Items of note:
____________
welfare patients
panhandlers
lawyers
needgreed
What else, you say?
Let me give a case study.
(People love a statistical reason to believe.)
Sharon is hit by a car, and files for disability payments.
She screams in mysterious pain the doctor can't locate.
The car was traveling ten miles an hour.
Sharon has seat belt on, and headrest properly adjusted
in her battle-tank 70s American station wagon.
Both vehicles were hardly scratched.
Sharon's lawyer thought she should file
she told her lawyer from the phone book she wanted to.
You see, apparently, Sharon didn't like her job, and besides…
she's about to be fired for taking indecent liberties
with paid days off.
It's in the script.
Sharon's lawyer wins, because its nearly impossible to show
someone doesn't have pain disability.
Does it figure Shar's on gravy train fer life?
Sharon should have been an actress.
Then there's Barb, (isn't her real name?)
She's got several.
Barb's too fat to work.
How can she work, when she carries
that disabling weight around?
Barb's got a thyroid problem.
Barb's always had some problem.
She's on gravy train too.
How did this happen? We want to know.
No one's quite sure.
Why did Barb get a doctor's signature on ten-twinkies-a-day,
punctuating her soda-pop no-exercise
cheddar-onion potato-chip diet?
(Maybe she didn't.)
It is too late for several hundred thousand men and women like them.
They're public-coffer addicts
too fat to work (but not too fat to have babies), smiling with excrucating back trauma…
too tweaked to sit at a desk, answering phones, but not too injured
for a rousing game of football, or pile-em-up with neighborhood kids.
Like a small Southern medical clinic where 55% of everyone
doesn't pay a dime. Pain killers are covered.
They come, and come.
You pay for them.
(Or maybe you don't.)
Ranks are growing.
A traveling nurse told me : This is nothing.
I see places worse than this all the time.
How many are goldbricking? You know,
could work if they really wanted to ?"
I ask her.
"'Bout half."
"No kidding!?"
And We the People wonder why health care's so damned expensive.
Nobody seems interested in setting records straight.
We are the We The People of liars, cheats, forgers
and semi-violent criminals.
We are a self-centered People that seed own demise,
then complain, finger-pointing causes at others.
Japan has an eighty billion dollar earthquake. Does it suffer
at the hands of looters? No.
Japan thinks of its future?
Who knows.
In the United States, a baby is born prematurely and
after nine months of agony in the hospital,
the doctors want to pull the bathtub plug.
Her parents, without money to pay, so "traumatized", they can't work
have to live off your taxes. And they are suing
with shuckster lawyer's promise everyone
gets rich quick. They think you should pay their escalating, sky-high bills.
They can not assume responsibility for a stroke of evil luck.
We've paid a hundred billion dollars
to shenanigans like this.
We've paid a lot more than money, and will continue to pay
until someone calls the no king's clothes "naked"
before the system has to
collapse. Because
in many countries, there is no social welfare.
People faced with no easy alternatives bend
to sharpen skills at grindstones. "Physical therapy"
is work, not hundred dollar visits to a neatly painted health office
to be taught self-help things patients rarely want to do.
When you're given food stamps
because you're too fat to work, something's gone totally haywire.
"I'm depressed."
People are depressed, because their system's totally bankrupt.
It's running off history inertia, not money and philosophy of
the system runs off history-inertia, brakes gone, straight into
modern-days' time. People ford church in forced habit
to pray for the million-dollar lottery ticket
to pay for those things
they couldn't afford, but just had to have anyway.
Who's operating from a higher sense of their purpose on earth?
Good welt on the back.
The idea is to get ahead at everyone else's expense
though no Spinoza ever got famous
expounding bereft philosophy like this.
Face it,
WE are pathological liars.
We don't know what truth is anymore.
If bending original circumstance lets anyone off-hook,
we'd suffice to call its warp, the bona-facto reality.
Pulled over?
A policeman has agendas you'll second-guess enough
to doctor around
some (nonexistent) circumstances
you didn't actually have.
of course you'll do it. It saves you time, and money.
Lie
Why not?! Accidents hold potential, to set you up for life!
Lie.
You're caught red-handed, and need a cover up that act
too stupid to properly justify.
Lie. Blame anything but the real cause:
Yourself.
That's why we're so spiritually bankrupt.
That's why a crack in the sidewalk is a good enough reason to fall down,
instead of pay attention step higher.
Clink go warm pocket pennies, nickels, and dimes.
Sucker smiles abjectly.
"But I felt sorry for him!"
Man wheeling his injury past open-cupped beggars,
may not realize his coins fell to ruse.
That war veteran wasn't,
that dialysis victim isn't,
and who says the girl has nowhere to live?
They are WE, addicted to a life of lies, jockeying
for best ones' reap.
The highest piles of cash. The covet.
Here are your mirrors...
look closely.
"The streets" are an occupation.
They are ontological walls
showing society's drip-by-drip collapse.
PS Note:
Our Constitution's actual letters, are deteriorating.
We The People so elegantly penned in time-worn ink…
flaking-off …
Means what?
The We People are flaky.
Frantically, government tries to blame outside influences
from its hermetically sealed glass circle.
Tobacco companies, for years enjoying subsidy,
must pay for emphysema victims' oxygen. Why didn't
beancounters think of this
a long time ago?!
It's someone else's fault, all citizens are too busy saying.
Someone else has to pay for this problem, and that problem
making the entire problem in the first place.
What Indian is next on the Inquisition's chopping block? !
What??! No gold! Off with their hands!
There wasn't any gold in Indian's ground to mine.
Alcohol companies must pay women who've lost children to drunk drivers motorcycle manufacturers must relate financial condolences to everyone they insideously piloted to deaths and surely, beef commissions must repair all habitual customers' arteries!
You see... crazy.
If an individual thought about his, her or our future more,
so would companies individuals funnel into that are bent
on making things People
will buy.
If users thought of realistic product use,
instead of more is better, and too much is the best of all…
If we realized The American Way is synonymous with More!
More of everything makes better living!
Don't think
other countries aren't listening. Companies are the citizens elect the governmental agencies making up that amorphous power structure we point big-fat fingers to, pinning our own inner-dynamic / city problems there.
Problem is:
The inner city reflects the inner us!
When you don't like your reflection, it's up to you to change.
Not somebody else.
"Societal Change" is breaking the mirror that portrays our problem,
before killing the messenger bearing bad news,
that didn't Make our Day.
It is a temporary solution, at best.
The Bilking of America moves echelons of world-wide scripts,
as ill news travels easily, through endlessly-swerving routes.
Go ahead and try to annihilate your problems!
Firearms get stronger, to reflect our need to destroy
what we're unclear about seeing.
Our mirrors get thicker, to reflect those bullets.
It's really quite simple.