Friday, November 9, 2012

The Fight Goes On

"This is a rich country that's creating billionaires by the bucketful and running history's most expensive military empire. We can afford for our elderly, disabled and sick to be decently taken care of. It's just a matter of priorities"

The end of another of Digby's great posts.

We can decide that people who need help, which is most of us at one time or another, can get it or we can continue our throwaway society and take them out with the trash.

I say lets realign our priorities back to what FDR started, what that war monger LBJ continued and join the rest of the world in providing that help when it is needed. No one gets rich off of welfare or SSDI or medicare or medicaid or unemployment, nor will they with the new healthcare law. If you are lucky those programs will allow you to survive, if you are very lucky they may allow you to pick up your life and move on.
They are opportunities, nothing more. Wonderful, absolutely necessary opportunities. But they are barely adequate most of the time, and not even that all the time.

We won a big fight on Tuesday but the war is not over. It will never be over for there are too many people who think that a hand up is wrong, that survival is only a matter of helping one's self. That may be true if you live in a cabin in the wilderness by yourself, miles from your nearest neighbor. How many of us live like that? I'll bet not even a hundredth of a percent.

To those who think we should never help anyone else, join the human race, it isn't a bad deal, sometimes it is even fun to run with the rest of us.