Happily Ever After and the Random Factor
By Trina Sonenberg
The American people need another New Deal
I have been through a great deal of trauma in my life. From raising myself from the age of eight, for starters. I have parents, but they were not good ones. Both took a hands off approach to parenting. (divorcing when I was five)
After two abusive failed marriages, I thought I was about to live happily ever after with my third husband. But then the random factors of life hit us square in the face.
Let me explain. My husband and I have known each other since we were teens. We got married after my second divorce and had a baby. He was a self-employed building contractor; I stayed home with the kids; and we were living a middle-class life. I was happy, he was happy and our kids were happy. Then, the economy fell apart. My husband had trouble making enough money to make ends meet. And, while we were building the home we now live in, we lost the one we had been living in for 13 years.
Now that is behind us, but life had to throw us another curve. I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. Now that my kids are old enough for me to go back to work, I cannot. Not there is a job to be had anywhere. So much for happily ever after. Random factors suck!
To make matters worse, my government will not help me. My husband and I have been tax payers for as long as I can remember; I got my first job in 1980, at the age of 14. Now that I am disabled my government is telling me I am SOL.
I applied for the Low Income Energy Assistance Program and was denied, you're gonna love this, because I have no income. They ask, how are you paying your bills? I say, I am not. The power company wants to shut me off. The phone company wants to shut me off, and I still owe the guy who cut my fire wood. (heat)
I told them that my husband is doing odd jobs for cash to pay the mortgage. Then they tell me that it took me too long to tell them that and I was still rejected. I sent them a response the next day. How much faster could I have been?
Have you ever tried to contact a government office? It is awful. First you get a robot that tells you that you're going to have to hold for some unGodly amount of time, or you need to listen to a menu to start pushing buttons that take you in a circle. Hire more people to answer the God Damned phone! Let me talk to a human! Give me a job answering the phone.
The American people need another New Deal, not an automated phone system. The high school has an automated dialer that tells me when my son owes for lunch. How stupid is that? They have office personnel.
Spend our tax dollars wisely by putting people to work fixing the stuff that is broken. FDR did it and so did Ronald Reagan. Regan put teens to work using the government as the employer. I got a job at the age of 17 working in a library through such a program.
Roads and bridges were a product of the WPA from the 1930's. Public works projects put people back to work once, they can do it again. We just need to get started.
Put that in your republican pipe and smoke it, John Boehner! You don't care about me. You have your health, your job and your bank account. The latter thanks to people like me. And I would never vote for you, I'd rather shoot you than vote for you. (time better spent)
Happily Ever After has fallen victim to the random factors in my life and I am sure I am not the only one.
Why do people do drugs? Because they feel the need to change their reality. So to get a nation off drugs, the nation needs to change the reality of living in it. Do things to relieve the stress and people will stop trying to escape it.
I think that if you are a millionaire running for public office, you should have to spend your own money on your campaign, otherwise millionaires should not be allowed to seek office. (They are not part of my peer group.) They know nothing of the plight of the average person and seek office for no other reason than to increase their net worth.
For all of the politicians who think that $7.25 an hour is a liveable wage, I'd like to see you live on it, and without the paid for mansion you live in thanks to the tax payer. Hell, I'd like to see you try to buy a car on that wage.
Henry Ford knew what he was doing. He made and sold cars so that the people who built them could afford to drive them. The end result: Ford Motor Company in the 21st century. How can one expect people to spend money they don't have. Credit isn't the answer. If you don't have the money today, you probably won't have it tomorrow either. Today, unlike in decades past, no matter how hard you work, you're not going to be a millionaire unless you were born into it. (Mitt Romney)
I find it interesting that the tycoons of the past held little stock in higher education and thought that getting to task on the job was the best education available. That might have been the case in the 19th century, but it is no longer the case. Higher education is now a right of the wealthy and that is wrong. Rockefeller never went to college. He built his empire through hard physical labor.
You gotta spend money to make money Mr. Boehner, FDR knew it; Ronald Reagan knew it and so does every corporate giant of the day. So, start spending money on things that matter.
Balance the damned budget, but not on the backs of ordinary people. Cut wasteful spending on things like the defense budget. We spend more on he military than anyone else in the world, so I think additional spending is wasteful. Cut health care costs, not by reducing payments to doctors, but in capping what drug companies can charge for medication. Just think about the money that could be saved on Medicaid alone, if drug companies could not charge $170 a day for medication, especially medication that cures nothing.
They can't justify the cost of MS medication to me. They aren't looking for a cure, so there goes the R&D excuse. They don't advertise it so there is no marketing expense outside of reps. converging on the doctor. So, Big Pharma CEO, how do you justify my medication costing enough for me to buy several houses? My mortgage payment is cheaper than your medicine. It's something like six times cheaper.
Let's face it, for $6,000 a month, I could own a lot of property.
I am calling on Congress to do something about the cost of health care in this country and reduce the deficit without hurting the average American citizen.
Something the corporate and political greed-heads should consider is this: If prices keep going up and wages stay the same, you won't make any money, because the rest of us will have nothing to spend.
There's a not so random factor that's gonna get cha. I gave up watching TV beause I couldn't afford it. How many of Directv's 30 million customers are going to disappear for the same reason. When I was a kid, TV was free. The commercials paid for it. Now we pay to watch commercials. 30 millon customers are dissatisfied with the service they get and when they can no longer afford the bill they will abandon it, like I did. Poor Directv, they will have invested in satellites for nothing. Whaaaa; my heart bleeds for them. Not!
I am tired of random factors contolling my life. I have always been able to take care of myself and those I care about, but not anymore. I am having to ask for help with things I've never needed help with before. I feel like a burden to my family, rather than a driving force behind it. And I can't help but thinking from time to time that perhaps they'd be better off without me.
I have been the mother I never had, I have been the wife my mother never was, and I keep trying to be all that I can be, but MS is a stone not so easily kicked from my path. It is growing in size and making it harder to go around as well.
We would do better by ourselves if we spent more time looking into the past for answers to today's problems. We can learn from successes as well as failures.
I bet you have been hit in the face with a random factor, or two.
For all of the creature comforts of this age, I do not feel we are better off than we were 50 years ago. Let's face it, you could graduate high school 50 years ago and get a job that would support your family. However, now you can only pull that off if you are happy living in a roach motel, or in a cardboard box.would
I don't think that people are looking for a hand-out as much as they are looking for a hand up. Since corporations only care about their bottom line, the rest of us fall through the cracks because we don't have the money to do anything about it. If our government wants to get people off public assistance, then they should be putting pressure on the billionaires to do something about it. You can't have your cake and eat it too, Mr. CEO. The gravy train will come to an end, whether or not you want to get off.
There is still racial strife and poverty in the Greatest Nation in the World. Why? Because we allow it. We allow ourselves to be tricked and lied to by the media. (Fox News) We were all put on this planet to share it, not for a single group of people to run rough shod over another group. We were all created the same, it is up to us to make things equal. So, let's get after it and be the random factor the government needs to get the ball rolling. It can only work for us if we make it so. Come on... there are more of us than there are of them.
Your vote is your voice; use it! Vote for the things you want to see happen, not for the lip service given by popular politicians who make the headlines. Have you ever noticed by the scandal sheets that the politicians who claim to be God Fearng Christians are the ones who seem to have trouble keeping their dicks in their pants? Do as I say, not as I do.
The U.S.A Today...
The United States of America is not a Democracy; it is a corporatilist nation. We are ruled by corporations, we are not self governing!
IT IS YOUR RIGHT don't give it up!
Is it important to vote? Does your vote count for anything?
You bet! On both counts. Your vote is your voice. Every time you fail to vote, it is a vote for the oposition. If all the people who abstained from voting, for whatever reason, made it to the polls and cast a vote, I believe the faces of our politicians would be very different.
So what if your candidate doesn't win. At least you had your say. You did something to be heard. Those who don't vote, can't complain because they chose to keep quiet. They had their chance to have a say, and they let it pass by.
Why do you think that the republican party works so hard to keep people from exercising their right to vote? Because the more people who turn out at the polls, the less likely they'll win. They know full well that most Americans do not like them in office.
So, if you think about it, you have no one to blame but yourself if you choose to stay home; and stop complaining about someone trying to take your rights away, when you choose to throw away the most important right you have. Your vote!
You may not always win, but not for lack of trying.
Such is life...
Our Beloved FDR
© 2015 Trina Sonenberg
Dear Trina,