Anecdotes:
Michigan’s
financial crisis is long from being over. I know where of I speak. I know of
very productive folk who have been without a decent paying job going on for
five years. I know a first-time homeless person who became ill subsequent to
losing a job they had loyally worked at for thirty years. The company had gone
out of business and leaving this person without insurance. The illness resulted
in losing everything. Then they became homeless. I have a friend who ran to
Florida in the hopes of finding work – he found a part-time job after two and
half years. He is on the outskirts of homelessness. I have a family member- a
professional - who has been out of work for over a year in Georgia pushing the
family to bankruptcy. I know a woman who ate nothing but potato chips last
night for dinner and a class of pop – it was free. She’s on the verge of losing
her place to live because she can only get a near full time job at minimum wage
driving a medical transport van. Her passengers love her but that doesn’t pay
her rent, utilities, food, insurance, repairs, etc. Recently she was given
a van and the State welfare told her she would be losing her food stamps
because she has this “new” to her van. She needs the van to get to work. She
closed her checking account because it was too expensive to try and maintain.
However, when she went to pay for her “new” to her van insurance she was told
that she would have to pay 30% more money for her insurance due to her not have
an ACH debit-able account. Every way she turns there is another impediment. She
has no health insurance….
The
synopsis headline of Vermont Senator Bernie Sander’s statement to his fellow
legislators, “Is poverty a death sentence?” https://www.commondreams.org/
view/2011/09/14-6. The answer to
this question is talk to the family of a friend who died of breast cancer and
left behind two teenagers and an ailing father. She could not afford a mammogram
until she had insurance but it was too late – the diagnosis nay verdict was stage
4 metastasized cancers. She was among the working poor…poverty’s death sentence
victim.
State
Issues:
Mr.
Michigan Governor what are you and your cronies thinking when you lay the
burden for budget cuts on those who can least afford it? You are treating the
citizens of Michigan not unlike those employees you left behind in your deal to
sell the sick Gateway computer out to a Chinese computer manufacturer. The egotistical
ethical position of “If it doesn’t hurt me and my buddies it is ok” to do what
we want. I believe many or most of the well-to-do in Michigan would be willing
to pay an extra few percent in taxes to bolster the state coffers. Hence, as
Shakespeare asked, “If you prick us cut do we not [all] bleed?” We are a
brother/sisterhood reliant on each other for this society of mutual support.
How many families will suffer the trauma of homelessness, causing children in
poverty to experience more than the average 6 meals missed a week – raising angry
children as a result? I will say another truism - we will reap the whirlwind by
subjugating the poor to the whims of a governor and legislative men and women
who know from where their next meals for a lifetime are coming.
National
issues:
Poverty
is a national issue that encompasses Michigan. Juan Williams, regardless of
your political bias, attempted a musical metaphorical opinion piece in The
Hill: http://thehill.com/opinion/columnists/
juan-williams/182221-poverty-met-with-deafening-silence. The cacophony of
self interest of the last several months which has risen from the discordant
legislators of Washington and elsewhere is stunning: Worthy of double takes, for
their blatantly inhumane disregard about the collateral damage their actions
have wreaked. There is no harmony emanating from these bastions of power and
control with few spirituals being sung except as prayers for relief by the
poor.
Stephen
C. Foster’s chorus from “Hard Times Come Again No More” addressed hardship passionately
in 1854:
Chorus:
Tis the song, the sigh of the weary,
Hard Times, hard times, come again no more
Many days you have lingered around my cabin door;
Oh hard times come again no more.
Tis the song, the sigh of the weary,
Hard Times, hard times, come again no more
Many days you have lingered around my cabin door;
Oh hard times come again no more.
Full lyrics:
Edison cylinder recording:
Universal
Solution:
Churches – how about the church
of one – which we all are if one reads the book? Point of order to consider is well
put in a recent facebook message:
Deborah Jane Choate Shepherd via Andrew Kronenwetter 23 Sept. 2011
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