Song in my head: Strumming my pain with his fingers...........................Roberta Flack

ALTER-ABLED NEWS

"Like creek waters around a rock", the indigent in this country are dangerously close to forgotten. Our country is as only as healthy as its citizens. And from this blog post the examples of how our elderly and alter-abled live is heart wrenching. via Yep, another Goddamned blog

The Bill Clinton boom years and the good fortune they had brought to so many had bypassed Lee Sevilla like creek waters around a rock. Lee Sevilla’s plight, which made my eyes mist up at work today as I could not stop thinking about her and Sandy, is not George W. Bush’s fault, or Bill Clinton’s or even George H.W. Bush’s fault. It is the fault of every administration that casually allows such people to fall in the cracks after doing the right things their whole lives. It is the fault and the responsibility of those who are in power to right these injustices that allow people like Lee Sevilla to be thrown into a closet like an unfashionable hat or dress because she lives in a system that keeps so many of us one or two paychecks from being thrown out in the street and reduces many compassionate people to being impotent Good Samaritans.

So the next time you hear Exxon’s new CEO defend on national television Lee “Jabba the Hutt” Raymond’s three quarters of a billion dollar severance package, the next time you hear George W. Bush say on TV or in his Saturday radio address about how well the economy is doing, the next time you hear people like Neal Boortz say that poor people should get the shitty end of the stick because they want to be poor and less “productive” than their tonier counterparts on the Upper West Side, the next time you hear Republicans call for permanent tax cuts, the eradication of the estate tax and the specter of Social Security reform that will surely result in smaller checks, the next time you hear about Dick Cheney getting a nearly two million dollar tax refund thanks largely to his oleaginous subverting of a Hurricane Katrina tax relief bill…