[A good friend of mine -- a University of Michigan-trained Social Worker up in Michigan's Upper Peninsula (hence the "YOOP"MSW with "UM" implied in the middle) and a really engaging Latina writer -- asked me to publish this story here on her behalf because, essentially, I have a lot of followers. So please give it a look. Part 2 will be posted Thursday morning.]
It costs a lot to be a Latino in Santa Nonama, SoCal, California, Califas. A young man I worked with, whom I'll call "Pedro," had to give his right arm.
He lived in a shack’s garage with his mother and three siblings. No real incentive to go to school, and his father in jail, Pedro quit school and hung out with his gangsta friends, getting high. Then, strung out on meth, he hallucinated that his dog told him his right arm was poison -- and so he sawed it off.
His mother and younger sister and brother came home to blood seeping out of their garage/efficiency, seeping out from under the garage door onto the concrete driveway pad in the heart of barrio "La Chupacabra." This kind of dwelling, its own version of outrageous poverty and squalor, was overlooked by my friend the mayor since so many residents made good extra cash renting out such back yard arrangements.
Pedro then spent 4 months in the adolescent psychiatric ward of the Santa Nonama hospital, St. Luke’s. After that, the mental health system and DHS got involved. Pedro got lucky. After a dismal couple of years floating around with his arm withering, he got lucky.
Oh, yes, I forgot to mention: he got sent to a group home, and then was too old to have to go back to his mother’s care. Of course, I didn’t tell you that he was rushed to the hospital and for 48 hours he was either in the operating room or intensive care. Lots of blood loss. Oh, yes, and his mother AWOL, terrified thinking that if she goes to see her son she will be deported.
For another month a team of neurosurgeons and other surgical specialists worked to further attach his arm. An army of OT and PTs also helped him for almost a year. But his mother remained a victim of domestic violence and possible occasional domestic arrangements made on the basis of a man willing to pay her rent and food for a month or two in exchange for regular sex. Obviously Pedro didn’t have much of a male role model.
Pedro got lucky because finally he found his way to an educational and support program paid for by California's "millionaire tax," an astoundingly good-hearted proposition, which actually passed on a wave of progressive and egalitarian feeling, that gave 1% tax of anyone earning over one million dollars (still a lot of money) to mental health programs.
Yooper Mark is not so lucky. He lives in Michigan instead of California.
Yooper Mark is disabled, and got $125 per month of food stamps until last month. The Republican Michigan state congress voted to cut funds to those on SSI and he now gets -- no, wait for it! -- $19 per month.
This is not only outrageous, but I can’t begin to understand how someone is expected to live on that amount of money and not starve. Isn’t that less than the food allowance per day at the most cheap a** government firm? As a low grade government flunky you might survive by eating all three meals at McDonalds, maybe you can eat for that much. (And get a heart attack the next day from the sodium overdose.) But Mark will try to go to a local food bank, because he really wants to live. And he has no chance of getting a coveted job as a low grade government flunky.
Mark and other Yoopers have help from local quasi-governmental county programs that distribute -- again, wait for it -- wood. (Hence more than an average number of homes burn down.) Wood let people heat their barely insulated houses in the middle of a wilderness; if they our better off then the use propane, but if not then it's wood-burning fire for fuel.
Mark is going to get his wood next week. He spent what he did not have to spend on rent for new tires, as his old car is slowly falling apart and he relies on it to get where he can to try to scratch up a temp job here or paint a fence there. Good luck, Yooper Mark. I hope that this winter isn’t as harsh as last year's.
I hope people don’t freeze or starve this cruel winter. It's too cruel the irony to see this happen while we have rival mega-billionaires playing “Who gets to be Oligarch? or” Who gets to hide more money away in the Bahamas?”
Allow me to vent a moment. Okay, then some more. I hope that someday those greedy bastards who do anything to avoid paying taxes have a moment of truth. They seem capable of anything including blocking voters, packing the US Congress with Tea Party drones bought and paid for by Kock bros et al. (YES, I KNOW I MISSPELLED IT!)
Great strategy, guys. Get your drones to gum up the works and do nothing. That ought to bring this great nation to its knees.
Kill the infrastructure, let the poor starve, especially if they are disabled. Natural die-off. We won’t have to take care of them; maybe this winter they’ll freeze there in the U.P? Discourage the meme about education leading to life in the middle class. We hate the middle class, they are the class that always bring out the reformers. The populists that get us in line. Can’t let people vote, or move ahead ‘less we have ‘em in our pocket. So stop educating their brats. Dumb down school and expectations, starve out the teachers, and breed slaves. Pack the Supreme Court. Hide your money. Feel rich and powerful.
Oh, may they feel the true scourge of the Gods of Karma. Karma as in the life they will lead next time. Or Lords, if you are feeling generous, maybe later in this life.
May they get a good, long, scary look at their own souls that makes them see where they’re headed -- maybe like that venomous political Willie Horton slick spin artist who repented right before he died of a brain tumor. His death, the result, no doubt of the curse he placed on his own head.
When he recognized himself at the person who helped Republicans win by just plain meanness and lies, and saw himself single-handedly bringing politics to a new low. He sees himself and feels a sudden fervent belief in the power or repentance. And he apologizes on his deathbed. But he only does it because he sees what he did. He hopes he will be protected from the truth of what he did. But he will not be able to be protected. Because of what he did.
So he goes to one of the outer rings of hell. After an agonizing death. {Okay, I don’t know about the outer rings part. But the agonizing death, of a brain tumor, yes.) So, billionaires, do you really want to keep ruining this planet, killing poor people and our society, and our country? And our planet??? Really? Well, then Karma’s gonna getcha!!
Oh, evil billionaires, I don’t wish that you turn into witless jabbering drooling madmen for the rest of your short, cursed lives until the demons of hell take you back to the pit. But I think that if you really see yourselves, your souls, that is what will happen. I hope that soon God makes us all have to look full on with no filters at every bad thing we ever did and see our souls full on in their sorry state. Hard enough for me. But I really do think that if the rich do it their heads will explode. But I digress.
I do realize that all those greedy mega-rich people only think they are people, entitled people, people who got lucky. (And really, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you take a gold ring if you could catch it? You wouldn’t want to pay taxes on it, would you? Wouldn’t you like to act like an a**h*le every chance you got? C’mon, you know you would. How many congressmen do you want to personally own? So that’s why you should vote Republican! Cause YOU really want to make that killing. You want to be the third Kock Brother. So why cut off your own knees before you ever get the goodies?
Yeah, buddy, you and your genes for the rest of eternity are going to be cut off from that elite group of billionaires. They live in another world far from you and it is getting further away all the time.
I hope you wake up. Be angry, but use it to let your children learn. To rebuild our infrastructure, jobs, green lifestyle, amending and reversing climate change. Make peaceful changes in the world. Remember we don’t have to let hate win. Or greed. Isn’t that how Atlantis sank in the admonitory fable?
Oh, and policemen? Please go back to being the good cops. Like Bill Clinton talked about? The policeman on the bicycle on a neighborhood patrol like old fashioned bobbies? Stop killing young, especially black or of-color men? Can you please not do the reprise of the “Stop! Bang! Bang! Or I’ll Shoot” gag? We really thought that was over 20 years ago. Good luck, world! Peace out.