Why I'm Talking Today

I wanted to talk when our children were mowed down.  I wanted to talk when the uneducated and immovable objects in the congress wouldn't move.  I would like to say I wanted to talk when my mother went into the emergency room again during the holidays but it's become more of a hobby for her than an event in our lives.  I wanted to send out my Christmas letters and they're still on my desktop because I'm going there for the duration.

I'm so fucking sick of the word dysfunction. Is it because it sounds so clinical?  It's not clinical, it's a fundamental breakdown. I have too many friends from Canada and Europe to believe the lies about how we can't provide health care for everyone without the concessions our president has had to make in the face of so many obstacles.

My parents were teachers, my mother never taught full time.  She was the parent of 6 children.  My father was a teacher, coach and athletic director and worked up to three jobs to make sure we had what we needed and, when he could gather the funds, what we dearly wanted every once in a while.

They're elderly, I'm going to help care for them because I love them.  It's also the right thing to do.  That's what pisses me off about all this crap.  I don't have to run for re-election as a daughter.  But I treat my citizenship in that fashion.  That's why I'm a PCP (look it up, Lazies) and work my butt off for my causes.  I donate more than my husband would like to charity and progressive causes.  But try to find out the options available to your aging parents.  You'd better quit your job and make it a full time career.

This is sick. As sick as assault weapons and magazines that hold that can cut children in half. Sick as the fact that if our family lived just north of where they live now, we would be having family holidays and all the care my mother needed.  She would also be healthier because she would not have been allowed to have all the stupid and unnecessary procedures that she got because she could here in the good old U.S. of A.  Because old people are cash cows.

I'm also going home to try to inject some reason into this insanity.  It's beyond reason.  We need to sensibly care for our elderly and give them dignity and kindness.  We also need to allow them to escape life of pain, emergency rooms and the prospect of abject poverty to grasp at the last sucking breaths of life.  Enough.  With love and sorrow and loss and pain.  Enough.