Is It Bad? Is It Wrong?...One Foot Still Firmly Planted in the Other America...head in the Cotton Candy Clouds...

I was running around today...through the treadmill of what has become of our social services, and looking up as I drove away from the project town, a beautiful cousin was looking forlornly down from the little white house at the thugs next door who always hang on the steps and always have the thud, thud, thud of rap shaking the house, and knowing that the grandmother is working 24 hours per day till Saturday, and the mother is sort of a wreck, kicked out of her housing in Bridgeport...I looked up as I was driving away from this masterpiece of social engineering, and I thought to myself, how long till she comes down to hang with the guys, ends up pregnant or jumped into a gang? Is she the one with enough resilience to stand her ground and go through the horrible schools and maybe, just maybe, get to college? ....will she be the one to get out?
I drove away with Ben...the chosen one, because I have grown to love him gradually over time, and quite by accident...and why should it be just him?
Well there we were hauling $270 worth of groceries, that I hope will hold them through the Kos weekend along with some pizza and maybe a little Chinese food here and there. Two 13 year old boys eat alot more than you'd think....and how does Ben's mom do it on so little income and so many other kids to feed?
The radio came on and I heard the end of a report about Roberts having fallen at his Maine summer place. I held my breath because I don't want to be someone who hopes for the worst...and away we went to the pharmacy when the 1010 WINS finally came round again to the story and, shushing Ben, I raised my hands and yelled "Seizure!! That could be a stroke or a tumor!!"
Then I felt bad.
Is it wrong?

Ben said something about my reaction and I just looked at him and said something to the effect of, you know, this man represents someone who wants to take your rights away and keep us all trapped in the little box where he thinks god intended us to be..and that he is in his spot forever and is a Bush person.
I stopped and thought to myself, could we be lucky enough to just lose one by accident or by medical tragedy?...maybe he could hold on just long enough to expire when the dems take over.

And so, now I am who Bill O'Reilly says I am.

And he is already fully recovered. It was a known problem and he probably takes medication for it, and its perfectly controlled or he wouldn't have been nominated to the position that he is in.

Today I managed to get little done and come away from what I did feeling really disappointed and downtrodden. My son, Will, is really feeling badly and we've been up at night every night. I'm worried about leaving him, but I think I have to go...and that maybe part of his anxiety is that I am going...
And I have alot of busywork to do involving printing cards and writing up directions about dog food and how to get to appointments.
Then I got a call from Ben saying that his Mom has an emergency and needs me to call her at work...oh, and could I please come and get him because he is alone with his cousins and its so noisy that he cant ready, and hasn't slept....
It turned out, from what I could understand, that she had gotten a notice when she got home on Saturday that she had been behind on the electric bill and that the power was going to be turned off today. She spoke to the electric company and they told her that she had to pay $500 immediately or the power would be gone by the end of today. There she was at work, knowing that everything is precariously balanced and thinking that she would pay what she could by Saturday when she got her welfare checks for the 2 grand kids ($600...$500 of which she had just found out she would have to give to the electric company,) and since she had screwed up the "arrangement" that she had made during her medical crisis in May, she was stone out of luck.
Here is the deal: An "arrangement" with Connecticut Light and Power is what happens when there is no work and you have been sick so cant make the sporadic payments that you usually make just before its too late, as you juggle too many bills, too many kids, and not enough services.
The budget program isn't even an option because you can never quite pay off the arrangement, and every time you are late you sink deeper and deeper towards losing everything....because this is not the only "arrangement" that you've got going.

The very root of this sort of thing smacks of the Company Store that enables but never really gives you an out unless you win the lottery... and there is nothing to do to get out of the hole no matter how hard any one tries. So, why try? Why strive for the American dream or anything? And this is what leads to the thugs who wander the streets and have outstanding warrants for this and that. This is what leads to the accidental pregnancy, the random shooting, the robbery and jail time. But most of all, this is what leads to the anger out of helplessness...and stories of a deported sister who stabbed someone and was jailed and then deported; and that's how that little grandchild came to be here, motherless and an America citizen, but stuck in the other America, which, even as it is, beats the hell out of Haiti right now....

When I called the electric company, I hit the same wall that she had. But I am articulate and was able to implore the woman to look at all possibilities....things that might never get mentioned to someone who speaks broken English and who is making a call from work to keep the lights on for the children that she wont see until Saturday (and did I mention that her pay works out to around $4 an hour before taxes?) got mentioned and I wasn't going away or backing down.
The deal is that there might be some program here in town, and indeed, even the electric company has people who speak French Creole, if one knows that they should ask for that, but it all involves going on the Internet, or going to the government center, and being able to have the translator call at a particular time, and one has to pay for a new pay-as-you-go card for the cell phone...yes, that is 25 cents a minute...because its expensive to be poor and to have no credit.

The deal was that she actually had, over the past couple of years of not having work and not having money, not taking her medication for blood pressure, getting sick, going to school to get the certification for this $4 an hour job, racked up a bill for over $800...and the last "arrangement was for just a few months to take $300 per month, which equals one child's total monthly upkeep, just for the electric bill, to try to make this up. This unreasonable plan could not possibly succeed, but at a point I think that people will just take whatever is offered for fear of having their electricity cut off by the man. I knew that I could offer $20 per month to pay off the balance, and they would have to take it, but the deal that they offered would still make her pay $500 to keep the power on because she had to pay off the last "arrangement" as per "company policy"
The woman was very apologetic, but couldn't budge. Since I am leaving town I am not able to go and barge into the government center tomorrow and figure this out in some reasonable way....I know that there are some services or charities to help with things like this...small loans to set people free, perhaps?
I kept asking a million questions about different possibilities, and finally I said that it was just impossible that they couldn't have a budget plan for people like this. She said, oh yes, but you cant have any outstanding balance. I asked what the monthly payment would be on the budget plan and she said $109. I asked if they had ever been on it...ever..and she said no, that they had just paid sporadically.

So, here is someone who doesn't know what is available to her, and has already fallen behind before she has the opportunity to figure it out. The applications are so difficult anyway that people just stop trying.

What did I do? I paid the entire bill on a credit card and got her back on the budget plan. I told her to pay me what she could when her checks come, but not so much that she cant pay her other bills...and that we can work the rest out. The important thing is that going forward her electric bill is a reasonable amount. I told her that if she gets in trouble that she has to ask for help before it grows beyond the $109...and meanwhile, I have a new job of finding out what assistance exists for the oil bill and the rest. I know that there must be assistance available and that there is also help with the language barrier; its just a matter of having the TIME to make the calls and do the research. Time is what I don't have these days...and I am so troubled about some things I found out about the community center where the inner city kids go for camp and after school programs ...but that is for another day...and as soon as I can catch up with this one family, I have to attack this from a different angle, involving the fantasy world of the Joe Lieberman's and the Chris Shays' who believe that they are fully caring for all the children of this state in a wonderful world of cotton candy clouds and candy cane lanes ...(cue the Sam Seder "world of your imagination" music....)

I do need a respite, but how can I look at the matter at hand without extrapolating this entire setup of a situation into what it is....The fix is in and from the very core of that rotten Supreme Court comes the conviction of those who hold themselves superior and above the rabble, (include women in that equation, along with the poor and people of color,) and so when any opportunity comes for a ray of hope against the body that would force those young girls and boys to resign themselves to another generation of hopelessness, I perk up...I'm hoping...and if that makes me an evil, negative, lefty, creep, then so be it...
But I challenge OReilly and his chit-chat board to do anything like what Ive been doing, actually get your hands dirty kids, and then set up a charity to continue this work.... and then to continue to agree with these smug social engineers that women don't deserve to have choice, that affirmative action isn't needed, and that enough time has long ago passed in order to make up for all the wrongs done to the minorities of this country. We need some balance back on the court, and if there aren't gonna be term limits then maybe a couple of them are gonna have to meet with natural disaster...
And what better place to seize than on your dock at your country place?...at least its damned beautiful there...enjoy it John...you've worked so hard...

If John Edwards isn't exactly what this country needs, I don't know what is. The very point of this whole story is that the returning army is largely made up of poor minorities, and the cards are already stacked against them. Getting out of the war is one thing, restoring diplomatic ties is another...but social services is THE thing....forcing the poor to play on a clearly uneven playing field while funds to education and services are clearly cut, and forcing anyone to decide about family planning with the help of anyone but their family and their doctor is just not fair and its not allowing everyone the same chance...because we know that the prep school kids have a huge boost up, and we know that rich kids who make mistakes get special treatment, be it private doctors, special lawyers, or extra educational help...not to mention those great oceanfront summer homes with docks....
Education, medical care, insurance, the American dream....what else?