Congressional Battering and a Lesson in Fear

Today, I had the talk with our son.  You know, the "honey, because of those cruel, petty asshats in DC playing politics with our lives, your daddy may be out of work next week" talk.  The talk that details the things that will immediately fall by the wayside.  Like cable TV.  Like the paintball Zombie-fest he's been looking forward to since March.  Like the strings for his electric guitar and the new cord to stop that crazy buzzing.

Like his beloved Hapkido classes that represent the only real "in person" interaction he gets with other kids his age. It's three nights a week he gets to hang out and learn and grow with other kids.

And it is OUTTA HERE if those mean, politicking monsters in Congress keep it up.

Explaining to him that, unlike the last time this happened, these bastards almost certainly won't reimburse the families they're devastating.

And make no mistake--they are threatening to devastate us.  It's his first lesson in what happens when bills don't get paid.  How they don't just scoot forward a month, but they become overdue, compounded with fees and fines and penalty interest rates, then lumped into the next month's bill, which is still due.  Things don't get pushed back, they get piled up.  And then the vicious tide of endless calls from creditors starts.  The three, four, five calls a day per creditor.  And each time they pretend they don't know you've already called, already explained.

Already begged.

We are working so hard to drag ourselves up and out of debt.  This will be the end of us, financially.  There will be no recovering from this.

Add that that my looming medical appointments for the large, growing mass in my forearm.  Oh, the copays.  Not just the 35 bucks a pop for doctor's visits, but the fifty+ for the MRI, the 100+ per hospital, etc.  Like having a possible sarcoma growing in my arm wasn't enough, the Republican Party has to trap us under their boot and gleefully threaten to twist that heel.

And it is gleeful.  Don't you DARE tell me otherwise, I read their words, I see their satisfied little smirks.  What happened to public service?  They're not serving anyone but themselves and their corporate masters.

And here's the truly bitter part: any one of them could fix our financial woes in a second. They have that kind of money.  They could just say, "Oh, shoot, 15 grand is all you need to be solvent? Here you go."  But that would be welfare.  That would be wrong.  Bootstraps and all that crap.  Except they're looking to slash those bootstraps and then, once again, castigate us for not being able to save ourselves when they've taken away our only means of salvation.  We are trying, we are paying things down and paying things off, but it's going take about two years to get it all done.  Unless they shut down the government.

Then it won't ever happen.

And all of this over a program the American People have already weighed in on.  They did--they VOTED FOR BARACK OBAMA!  Seriously, what do these bastards think that meant?   They ran their boy Mitt on a platform of killing Affordable Care, and they LOST.  They LOST, and yet they keep terrorizing Americans in attempt after attempt to  . . . unlose?

I know what they're trying to do.  They hope that, if they can make things as painful and miserable and bloody as possible for folks like us, we'll throw our sad, terrified hands in the air and say "Fine! Defund Obamacare, just please, please don't sink my family!"  They know that, given enough fear and hurt, we'll eventually buckle under and throw our fellow Americans under the bus to save our own families.

According to one nutty windbag down in Texas, if the American people get a taste of affordable care, they'll be "hooked."

"Hooked" on affordable health care for everyone.  Oh, the horror!

The stress kills.  They say that it shortens your life and opens you up to all sorts of awful ailments. From obesity to cancer, there's a stress link.  So it's not much of a stretch to say that the Republicans in Congress are attempting to murder me.

This is terrorism.  There's no other word for it.  Every few months, they come at us with threats of shutdowns and furloughs and slashing of services, using us and our lives as game pieces, bargaining chips.  And each time, the constant, thrumming adrenaline, the panic, the insomnia, the tears.  It's terrorism, plain and simple.

Congressional Republicans are terrorists.  They're why Guantanamo Bay needs to stay open for business.

Boston Marathon

Not a lot to say.  A friend who was at the Boston Marathon, who had just left the finish line area minutes before, first told me what had happened.  Her husband, who is an ER physician in town, treated 20+ patients, including a number with devastating limb injuries.

One?  A dancer.  Oh, honey.  Oh.

What to say.  What?  What can I add to that?  I mean, we don't even know for sure who did this?  It could be domestic nutjobs, though my sad heart is leaning toward foreign.  I looked at my son and said, "Your father and I grew up in a time when our country's foreign policy was exactly that--foreign.  We could invade other countries using fancy War Names like 'Urgent Fury,' 'Just Cause,' and 'El Dorado Canyon' and not worry that any of it was ever going to splash back on the bright and gleaming shores of our great nation.  We overthrew governments, we funded coups, we funnelled money into Israel, Iran, and then Iraq, we used Afghanistan as a proxy playground for our pissing match with the Soviets. We supported governments that tortured, oppressed, occupied, and flat-out devastated their citizens, and we never, EVER considered that maybe all sorts of bitterness, hard feelings, and all-around burning hatred was stewing."

I truly never thought we would find ourselves the victims of foreign-based terrorism at home.  Why I never thought it, I don't know.  Common complacency, I guess.  The constant chorus of government folks telling us that WE were the "GOOD GUYS," we were the "voice for democracy," we were RIGHT.

I never thought to question it.  Or, at least, I never thought to expect it to come back to us.  Desert Storm left me questioning what on earth we were doing in the Middle East, but it wasn't until 9/11 that it came crashing home for me--how could we NOT have expected that?  How?  How could we think that playing colonialist super-power, that manipulating and overthrowing and killing tens of thousands (directly and through the funding of oppressive, murderous governments) wouldn't eventually come back to bite us?

Make NO mistake--I'm not excusing here!  Never, never!  But when I hear the, "Why do they hate us, why are they so evil when all we want is to bring freedom to the world" litany, I want to scream.  Because that's such bull.  That's propaganda worthy of WWII era Germany or the Cold War Soviets.

It's odd.  I was watching a documentary on Noam Chomsky just the night before, and he was talking about terrorism.  About how, after 9/11, countries like Nicaragua and Panama expressed their horror, their sympathy.  And they said, "It's terrible--we know, we experienced something much like that."

Yes, they did.  And they experienced it courtesy us.

NOBODY should EVER suffer something like 9/11.  NOBODY should EVER suffer something like the Boston Marathon bombing.  NOBODY--not Americans, not Palestinians, not Syrians, not Panamanians, not Iranians, not Canadians, not Pakistanis, not Grenadians, not Nicaraguans, not the Irish, not the  Brits, not ANYBODY.  But we can't be surprised when it happens to us.  To stop terrorism, we have to STOP terrorism.

I looked at my husband last night and said, "You know, I long for a world where non-combatants aren't targets."  And he said, "Hey, if you're going to wish for the impossible, just wish for a world where there are NO combatants because we've learned how to get along."

Okay.  I wish for a world where there are no combatants.  Where no one gets to decide that their deity is THE deity, that THEY are some ghost in the sky's preferred folk, that their holy book is the one by which we draw geopolitical boundaries or lay down civilian law.  I wish for a world where people are smart enough and sane enough to say, "Wow--if we fight over this, tens of thousands will die and we'll destroy anything that might have been worth fighting for--let's figure this out and share."

I wish for a world where my kid doesn't have to worry that the backpack next to the garbage can is the one that will end his life.

I'm sorry, Boston.  I love you, and I've loved you since my annual summer treks way back in my teens.  I'm sorry this happened.  I wish for a world where no one would ever think to do something like this.  To anyone, anywhere.

And most of all?  Oh, my heart breaks for those people who trained so hard, who hoped and wished and laughed and dreamed of yesterday's race, only to be struck down, viciously wounded.  Some, including a child, killed.  And then my heart swells when I think of those race volunteers, the medical folks, the police and fire, and the runners themselves who turned back into the fray to rescue, to save.  There are, every day, heroes among us.