Dirt poor?

I have been avoiding this discussion as a pointless wate of time, but I guess I’m feeling self destructive today. How to set aside my feelings of rage and attempt to gain understanding? Well, I’ll practice on you guys, but I’ll say at the outset that I’m pessimistic about by ability to reach anyone.

I’ll start with the question of poverty first. For the sake of this discussion, lets set aside the percieved or real situation of welfare mom’s or illegal immigrants who come across the border solely to live at the US government’s expense. I’ll write merely of the plight of the disabled – a plight which I know intimately since I am only just now recovering from a long term disability myself. I am further going to limit my discussion to people who did not have private disability insurance at the onset of their disabling condition or become disabled due to an injury that was covered under workman’s comp.

There are about 7.5 million disabled Americans who fall under the criteria I listed above. Anyone who wishes to check this for themselves can start with the National Center for Disability Statistics http://www.dsc.ucsf.edu/main.php?name=publications
These 7.5 million have incomes of less than $6,000 a year (There are far more than 7.5 disabled Americans, by the way. A significant presentage of these live in poverty. I’m talking only about those who live BELOW the poverty line here).

I have experienced the temporary poverty brought on by college expenses and youthful flings of adventure. I’ve eaten bean loaf and never turned the thermostat above 55 degrees because I had to buy text books. My car has broken down thousands of miles from home and I’ve had my money and passport stolen in Mexico and had to hitch hike back to the States. There were periods in my life when my income derived solely from a minimum wage job and I drove my car mostly on gas fumes and prayed for long down hill coasts. These things were trivial compared to what I experienced as a disabled individual without private insurance in the US today.

The very worst part was the despair. I knew I could get back on my feet with medical help, but there was NO medical help, just the occasional band aid here and there. I wanted to work, but I couldn’t. Time after time my neurological impairments caused employers to fire me from even the most menial jobs. After a while I lost all hope along with everything else. I went through every penny I had saved or invested, sold off every last thing I owned of any value in my bitter struggle to survive. When all my resources were exhausted I found myself out on the streets and I ended up camping on National Forest land for three months until I was able to find shelter indoors. I had food stamps but they only give you enough to buy your ramen and rice and beans for 3 weeks of the month. The final week of the month I went hungry unless somebody gave me the $3.00 to drive from my camp site to the nearest food bank in a town 30 miles from my camp. As a woman alone, I chose this isolation for reasons of personal safety. I figured my survival odds were higher than on the pavement of the urban area where I had been living. I didn’t have the money to buy a full month’s prescription of the expensive neurological meds I had been prescribed. I would run out of these at the end of each month as well, and be rendered almost incapable of functioning.

Each time I made the drive to the food bank I became an unwilling enemy of the state because I could not afford to insure my car of keep its plates current. In my state the penalty for driving without insurance is anywhere from 30 days to a year in jail. Sometimes I used to wonder if I wouldn’t be better off if I got pulled over because in jail I’d at least have shelter and a consistent (if not very good) supply of food. Despite the allure of jail, I lived in terror of being pulled over by the cops every time I made one of these survival runs.

The only source of distraction I had during this period was my car radio. In the isolated area I was camped in I was able to pick up a single radio station – a country/western one – that’s it. Even that I couldn’t listen to often for fear of running my car radio down. Every penny I had went to buying my meds. I had no choice because my neurological functioning deteriorated so much without them. I mean EVERY penny, too. I had no money for so much as an envelope and a stamp; no money for items of personal hygeine. If it didn’t come in my food bank box, I did without it. And always the despair, the despair, knowing that with proper medical evaluation and treatment I could do some sort of work again and knowing that without it I was doomed to a life spent living out of my car.

I waited 5 years to get medical assistance from this country. 5 long years, 4 of which I probably could have been a productive citizen again, standing on my own two feet just like I always had. Instead, I was in effect consigned to a human garbage heap while my health went steadily downhill for lack of proper medical care. My recovery has been made consiberably more complicated thanks to this long delay. I am not alone. My story has 7 .5 million variations but the people who could tell them lack the ability to be heard and, more importantly, the belief that anyone really cares to listen.

The disabled of this country are even more handicapped by the open prejudice they all too often encounter. People dismiss us as lazy druggies living off the government tit for lack of will to do better. We are all a bunch of shiftless cons in some people’s eyes. Let me tell you. There is NO government tit. Radar himself states this:
“Government keeps 85 cents of every dollar collected for overhead as opposed to 12-15 cents of every dollar for non-profits” Whatever the government does with this money, almost none of it is going to the needy disabled and charities are NOT taking up the slack.

Radar is espousing Libertarian beliefs with all the sunny innocence of a child. I’m sorry, but I don’t believe for a moment that Americans would take up the slack by an onslaught of charitable giving if their tax burden was taken away. For one thing most Americans find it incomprehensible that people could be reduced to such desperate circumstances in the good old US of A. For another, under libertarian anarchy people would remain largely uneducated about these and other issues. There would be no public libraries or school systems. The wealthy would give their children a good education. Everyone else would home school their children or forget about the whole thing entirely. On top of that, people would be too busy arming themselves to the teeth without police or fire protection. The disabled would be the last thing they thought about.

Radar advocates an end to all government services because he resents paying taxes. This is the real world, not some utopia. If the libertarians would put down their copies of Ayn Rand long enough to look out their windows, they might realize this. OK now, go ahead and attack me. I may respond or I may not. I’m feeling very tired.