When The Mortician Cried

For someone who truly believes that life goes on for mortals after the death of the physical body I do not handle death well. I am always devastated when someone I know passes on. Oddly enough, I do not fear making the transition to the other side for myself so much as I fear the mostly terrible ways that bring on the transition. There are few calm and kind ways to release from the physical body and the ways that humans deal with what we leave behind are horrifying to say the least. In an attempt to make peace with the rituals that are used in this world to (supposedly) care for the dead I have watched a multitude of videos that explain the processes and I can tell you right now that they haven’t helped me one bit. They only keep me awake at night feeling a morbid dread of having to leave here with the burden of how I might rest in peace left to my children. Every aspect of after life care seems traumatic and invasive and violent. Maybe I won’t care at all what happens to my physical body once I pass on, but I will tell you that what I know about the spirit being out of the body makes me reluctant to believe that. I assume that I will get over the trauma of what I might see happening to my remains and my family from above it but I cannot truly be sure of that.

They say that people used to be terrified of being buried alive and it makes sense when you see stories about near death experiences and people waking up in the morgue and at the funeral home. I am convinced that for my own peace of mind and for the peace of mind of my children the best way to manage what remains of me once I go to the other side would be to bury me in a mass grave with other people three or four days after passing on to make sure that I truly have passed. Just leave the body as it is, wrap it in a sheet and allow nature to reclaim it naturally with no scalpels, fire, chemicals, or unnatural attempts to make death look pretty. It isn’t.

I have been watching videos made by a mortician who truly does her absolute best to take the fear and dread of death to a manageable level but for every video that she makes there are ten or more videos describing vile and unscrupulous morticians who have done the unspeakable to people who were entrusted to their care by the loved ones of the deceased. Who to trust in the funeral business is getting harder and harder to figure out now.

When I was a teenager, my boyfriend Mike, had an older brother who was married to a woman whose father was a mortician. One day Mike managed to muster up the courage to ask her father if he could see how he took care of the deceased. Surprisingly, he was allowed to witness the process. Mike never told me or anyone else that he was going to do this prior to going, but after he went, he came straight over to my house to see me. He was visibly shaken and unable to talk about it at first but after a few minutes of pacing the floor and wringing his hands he told me where he had been. I don’t know how much help I was to him, fifteen year old kid that I was, but I knew that he must have placed a high level of faith and trust in me for me to be the person that he chose to come to first to try to unburden himself. He had difficulty describing the processes that he saw but after a few minutes he began to be less shaky. He did say that he didn’t want any of that done to him when he dies. His last words about it were, “Poor old man.” as he shook his head with a grieved and pained look on his face.

This was a hell of a lot for a sixteen year old boy to process, but I wonder if seeing something like this might put the fear of god into the people who are daily making decisions that result in the deaths of many thousands of people everyday in this world. The mortician whose videos I have been watching told the story of how she chose that profession for herself. Her father was a mortician so she grew up in the business of death. She described how her father was on call 24 hours a day in the job being called at all hours of the day and night to pick up the deceased from different places. She also said that her father would cry every time that the body was that of a child.

Every week day I watch a program on the Democracy Now, YouTube channel called The War and Peace Report. The program always begins with a tally of the deaths that have occurred over the last 24 hours in whatever country they are reporting on with an emphasis of how many children have died that day. Many of these children have been shot, or have died as a result of not being able to receive proper medical care, or have died from starvation. As terrible as it is to hear that this is happening in a war zone it is just as terrible to know that these things are happening in countries that are not at war. Mass shootings, domestic violence, starvation due to a lack of adequate resources to sustain life in far too many families, inadequate or nonexistent healthcare, and just pure apathy toward the poor in this world insures that every day will bring with it the loss of more human beings who are not deserving of such a fate. A great many of the victims will be children. If their lives are not lost on this particular day their lives may be emotionally destroyed by the loss of their parents. Would it make a difference if those whose policies and decisions cause far too many of these problems had to go out in the middle of the night to pick up the bodies of these casualties and then clean them up and try to make them look like a tragedy did not happen to them and try to make them look like they are just peacefully sleeping? If a mortician who deals with the disposition of death services every single day is moved to tears every time he sees a child victim of death I would like to believe that people having to look at the cold hard reality of what uncaring and selfish decisions made in this life have brought us to might help them see their actions differently.

Taking responsibility for the consequences of our own actions is the one true verification that we have grown up and not just grown older. Our world is not in a constant state of turmoil worldwide by accident. It is by ignorant and negligent design. When the mortician cries, we are no longer human if we aren’t crying, too.

The Lazy Lazoon

In the 1960s there was a British television series called Fireball XL5 that had a cast of marionettes and is great fun to watch. It is science fiction set in outer space and has many never before heard of alien races that the Fireball crew come in contact with. Some are friendly and some are hostile but there is one race of beings called the Lazoon that are so incredibly docile and unobtrusive that they are darn near extinct from not having the capacity to defend themselves in any way.  One particular Lazoon, named Zoonie, lives with one of the Fireball crew named Venus who is their medical officer. She allows Zoonie free reign in her house and never loses her temper with him even if he messes up situations frequently because he understands next to nothing about their culture and mannerisms. The best he can manage of their language is to say “welcome home” and “full power” and a few other simple phrases. He does require supervision even though he tends to sleep a great deal of the time. He is quite a unique character and would likely be exasperating for some people to tolerate, but he isn’t for Dr. Venus. She understands and trusts him like no one else. I wonder how many of us in real life would be so accommodating?

I was in a Walmart store recently and heard an employee talking to another customer as they and I were at the self-checkouts. She said, “The energy here is really bad. Nobody that works here wants to work here.” It isn’t hard to feel empathy for what she said. The store is always crowded. There are always aggressive people in there. Many people are tired and frustrated about everything from the hot weather, the prices on just about everything having increased since your last visit to the store, the screaming and crying children who are possibly more troubled about having to be there than the adults are, the customers who are oblivious to the fact that they are blocking the aisles with their shopping carts, and the fact that there are sometimes five or more of them in their entourage who are congregating at the end of an aisle talking about their grievances in life and making it very difficult to quickly do your shopping and get the hell out of the store that you don’t want to be in either.

“Times is hard.” Mrs. Lovett sang about in the musical Sweeney Todd. They are very hard and not getting any easier. I could name off about 50 reasons for why that is so, but in this post, I will confine my ranting to just one of them; why people seemingly don’t want to work. I say, seemingly because I don’t believe that this assessment is truly accurate. They have futility confused with laziness.

In a capitalist society it is understood that you will have to do some kind of work or you will die in the gutter pretty quickly. There has never been a time in history when that wasn’t so. In the 20th century there were some people who realized that not everyone was capable of managing a full time job and some accommodations were made to help them sustain life with government assistance. That was truly a blessing. For the rest of us who understood that it was up to us to make it on our own we at least carried into that endeavor a mindset that whatever kind of employment that was available to us would have within it at least an adequate amount of compensation for our labor. I don’t know if that mindset was truly possible for everyone but I am sure that it seemed reasonable to assume that it would be true. There can be no reasonable assumption of that now. In fact, far too many jobs in this country will not pay you enough to even cover housing alone. I cringe every time I hear that there are cities here in America that have rental houses and apartments where the rent is 5 thousand dollars a month and up. Who the hell can pay that much when there is a minimum wage of less that $8.00 an hour in this country? You might get extremely lucky in this world and find yourself a job that pays $50k per year but that will not be the amount that you will actually receive in take-home pay. What you will actually have after taxes and insurance premiums are deducted will be about $32k per year. Divide that by 12 months and you have approximately $2,666.00 per month in actual money. It is ludicrous to think that anyone on the planet can manage to live on that amount when rent can be more than three times that per month. What is even more ludicrous is to think that an employer will give you a salary of 50k per year for any of just about 75% percent of the jobs that are available in this country. You can tell me that people just don’t want to work anymore but the fact is that they know that it isn’t going to do them a hill of beans good to work when receiving a living wage for the work is on the impossible list for far too many of us. They will tell you that you are a lazy slob for not wanting to accept a substandard compensation for your labor but they won’t tell you how you can manage to live in a world that “wants 11 dollar bills and you only got 10” ( from the Bob Dylan song Subterranean Homesick Blues).

 

And now that we have established that the vast majority of Americans are well and truly screwed when it comes to even approaching the ability to adequately sustain themselves here we need to understand that this isn’t our only problem. Many of us also do not have healthcare coverage. Many of us also cannot afford a car. Many of us cannot afford to pay for childcare. And we also do not have free television service which prior to the 1970s most people had if they could afford at least a second hand tv and had access to an outdoor antenna. Watching television used to be one of the most prized pastimes for overtired and overworked people to come home to in the evening. You may think that not being able to watch television has little importance in this world but without a way to tune out how difficult life can be sometimes you cannot reset and recharge the energy that a constant barrage of the bad news and frustration that life hands you every single day takes out of you. There weren’t very many channels to watch back then but there was a multitude of very good and very entertaining shows that the whole family could watch together. You can still watch many of those shows on YouTube today. There were no parental warnings shown before the programs started that told you that there was content in them that was unsuitable for children. Such a world used to exist?!? You bet it did! Ask your grandparents.

One thing that is definitely not free in today’s world is the ability to communicate. You are more than screwed if you don’t have a computer or a smartphone and internet service and WiFi. None of those things are cheap. Multiply the cost of them by the number of people in your family and deduct that from the actual salary that you are getting. You might be able to just break even if you live in a garbage can like Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street. No utility bills, no car, and…never mind. Oscar probably can’t manage either.

I would really like to see a world where everyone including beings like Zoonie had good homes and people like Venus to see to it that they can live a decent and worthwhile life regardless of their circumstances. That really isn’t too much to ask for from humanity. I never heard anyone tell Venus in Fireball XL5 that she was stupid for taking care of Zoonie. His life mattered as much as anyone’s. We have a cat that we named Zoonie. He is one of a litter of four boys and we love him dearly. One of his brothers is a bit of an efficiency and organization fanatic. He rearranges things in their room all the time but he never gets scrappy with the others if they happen to nudge him out of the way at mealtimes. In cat culture he may be the best at “keeping house” and “keeping the peace” but that does not lessen the contribution that Zoonie and his other two brothers give to their and our lives. Capitalism shouldn’t be a mandatory way of life. Everyone has something good and needed in this world to give. Whether it is Zoonie the Lazoon or Zoonie the cat or any one of us that exist, do not judge them by their strengths and weaknesses and then discount them as useless because they don’t possess the skills to keep someone else wealthy. Like Venus, know that they matter for the mere fact that they are here. And get rid of the word lazy. Every life deserves the best that we can give.  No one has the right to take us for everything that we have or covet a world where we are continuously forced on to the endangered species list for their continued gain.

Just for fun, here is an episode of Fireball XL5.

     

 

Caring for everyone is possible. We just need to strive for making selfishness impossible by setting a better example.

“This means giving up no freedom except the freedom to act irresponsibly.”                          

                    -from the film The Day the Earth Stood Still.

“We were never holding back, worried that, time would come to an end.”

-from the song Being Boring by Pet Shop Boys

In a recent video posted on the YouTube channel Life After Layoff, the series host told a story about people having been hired for a job out of state, quitting their current jobs and moving to another city to start the new position then finding out that the job offer had been rescinded before they were ever able to start work, leaving them high and dry and unemployed with no guilt whatsoever on the part of the employer. For anyone who is seeking a better employment future for their self this is the ultimate horror. In the current job market now, this is probably much more common than we might imagine. It also happens that sometimes you are actually able to take the job but for whatever whim that strikes the fancy of the employer they might terminate your position within a few weeks or a month without giving a damn about the consequences to your life.

Many years ago, actor Bob Hoskins was hired for a role in a major motion picture but before he could start working the producer/director of the film decided to give the role to someone else.  Bob was given an apology and a substantial amount of money anyway for his time and trouble. I wish I could remember the name of the film and its producer because I really think that the way they handled the situation was truly fair and commendable. It should be a law that anyone who gets treated like they have no worth as far as making a living goes must be paid the equivalent of two years salary by the corporate perpetrator who plays games with people’s lives and walks away clean. It is too bad that in today’s world of apathy and no empathy for fellow human beings and the tragedy that is life in the 21st century we could all take a lesson in how decent and honest people handle situations that can make or break a human being as they do their best to navigate this life and try to live the best life that they can.

If you were born in the 20th century you can probably remember people, possibly your parents or grandparents, who had worked at the same place for years and sometimes decades. Many of them were fortunate enough to retire with a pension and a paid for home. This was not a legacy that was passed on to later generations. My daughter told me recently that she cannot remember any time in her life when the kind of troubles that we have now didn’t exist. Certainly what we have now is worse but she is correct about things being in a constant state of turmoil and fear since the beginning of this century. We cannot be sure from one day to the next what kind of fresh hell is going to hit us in the morning and the people in this country are extremely divided on why this is so and how to fix it. There is a category of people who are hell bent on destroying any possibility for security and stability for the majority of us. On the other side there are the rest of us who keep trying to duck and dodge our way through the mind-boggling deluge of hate and disregard for whether or not we live or die while they set about destroying our security and wellbeing one piece at a time every single day. Just like the lyrics from the song written above there was actually a time when we felt reasonably sure that we didn’t have to constantly fear for our very lives. We did have “time to find for ourselves” and we weren’t “worried that time would come to an end” because we were not in a position of constant terror like we are now. Most people were truly not thinking that they wouldn’t be able to have a job or a career at some point. It just did not occur to them that they could not or would not be able to work and sustain themselves somehow. Jobs may not have been easy to find but they were out there. We just needed to prepare with an education. There were many of us who saw this coming in the 1990s but we were in no position to stop it. Those who had the power to stop it were the very people who were creating it, so we had to watch the downfall as it came and try as we might to save our children from it as we entered the 21st century we were not able to.

Human behavior has changed so much in the last two decades that I find myself looking back and remembering when it was actually possible to “rely on a friend” but as I look around, I realize that most of the people that I could rely on are gone. They have moved away or died. Is this why things have gotten so terrible? Is it because the people who knew how to care don’t exist in my world anymore or is it that the traits of caring people have been unlearned and are evolving out of the culture? If the latter is true, I can tell you that there is no hope for us without a deadly civil war brought about by those of us who still remember a better way. What a tragedy. I see and hear experts walking carefully around the promotion of taking to the streets to begin that war but there is no denying that they are tailoring their speech to say that this is all that we have left to us if we are ever going to come out of these deadly times and bring forth a world where we can believe that our time won’t come to an end while we try to prevent the inevitability of it.

When you cannot trust that you will have employment to sustain you or income of any kind be it from working or from the benevolence of a government that understands that everyone must have a way to take care of themselves properly you are just a few baby steps away from annihilation.  When you cannot trust that you will have a decent place to live or clean water or something to eat or a way to sustain your health there is nothing left to keep you living for much longer. I keep hearing that we have no other recourse for this other than a situation like the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution. That says to me that our days are truly numbered because a great many of us are not capable of living through such a thing. What can we do while the battle is raging? You only need to look to the east of us to see our future. How are those who are engaged in these kinds of wars right now holding up even as the whole world takes to the streets and condemns what is happening? There is no benevolent and prosperous United States to escape to now as there was during World War II. Life will only be as good as we are able to make it by relearning the basic human traits of civility and hard work as the basis for having and keeping a safer place to live. If we don’t re-learn that and do it damn fast we won’t have the luxury of looking back and declaring that “we were never being boring” because we sure as hell won’t be able to remember a time when we weren’t worried to high heaven that our “time would come to an end”. “Feeling boring” is the least of our problems. Feeling singled out for extinction is problem number one.

And Who Will Save Greece?

A few months ago, I wrote on this blog about Inishbiggle Island off the coast of Ireland and how the Irish government refuses to help the few remaining residents there who are struggling and not winning the battle to save their home. I asked why the people who speak every day about how only Socialism can save the planet now are not stepping up to save a place that could survive if they would turn their attention away from talking about what needs to be done and actually doing it. Inishbiggle is a small place, but it is not without some resources to try to jumpstart itself again. I have to assume that the reason no one will help them try to start again is because the only people who could help are Capitalists and they are unwilling to lift a finger without an assurance that they would make large profits for themselves in the doing. I look around here in America and in other countries such as Greece and I see and hear about how they are also teetering on the brink of collapse, with thousands of their citizens leaving the countries by the day. Are we not long for the end of our perceived paradise homes as well? It seems as though no one who could change things has any desire to do so as they have pretty much tapped out all of their sources that could produce more wealth for them, so they seem content to sit on their assets in their arrogance and look for new opportunities to acquire profit by seeking to steal it from their people and other countries instead of picking up the pieces of their collapsing houses and refurbishing what is already there. But that is not the capitalist way of doing things.

Journalist David Brooks of the New York Times said (reluctantly and halfheartedly) last year that society made a great error in assuming that manufacturing was no longer the way to a brighter future for Americans. He, and far too many others, projected that what we really needed here was more intellectuals and technology experts to create a great and prosperous future for ourselves. As a result, everyone was encouraged to go to college and pursue “thinking” careers instead of manufacturing and industrial ones. After several decades of doing just that we find ourselves in deep financial insecurity across the board when we realize that we have lost too many of the very things that built this country. There are not enough skilled people to maintain our infrastructure and keep and maintain a thriving middle class. Nobody wants to do these “crap jobs” as they are called anymore. Supposedly, the only people who are willing to work in agriculture, construction, and other “crap jobs” are immigrants, and we don’t want them here. If we ever allowed them to better themselves, they would also want to escape from low wage and dead-end jobs and go to college to become thinkers and talkers, too. We were pushed into believing that maintaining a balanced society was for someone else to do. It worked. We believed it. And now we have thousands of people here who are overburdened with college debt and an inability to find a job that pays them enough to give them a decent standard of living or they cannot find a job at all. It is helpful that David Brooks came to realize that our elitist thinking helped to create the terrible situation that we find ourselves in now, but if he proffered a real solution for how we can get ourselves out of this situation I did not see it.

Before I began writing this essay I went back and revisited a post that I wrote in 2015 called “An Open Letter To Greece." I am sure that if there were any politicians or economists who happened to see this post they were probably thinking “Who the hell is this woman, and how could she be so crazy as to believe that any of this is possible in the real world?”  It is now 10 years later and I honestly do not believe that anything I suggested in that letter was any more ridiculous than what I have been seeing out of politicians and the ruling classes over the past decade when you consider that the actions that they actually took to address their problems did not do a hill of beans good as they still have the same problems that are now coupled with more debt and the loss of thousands of their citizens who are leaving the country in droves. Believe me, America has been no better at fixing their problems either, but several wrongs do not make a right anywhere, and the people are so much worse off now that I don’t even know if handing them a farm in the Australian Outback for $1.00 would make a difference today.

In the aftermath of WW2 most of Europe was nearly destroyed. How to build back up from that had to look like a most daunting task. Germany had to take a hard look at itself and own up to how badly their actions had devastated so much. They actually did take a hard look. The Nuremberg Trials were proof of that. A great many people were held accountable for their actions. It is my understanding that they also did not try to whitewash what they did like many other countries have done. Their schools taught later generations the truth of what happened and Germany was rebuilt and rethought as to how they would not make the same mistakes again. That absolutely may not be the way things are there now, but back in the 20th century there was an admirable effort on their part to do better and live in peace. And it appeared that the rest of the world supported their efforts.

So, when I hear now that Greece cannot (or will not) take the necessary steps to backtrack and assess what has kept them on the edge of a cliff for far too long, I cannot help but wonder why they, and yes, everyone else who is pretty much in the same sinking boat, still refuse to look back and then look ahead to how a dose of Socialism might redirect them into a situation with a future. In case they haven’t noticed, there really is no capitalist solution to what they now have. Without elevating the standard of living for the people who do the actual work in this world you will never not be in crisis. At the risk of being called a racist for daring to bring up the film Gone With The Wind, when it depicted a time of slavery and absurd thinking on the part of the American South, I cannot think of a better example of where we are now as a society. After the Civil War ended and the entire South was decimated, Scarlett O’Hara went home to try to pick up the pieces of the family plantation and their lost way of life and she is asked by one of the house servants “Who gonna milk that cow, Miss Scarlett? We is house workers.” Here is the truth of a people who were so preoccupied with their graciousness and grandiosity that they never counted on losing their slaves. The very people who were smart enough and skilled enough to see to it that there was food to eat and their house was clean and well maintained so they could sit around in the parlor and smoke cigars and set the rules for living that everyone else had to abide by could no longer be relied on.  Here we are again. The people who actually knew how to do important things have “run off” or been kicked aside as useless by all of the superior thinkers. How long will it be before we cannot find anyone who knows how to milk a cow, or change a tire, or anything else that requires life skills and the intelligence of how things work and how to maintain them? Not long, I would think. We already have junkyards full of over-priced cars, auto mechanics who are so overwhelmed with work that it can be two or three weeks before you can get an appointment with them to bring your car in for much needed repairs, and landfills that are specifically for non-working electronics because there is a shortage of people who know anything about how to fix them. People know how to use them, but they find that it is faster and more efficient to just discard them rather than wait for some overworked tech person to try to repair them. Not to mention the fact that many things that we rely on daily are part of a “planned obsolescence” theory that wants you to never stop needing to replace them after a short period of time so their profits never stop pouring in.

So, back to my original question, who will save Greece? You might want to look for a Jeffrey Sachs, who helped pull Poland out of their financial crisis in the 1980’s by telling them to ask for debt forgiveness from their creditors, and they actually got it. But you will have to remember that you cannot go back to your capitalist practices once you get straight or you will find yourself back where you were. For any country that finds itself teetering on the brink of collapse like Greece, and like America, and too many others, you might look around to see if you have a “Jeffrey Sachs” available there. Greece does have Yanis Varoufakis, if he still lives there. And America actually has Jeffrey, but I don’t see anyone listening to him except the progressive media and people like me. Pray that it isn’t already too late for us to find some “field hands” who actually know how to do something to set things right. Without them, forget about having any milk to drink when you mindlessly threw the baby and the cow out with the bath water.

"I don't care if you die."

-This was said to an anti-capitalist protester by a wealthy resident of Nantucket Island

This is a dreadful time for people right now.  Unfortunately, most of the troubles are not new. They have just gotten much worse. Too many people continuously blame people in need for having the need, which most of the people doing the blaming are responsible for creating. On the other end of the spectrum there are the have-nots who are angry for being have-nots and being aggressive about it to any random person that they may encounter, just because. Having worked in the American legal system in years past and in the social services system I can tell you that most of the people who came and went through the places that I worked were nearly all guilty as hell of being aggressive, hateful, smug, snotty, impatient, threatening, and condescending. Numerous times I and my co-workers and supervisors had our lives threatened for just being there and trying to help and do our jobs. I’ve had people tell me that they knew where I lived and if I didn’t give them what they wanted they would show up at my house. When I worked in the Circuit Clerk’s office, we used to get letters from incarcerated people saying that when they got out of prison, they were going to kill us, the prosecutor, and the judge who sentenced them. I saw a great deal of hostility from attorneys who just felt like being jackasses on any given day if it took longer than they wanted to bother with to process their documents. I left the legal profession after a few years without ever looking back because it was damn tiring to be in the line of fire just about every day by someone who, as they say, had a ”cob crossways." I saw citizens, lawyers, civic leaders, police officers, social elites, doctors, ministers, and children get carted off to jail and I wondered if anyone in the entire town was actually nice or law abiding when it came down to it. An attorney that I worked with and admired very much was arrested and sent to prison for embezzling child support funds. Socially prominent doctors were getting sued for malpractice on a regular basis and to see them in public you would think that they didn’t give one big damn about being accused of causing the death or injury of anyone. Most of them settled out of court with the plaintiffs, and once their cases were settled it wasn’t a shock to find myself filing legal papers against them again after a few months or a year. One of the biggest recipients of malpractice suits against him was also the head of the local Republican Party. A doctor that I had worked with many times was arrested and sent to prison for “loan lapping” along with a prominent local banker. I lived in one corrupt little town, for sure. Wealthy big shots were charged with sexual harassment, indecent exposure, and pedophilia frequently. There was lots of gossip and giggling about them behind their backs but I don’t remember anyone in their social groups reacting like it was a terrible thing and they should be punished. They didn’t care. It didn’t happen to them. Is it any wonder that there is no peace anywhere on the planet now since people have never bothered to address this kind of hell that just keeps getting worse?

I have only had health insurance coverage three times in my life. Each time it was very short lived. I had it twice for a short period of time because it was tied to employment on short lived jobs. When my husband had a heart attack, he was fired from his job for being unable to work. His employer did not give a damn about it at all except he wanted me to return the company vehicle. I had to come home from out of state (where my husband was in the hospital) and get my stepfather to drive the vehicle back for me because I did not know how to drive a standard transmission. There were no condolences sent or a final paycheck given. The only thing that saved me from financial catastrophe and emotional collapse was that we qualified for Medicaid because we had two young children. Because of that, the whole family received coverage. Medicaid was a god send. My husband was in the hospital for four months before he died. He was suffering from heart disease, liver disease, kidney disease and uncontrollable diabetes. After his heart surgery all of his major organs began to fail and I was told that a liver transplant might be his only chance. As it turned out, he didn’t have a chance at all. He was only 38 years old. As devastating as all of this was for me, one thing that helped save my sanity was the fact that Medicaid paid for all of his medical care except $255.00 for blood transfusions that he received. I couldn’t believe it. I nearly fell out of my chair when I saw the bill, and cried uncontrollably. I never expected them to pay the thousands of dollars that we were charged. I am still so grateful to this day that they did. I can tell you for a fact that it wouldn’t happen now. In the state where I live today, they are throwing people off the Medicaid rolls right and left by the hundreds of thousands, eliminating desperately needed care for infants, children, pregnant women, disabled people, and the elderly. They don’t give one damn if these people live or die. In their mind, it serves them right for having the audacity to be sick and poor. It breaks my heart to see this happening knowing that there used to be a semblance of decency in some places. You can thank corporate lobbyists and wealthy elitists like the man in Nantucket for this. They bought government cooperation in their quest to deny people in need in order to stay ungodly wealthy and superior. You can also blame the government for allowing themselves to be bought. Lobbying should be outlawed because too many people are willing to sell their souls for a profit. I have seen this time and time again throughout my life. Once people get a taste of affluence and a welcome into elitist circles, they more often than not feel a new entitlement to never look back upon the time when they may have had an actual heart. They continue to believe that they are still good people, it is just that somehow the people that they rose above are irrelevant now and do not deserve to do as well as they are. I cannot say that the people who have turned the insurance companies into multibillion dollar establishments ever really had a caring and generous heart, but I know that some state and federal entities used to. Now, very few of them do. These people are not really any different from the people in the corrupt little town that I used to live in. Much of the problem is that they have never really been held accountable in their own peer group and since that is the only group that keeps them in wealth and power, no one else matters. It is a narcissist’s game, and it is the only game that they want to play. So, who can stop them from being this way? A person with a gun? No. That just happened and they are appalled that they are being called on to account for their cruelty and selfish behavior. It will take a refusal to let them lobby/buy their way out of this by their peers and our government to stop their behavior. Without the rest of the elitists rediscovering their own humanity and humility and discontinuing to turn a blind eye to these tragedies we will never get beyond the situation that turns the rest of us into desperate and furious people who will at some point start a class war that can only end in the death of this nation. It has already begun. Those who can stop this are not yet willing to. Bottom line, you just have to be human enough to not take the damn money!

We are coming to the close of this year and I wonder how much money people will be spending on gifts and gadgets for Christmas that people do not need. If the insurance companies would take the money that they have collected and hoarded from all of the people whose only wish was to be well again and put it into a government fund, not the pockets of politicians, to create the single payer healthcare system that we want and desperately need we could immediately do away with a great many of the serious situations that we now find ourselves in.  Medicare for all sounds like the perfect solution for America but I actually believe that Medicaid for all would be the better choice. I have seen firsthand that what it used to be can be like a miracle without monthly premiums, co-payments, and deductibles. The companies would still have homeowner’s and automobile insurance to stay in business. Lower the 10 - 20-million-dollar CEO salaries to a reasonable amount to maintain a comfortable living. No one on the planet needs that much money to live on. Also, return the hospitals and medical practitioners back to nonprofit.

Before it becomes too late to stop a troubled citizen from taking a desperate stand on our immigration crisis there needs to be an emergency solution proffered to rebalance the system. We need to create a coalition of citizens who believe in and support immigration to step in and take responsibility for how badly we have bungled our current policies. These people really need to be willing to sponsor immigrants one person or one family at a time. This can be done legally. Every person that strongly believes in freely allowing immigrants to come to their country needs to also realize that to promote this has to mean that they will take some responsibility for the support of every immigrant; financial responsibility and integration in to communities’ responsibility. Our tax dollars designated to address the situation have been blown to hell by incompetent administrators who use the bulk of the money to pay capitalist entities to do a half-ass job and rake in much of the money for their own pockets. What we have created and allowed to happen with haphazard rules and policies so far is ruining lives and ending lives. Do not designate yourself as a sanctuary city or country without proving that you have a support system in place to manage it. Countries and societies are collapsing under the weight of what we have allowed to happen up to now. Criminal opportunists are taking advantage of the incredible chaos and getting elected to positions that they are not qualified to manage even if they really wanted to. If you support immigration, really support it by sponsoring these people who only want a better home and way of life. Your governments are not capable of solving this problem. They have proven that.

We are going to have a new government administration in January and if the current President and government officials wanted to, they could do much here at the 11th hour to set this country upon a different path. Right now, is truly our only opportunity. After January 20th you can kiss goodbye the possibility of ever righting the wrongs here because there aren’t enough people in America who understand the hell that they asked for on November 5th. Nonviolent people  in prison right now whose only crime was protesting unfair treatment and discrimination should be given clemency. Eliminate all for profit correctional facilities. Hold the money hoarders in this country accountable for their unwillingness to pay taxes, give a living wage and fewer work hours to everyone who works, and give an equivalent of the living wage to those who cannot work for whatever reason. Raise Social Security payments to that level as well. Eliminate student debt and medical debt. If you can imagine these things, you can do them. If you cannot imagine them, then peace will never be imaginable on this planet either.

While it is painfully evident that too many people do not care if you live or die or starve to death or become homeless now, there was a time when it wasn’t so fashionable to be this way. If you were always so uncaring like this it was at least not so supported by most people to brazenly show it. We really must hold each other accountable for the consequences of what we have created. So many horrific crimes against humanity go unpunished because our society doesn’t recognize them as crimes because they are being committed by the wealthy, the powerful, and the elitists. We turn a blind eye and let it continue because holding them accountable requires a different mindset toward their perceived superiority. When a “David” takes a stand to stop a ”Goliath” we need to recognize that it came to this because of our continued inaction to correct inhumanity and fascism. What ever crime you think that “David” has committed to stop these problems is a small price to pay for eliminating a terrible injustice. Put your pitchforks away because the law does recognize “justifiable homicide” when that is the only thing that will stop the mass murder of countless others. Learn to recognize what it takes to right a dreadful wrong. The solution isn’t always pretty and you cannot assume that evil always has an ugly face.  Putting people before profit is the only solution. Only “David” had the courage to stop the giant. We created that giant and looked away when he stepped on and killed thousands. Thank God that somebody felt compelled to step in and try to call a halt to the even bigger crime, but we need so many more of them.

There is no better time to right what is wrong than this moment, while we have Christmas to help us remember that caring and giving is (at least it used to be) a human tradition. Wake up on Christmas morning with a renewed sense of self-worth and esteem by being an integral part of a world that has decided to build up instead of tear down. Realize that peace will be your reward. Hatred and death does not have to be the legacy of this generation. There really can be a Merry Christmas to all and it can last well beyond the holiday season. We only need to make it so.

                                                                       🎄🕊️

"ILL" Gotten Gains

The recent killing of Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Healthcare has truly been a shock here in America. At least it has been for the capitalist class who believe themselves to be worthy of worship in the world. The rest of us aren’t too terribly surprised by this event. What is surprising is that it didn’t happen long before now. A young man has been arrested and charged with 2nd degree murder for the killing, but this entire situation could have been avoided if we lived in a society that cared enough about its people to eliminate the mental and financial torture that gets worse by the minute in America because of capitalism. This is one of the few times in my life that I have felt like a terrible something that someone did was not a crime so much as the only result that could follow an ongoing abuse that was put upon the perpetrator and countless others who knew of no other response to their trauma. Three other instances of justifiable crimes were the ordeals of Patty Hearst, Francine Hughes, and an elderly man in California who killed a neighbor for constantly terrorizing and threatening everyone in the neighborhood. I am sure that there are thousands more incidents like these that just didn’t make it to the national news. Their circumstances are different, but fear and abuse were at the core of all of these tragedies. There always comes a point when a human being can no longer manage the torture being forced upon them. When your health and wellbeing and your very life are threatened and controlled by uncaring others, a break will inevitably come.

Filmmaker Michael Moore’s documentary “Sicko” gave us a very hard look at the health insurance industry in America years ago and it was not a pretty sight. It was the first documentary of his in all the films that he has made that quickly brought me to tears. How humans can treat each other with such disregard and a “don’t give a shit” attitude when it comes to some of the most basic of human needs such as health and wellness is inconceivable to me. They absolutely can and do, though, and there is one man out there who said loudly to them “how dare you!” last week.

I was very surprised that it was a McDonald’s employee who called the police on the suspect. There are probably thousands of people in this country who would hide this man in their homes or give him resources to prevent his capture or swear in court that he was with them at the time of the shooting playing video games or watching Netflix. If the shooter goes to trial for this, few people will want to convict him. You can’t blame them. With the exception of Wendell Potter (who blew the whistle on the insurance companies years ago) and Michael Moore, there has really not been anyone here who has bothered to do anything about the “legalized extortion” that has frustrated, traumatized, prolonged illnesses, and been responsible for the deaths of possibly millions of people like the insurance industry has. Our government turns a blind eye to it all and hungrily accepts their payoffs when the insurance moguls say “frog." (for those who may not be familiar with this old saying, it is a reference to calling out people who can be bought, as in, when the people who are offering money to get a pass on their unacceptable behavior call upon you to cover their asses all they have to do is say “frog” and you will say “how high?” meaning you are more than willing to jump as high as they would like you to in order to collect the cash for doing it.) I am sure that most Americans are hoping that this event will shake up the country enough to bring about a total change in the healthcare industry now and create a national single payer system for everyone. I am afraid that I cannot be that optimistic. I would love to be, but I cannot imagine monied people suddenly finding their better angels now and vowing to do right by others just because one millionaire capitalist was killed for his apathy toward the people that he screwed over and caused the death of for his own profit. As it turns out, this man was one of the lower paid millionaires in the industry. His salary was only 10 million per year. Most of the other CEOs in the large insurance companies make more than 20 million per year. They might be afraid of being gunned down by an “at-the-end-of-their-rope” citizen, but they are most likely too arrogant to believe that it could ever happen to them. Pretty sickening to know that, and even more sickening to know that our heartsick illness isn’t covered in any insurance plan. Having arrested someone for the shooting so quickly pretty much means that not enough time will have elapsed for there to be any sort of wakeup call or remorse on the part of the insurance companies toward their guilt at causing an incident like this to have happened.

So, with Christmas being two weeks away is there any hope that the elitists and capitalists in this country will now do an about face like Ebeneezer Scrooge did when he got a look at how uncaring and cruel, he had been to others, and become the kind of people who will make amends for all of their past crimes against humanity? The “miracle of Christmas” that they talk about in literature and film would have to go quite a stretch to bring that about, but I would love to believe in the possibility. We could all ask the Universe to send them three spirits to show them how they have wronged us. We could also send them a link to the song below and pray for a humbling of their hearts. We need to bring about a miracle because talking hasn’t made any difference. The man who was arrested will now suffer the modern-day equivalent of a crucifixion for what has happened. Some people are calling on President Biden to pardon him, but I wouldn’t even bet a nickel on that. Jesus had the remote opportunity to be saved if the citizens had wanted it but they didn’t. They chose to save the career criminal Barabbas instead. So many people have no idea how much unnecessary trouble they continuously cause in the world by not understanding who they are, what they are, and why they are here. There is a connectedness between all of us that mostly goes unspoken and unheard. Suffering is always the outcome of this ignorance. What a shame that it always takes catastrophe and death to knock some sense into us, and even then, it never resonates with everyone.

Invited to Inishbiggle Island

YouTuber Bertie Brosnan posted a video a few days ago about Inishbiggle Island, off the coast of Ireland. (See Video Here) The name of the island sounds very whimsical like a place you would read about in a fairytale, but its story is anything but cute. It is an island with less than 20 inhabitants now and according to Bertie it is one without hope. He says that the Irish government has washed its hands of it and its people. How could this be happening? The whole world is ablaze with news stories and protests about the plight of thousands of immigrants who have made their way to just about every country on the planet seeking shelter and a new life. Billions of dollars have been spent on trying to help and accommodate them, and a great many people are angry to find them living in their countries. I honestly do not know how the world will be able to solve this crisis, but I am pretty confident that there are many people who would know how to save the island of Inishbiggle and it’s inhabitants if they were willing to look into their left-wing philosophies regarding how countries and governments across the globe have made an incredible mess in their world by focusing only on their own self interests. I have a few suggestions for the people who speak daily about how we need to do away with inequality and capitalism by remaking the world with socialism. My views are strictly the product of years of caring and observing people and the world. Expert minds in the fields of sociology and economics would probably be able to write the book on how to save Inishbiggle Island from a total demise. I am counting on that, if they are also believers in socialism and Marxism and communism. Here is their opportunity to start from scratch to remake a place that capitalism no longer wants and turn it into a place where cooperation and sustainability can be the model for the world to see.

When you watch the video, you will see that transportation from the island to mainland Ireland is a critical issue that has to be addressed. Where most countries have been digging their own graves for decades by their dependence on fossil fuels, I am certain that there are some very learned people out there who know a solution for how to solve the issue of being able to commute to the mainland in the most sustainable and eco-friendly way. Billionaires who own private islands have managed to power their estates and travel to and from their mansions. Can we not do the same for the socialist model city that we would be seeking to create? Someone once accused Senator Bernie Sanders of being the only millionaire socialist in the world. I don’t know if that is true but I can tell you if he is not alone in that it would be helpful if they would put some of their money where their mouth is. It usually takes a person who has experienced poverty to comprehend that it is even a problem.

The possibilities here are endless if the people who teach and promote better living without capitalism truly mean what they say. We can spend the rest of our lives trying to convince the “haves” in this world to step down from their pedestal and acknowledge the “have nots” by talking until we are blue in the face but where has all the talk and statistics gotten us since Karl Marx died? Bertie Brosnan is showing us an incredible starting point for all of our socialist ideals to manifest into a reality. There is no reason why some people who understand the dynamics of how to set up a society that can govern itself and sustain itself to the benefit of all can’t put their knowledge and skills to the test of what they are truly capable of when a place like Inishbiggle Island exists and is as available as an orphaned or abandoned child to be rescued and given the opportunity to live and thrive in a way that so many of us wish we could experience. Time on earth for humans is short, and when all of our talk and conjecture about how wonderful this life could be isn’t manifesting because our voices fall on too many deaf ears there has to be someone or someones to step up and say “we can do this” or our talk has been for nothing. Bless you Bertie Brosnan for showing a need that really can be addressed and built into the very model of what can be if we will put out less talk and more action into the things that we have been promoting and saying for more than a century. If you truly want to see a change, be that change and make it happen. Inishbiggle Island is waiting.