This is hard to write. And yet I can only write it because I am getting better. The little yellow bellied sap suckers who live on the hill behind my home have been a great help. So have my pooties. I have been deeply depressed for some time now. Follow me through if you dare to see all the crap swimming around in my head these days. I will try to organize it.
-First the healthcare debate. It should not mean anything to me. I have medicare now. I am taken care of. But how many millions more Americans are going through what I went through? Waiting and hoping and never getting help until the damage done is severe and may be permanent. It would have been cheaper for the government to intervene before I lost the ability to support myself. That did not happen and beyond the disability I also have food stamps, energy assistance, telephone assistance, medicare and about $100k in old medical bills. I cannot even manage bankruptcy. So I go make a comment on youtube. "anyone who pays health insurance premiums is paying the wages of the person at the insurance agency who will get a bonus if they deny the claims of those people." Right wingers do not like to have things like that pointed out and go off about not wanting to take their money for people who are too lazy to work. That's me to them! I respond with something about how they already pay 30% of their healthcare dollars on just the insurance agency and even more on the people their doctor hires to work with the insurance agency and is it really such a problem if that money went instead to help treat sick americans. Apparently it is. So I respond. It will be your right, even with a public option, to do just that. And since the insurance agency will deny 20% of all claims you can pay for an 80% chance of healthcare. Sounds like a lottery system to me. If the insurance company denies a child's claim for cancer treatment, do the parents then get the right to pay, with their future premiums, the bonus of the insurance company employee who killed their child? After all they will still need their 80% chance of healthcare right? Or do they try another insurance agency and begin paying the wages of some other insurance guy who will make a bonus for denying their claims?
What I do not say in these little conversations is that I am the one they would vote to death. I am. By their measure I am nothing but a failure and a loser. I am weighing others down with the burden of providing for me. I know they do not believe I should have a right to live. they do not want me to have healthcare, social security, food stamps, etc. My partner ben too. Maybe my tow unemployed adult daughters. I am sure they would have no use for most of my neighbors. They would not put us in a camp. They would not put us in a prison unless they had to. They would just cut us off and watch complacently while we die. It's like dunking witches back in the middle ages right? Maybe reversed. If you sink you are guilty and deserve to drown. If you swim you never really needed help at all and should be punished for your laziness. You and I see these Americans drowning at the town hall meetings where republicans jeer at them as they cry out for help. They never seem to realize that if their guy at the insurance company wants a trip to cancun this winter it may be them crying out for help. Will anyone be left to care?
Abortion. given the whole healthcare debate I think it is high time we start calling them like we see them. those on the right who like to call themselves prolife are really pro abortion. they just believe that all abortions should be performed post birth. What do we call that? post-birth abortionists? breathing baby killers?(too confusing). I don't know.
-Roman Polanski. I may have said all I had to say in comments on this one but this reminder. There is a woman out in the world who has been dealing with the nightmare of what was done to her for over 30 years. It may seem long ago and far away to you but ptsd makes it here and now for here. Please refrain from becoming too callous.
-32 years. A life time for some people. And yet here I am an 11 year old girl again having nightmares and deep depression. 32 years and if I could have any wish it is that these men who did this to me would have stopped after me and never done anything to anyone else again. That would be the best outcome. I used to harbor fantasies of revenge. But now I am old and tired and just want all the pain to stop and the only way it will is if the violence and abuse in this world stops.
-Torture. I read recently and can't now remember where it might have been digby, that torture doesn't work because the pain and trauma affect the parts of your brain you need to give good information. That is the centers of memory and concentration. And I thought that is what's wrong with me and I remembered...
when I was six my mother put aside $20 in a pocket of her wallet for easter. that money disappeared and I got blamed. My parents were so sure that I had done it that they badgered me for a long time until I would admit I did it. They didn't beat me but I was slapped a few times. Everyone in the family was angry at me pushing me yelling at me. I confessed and got an extra bad beating with the hotwheel tracks for not confessing at first and for 'losing' the money( could not produce it). Well a couple of days later my mom did laundry and when she put it away she found a bag of candy and what was left of the $20 in my brothers drawer. No one ever apologized for the way they treated me. In fact I was lucky not to get another beating for lying and covering up for my brother. I did get the dubious honor of watching as the stripes were laid on his naked eight year old body.
The reason torture does not work is that your brain is programmed to try to escape those kinds of painful and traumatic events. I have suffered fro dissociation my entire life. I dissociated to escape the pain and trauma of my childhood. All the victims of torture are very likely to have done the same thing. In the fog of pain, dissociation and burgeoning mental illness they would say what they thought their torturers wanted to hear. Give them convincing evidence that was nothing but a figment of the victims imagination because of the very fact that the torture made them unable to do otherwise.
-John Edwards. John Edwards has acted like the biggest asshole in the universe. He has. It is hard to defend him. And yet...When my first husband and I were separated for the first time, one day he called me and told me he was divorcing me and marrying his girlfriend. He didn't. she dumped him. But that night I went to work and went home with a young man I worked with and screwed his brains out all night. Not exactly the same thing I know. I reacted that badly to hearing that the man I had left wanted a divorce. How did Mr. Edwards react to hearing the wife he had loved for many long years, the mother of his two small children would not only be lost to him but he would be forced to watch her die of a slow and painful disease. I remember what it was like watching my mother dying and as big of an asshole that he has been I feel some compassion for him. I am crazy enough to do something that horrible and stupid myself in a similarly stressful situation.
I guess that is it. I just had to get some stuff off my chest that has been there for many weeks now. I must be doing better because I am now able to write about how bad I have been. Plus I noticed the little female yellow-bellied sapsucker on the hillside just above my terrace.
I wish more people would blog about the affect issues have on their mental illness and the effect mental illness has on our nation.