My favorite manip of one of Jeanne’s art pieces
Hi readers.
The email forwards are telling me you fine, upstanding citizens are giving serious thought to electing a vice-king who’s committed to robbing me of the only financial resource I’ve got: my Social Security pension check. Paid in by me longer than most of you’ve been alive, by me and matched by those paying me.
Hokay. For myself, I honestly don’t give much of a damn. I’ve lived long enough and hard enough to be confident I can survive as long as I need to. It ain’t a big deal in that regard.
But I’ve got four cats here depending on me to buy food for them. Cats I value higher than I value the lives of the multitudes of folks who are venal enough, stingy enough, or indifferent enough to tacitly or actively select candidates who don’t give a damn about my cats.
All over this country there are people in similar circumstances, probably placing a higher value on the continuation of their own lives than I do, depending on those SS checks monthly to pay the rent, the mortgage, buy food for themselves. People who paid in, and their employers paid in on the promise there’d be an eventual return when the cows all came home.
Those people grew up in a different time with an entirely different set of values than exist today. They aren’t as accustomed being pushed around and bullied as the folks who’d help rob them might wish.
I don’t know how they’ll react if you rob them. I don’t even know how I’ll personally react. But I will tell you this:
Back me into a corner and take away my livelihood, force me to kill my cats as an alternative to having them starve, and a different man will come out the other end. A man who has not a damned thing to lose other than his life, which there probably ain’t a lot left of anyway.
So do whatever you damned well please, vote in whatever greedy animal you wish to do your robbing chores. But keep in mind there’s a piece of the population out there you’re deliberately and calculatedly choosing to back into corners without gaining a damned thing for yourselves except smug satisfaction.
And the folks you plan on doing it to are tougher than you, smarter than you, potentially one-hell-of-a-lot meaner than you, and almost certainly won’t take kindly to being mugged.
You don’t have the imagination to care, but life has a way of providing what the imagination doesn’t supply.
Old Jules
So Far From Heaven 