re: #137 palomino

It’s always so easy for self-righteous moralizers to preach “fiscal responsibility” when they don’t have any catastrophic illnesses or layoffs in the family, or any other of the financial problems that hit most Americans at some point in their lives.

Exactly.

I used to get on my soapbox over that nonsense and complain about ‘welfare queens’ and slackers eating off my tax money.

Then I found out about disastrous medical bills (like a 5,000 dollar ER visit for my spouse one night. No insurance, since I was laid off from my regular job and was contracting out).

After that, I found out how bad things can really get when I started feeling something wrong in my back around Christmas of 2005…and had a disc rupture just before New Years while working on the job in the aft cargo pit of a 757. It seems I have degenerative disc disease. No more aviation career, and my other joints are getting worse also.

We ended up on food stamps and humiliation for years. Bankruptcy. We had to sue my employer. Two major and excruciatingly painful surgeries. I live on handfuls of pain meds every single day, and will for the rest of my life. I was awarded federal disability this last year after 4 years of legal hell.

I worked hard, and I got fucked over real, real bad for years. Now, the tea party types say that society doesn’t owe me and my family a damned thing and if I can’t work, than it’s the soup kitchen and church charities for us.

Fuck that. I am doing the best I can to finish a degree in the next year so I can do something that may bring in income with an employer who understands my physical limitations. The geology department at Guilford waived the field camp requirement and accepted my field techniques class from CSUF as to spare me from 3 weeks climbing around Idaho. I and my family will get through this, but it is because the government actually did step up and help when there was simply no other alternative to being literally homeless on the streets. We got help from churches, but those were one time only payments for utilities.

No charity can possibly take on the enormity of poverty and suffering right here in the US today, and there is no historical evidence that private charities have ever had the resources to handle major societal problems. In the 19th century both here and in England, hundreds of thousands of people died of neglect and illness or if they were children, then generally ended up in crime or enforced prostitution. It looks to me like the tea party wants 1850’s London right here and now. I don’t say that as hyperbole.