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DUMBER THAN SARAH PALIN?
07/05/2010
I just learned that a family who lives across the street from me is moving. The family is comprised of three generations: the eighty year old grandparents, their daughter, and her two teen-aged children. The daughter is divorced and, though she works full time, she doesn’t make enough to pay all of her expenses and the house payment without her husband’s child support, and now he has been laid off and isn’t paying her. Unable to continue paying their mortgage, they are allowing the house to go back to the bank and are going their separate ways. The divorced woman is moving into an apartment with her children, and the older couple is moving into a less expensive retirement home.
This is the third family on my small street (12 houses) that has had a multi-generational living arrangement in the past several years. In the other two homes, the adult children who had moved in with their parents, were eventually able to move because they found work, but the scenario across the street predicts worse days to come. Now even multi-generational families cannot make it and are losing their homes. If more of this happens, we may see a second housing dip, meaning the economy is not improving any time soon, and those of us who are close to retirement, and had hoped to build a little equity in our homes, will probably not see that happen.
Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle, she of little brain and big mouth, thinks we should not pay unemployment benefits because it makes people lazy and they will refuse to look for work, preferring to stay on the dole forever. I wonder if Sharron Angle has ever been unemployed. I wonder if she has any clue how impossible it is to pay the bills on unemployment. If so, she would know that it is humiliating for people to be out of work, and that unemployment does not come close to giving them the standard of living they once had, the comfortable "American dream" type lifestyle that a job can provide.
If my husband were to become unemployed, for example, he would collect one third of his salary, which has already been cut by 20% because of the recession. I collect a small social security check each month, but the two combined would not come close to paying our expenses, and our expenses are not that outrageous. Of course, our expenses would also go up, as the loss of a job would mean we would also lose our health insurance, and would have to pay out of pocket for private insurance, which at our ages and with some minor health conditions, we could probably not afford.
I wonder if Sharron Angle, she of little brain, big mouth, and no heart, has any idea what someone goes through who is laid off. First, there is the blow to the ego. When someone has worked at the same job for decades and is suddenly without work, suddenly told they are not needed, they feel insignificant, rejected, and can even become depressed. Days, weeks, and months of searching for a job to by, only to have resumes disappear in stacks of applications, calls go unanswered, and requests for interviews rejected. Applicants eventually become demoralized as they realize they are not going to find a job in a market where there is one job for every five applicants, and in the meantime, they become delinquent on their mortgage and car payments, and eventually lose both. They go to food pantries for food. They move in with relatives, if they have relatives willing to take them, or they find low cost housing somewhere of even become homeless. Often couples divorce from the strain, and children are left with a broken family, that never would have broken had some greedy moguls on Wall Street not gambled with other people’s money and lost. If Sharron Angle thinks for one minute that these people are lazy and enjoy being unemployed, she is beyond hope, she is delusional, she is inhuman.
And yet, Sharron Angle, she of little brain, big mouth, no heart, and downright meanness, thinks people without jobs are lazy because they won’t “take the jobs that are available.” I’m not sure what jobs she is talking about. Fast food restaurants? Minimum wage jobs that won’t pay the bills either? Even these jobs are scarce. Sharron Angle was once a substitute teacher, though her only full time teaching job was with a tiny Christian school she helped found. Does she have any idea how many teachers are currently unemployed, or will soon be unemployed because the stimulus money is running out and her fellow Republicans don’t want any more stimulus funds allocated? So, Sharron Angle wants no more stimulus money, and no more unemployment payments. Does she want a permanent underclass? Does she want a two tiered society, rich and poor but no middle class? Because that’s what she and her fellow Republicans are going to get.
Sharron Angle also wants to privatize Social Security which, if she achieves this goal and there is another disastrous fall in the stock market, would throw many seniors into abject poverty. She’s also pro-gun, pro-offshore drilling, even with the recent Gulf disaster, pro-coal even with its disastrous environmental effects, and anti-abortion even in cases of rape, incest and the mother’s health, because she’s a “Christian,” she says, so I guess she believes we’re supposed to enact laws because the legislators are “Christians” not because the law is for the common good.
I didn’t think it was possible to find someone dumber and more cruel than Sarah Palin to run for public office, but the Republican party these days is finding them under all sorts of rocks. And since there seems to be no shortage of people who are as brainless, mean, heartless, and uneducated as they are, and who are willing to elect them, we’re liable to have a real doozy of a Congress come November. And a lot more families will lose their homes and fall into poverty.
All content © 2005 outragedcitizen.com
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