate it, but how to force all the dam media to break ranks as 60 Minutes did and reinvent the political wheel when the wheel is owned my Mega-Corp I do not know.
I'm sorry this is so long, seriously.( I'll refrain from a tangent on the whole 'Freedom to Farm' bill that snuck through Congress some years ago since there's another 6 paragraphs and another dent in my head.) I once wrote an editorial for the local paper about the silly overeaction when France refused to enter the war with Iraq. There was this 'thing' here, to the point where there was a movement to rename 'frenchfries', 'libertyfries'. Please. ( there's no such thing as french fries over there anyway and in the UK they're called 'chips'-don't think the French had their feelings hurt whatsoever).It was ludicrous. I said France's disinclincation to blow up a country based on Dubya's WMD misinformation was laudable.Well- did I hear it- was told to just leave the country if I could not be a 'patriot'. I wrote back, said that every hopeful, barefoot bedraggled Mexican who made it across the border yesterday in the hopes of a better life is an American already, that my family did the same thing in a leaky old boat with an improbably cheerful name a couple hundred years ago and survived long enough to get shot at in every dam war for the sake of the same liberty, were now pretty much genetically American and my idea of being a Patriot is to stand up for everyone's right to be here, be heard, live well and share 'the dream'.
It's hostile here, actually, when one does question the prevailing 'party line'. I think it's going to take most out of their comfort zone to do so, but getting the flat, dreadful facts out there is the only possible way to achieve this. There's no agenda on the part of the huge majority of the citizens behind the 1.5 million children who sleep every night in our borders with no home and empty stomachs, just an abysmal state of affairs noone has been allowed to see because of the agenda of greed and misinformation in the power structure. Again, sorry for the rant and long post. Someone asked me not long ago what message I'd leave my children. I think it would be 'Stay outraged, then do something'.
