Dear $250kers

Dear $250kers,

Now that you don’t pay your fair share of taxes, and roads will go unpaved, public schools will continue failing to attract talented teachers due to non-competitive salaries, police departments layoffs will go the way of fire houses ushering an era of volunteer police officers, libraries will close, corn farmers will abandon their fields, soldiers in Afghanistan will go without helmets, while all that happens please do me one little favor.

When you sit at your board meetings, looking over the company budget, please choose to give me a raise from $60k to $90k (at the very least) because now I have to pay tolls on deteriorating roads to get to your company’s office and do your company’s work.

I now have to pay private school tuition for eighteen years just so that my child will be competitive for a college’s admissions board, then I have to buy four to six years of that college’s tuition because there is no more pesky wasteful spending on education grants.

I have to pay Amazon’s prices, shipping & handling to read the books that Benjamin Franklin foolishly thought should be freely accessible in big wasteful government spending libraries.

I have to pay for a private security company to patrol my streets.

Please, increase my salary for the 40 to 60 hour work weeks, five to six days, 50 weeks a year, while you make money lounging poolside off capital gains investments.  Yes, I work damn hard for my money and now need more of it so that I may buy food without high fructose corn syrup added only to subsidize corn farmers who would actually have a lucrative alternative fuel market if, you, the $250kers at the top of oil companies allowed ethanol research and the reproduction of alternatively fueled cars.

I’d also like to avoid consuming high fructose corn syrup, not so much to preserve my girlish figure but more so to avoid type 2 diabetes which is a rather expensive disease what will cost me the daily insulin supplements, glucose meters, regular doctors’ appointments, and not to mention that because you $250kers continue to restrict company healthcare insurance while also increasing dividends for your insurance and pharmaceutical company stockholders (your fellow $250kers), for whom you championed against affordable government options to healthcare and ensured that by (now) not paying your fair share of taxes, those government healthcare options will become nothing more than desperate and grossly under-serviced healthcare options.  So I really need a higher income to pay the hospital expenses I’ll incur and pass on to my children at the end of my life.

Oh and one last request before I die, could you please increase my child’s salaries when entering the workforce? As he or she will likely have children patrolling your draughted oil fields in the Middle East but as you don’t pay your share of the tax burden anymore, the army can’t afford helmets.  I’d like a salary to pay for their helmets as they put their lives on the line for your bottom line.  40% of your income was too much to ask, I get that but the solider gives 100% of his or her life – isn’t that entirely way too much ask?

You, $250kers who only make up 3% of the United States population but possess 80% of the wealth, keep your wealth and leave it up to the 97% of us who are diving up only 20% of the wealth to the foot the bill for the military that protects you.  So let’s make a deal, you continue avoiding taxes, just pay me what I deserve for the decades of hard work I’ve given and the blood of my children who I’ve given to protect your interest overseas.

Don’t pay taxes, fine but at least pay me.  Deal?
Thank you sincerely,
The Rest of Us

Dreams On Life Support

 

The doctor and nurse enter the sterile hospital room where machines hum, buzz and beep the factuality of their existence overpowering the faint sounds of sighs, coughs and wheezing.  The human sounds are not so certain of their existence.  The nurse tends to everything from the IVs to bedding.  The doctor asks, “How’s the patient?”  I can’t help but think, “You know better than me.  You, who can read the wheezing and coughs, you, see inside the chest and mind with x-rays and CAT scans, you tell me how the patient is doing” and in my silence, he does.  “The patient is no longer breathing on her own.  These machines are keeping her alive.” 

Machines which will pump the breathe of life into her lungs without judgment or prejudice for the kind life it is.  It could be miserable and torturous and desperately painful but the machine doesn’t care.  The doctor goes on talking but I’m stuck wondering why the machine doesn’t care. 

As long as the blood flows and the heart beats the machine doesn’t care.  As long as the stomach churns food, the fuel of the system, the machine doesn’t care.  I wonder would the machine pay any attention if that fuel ran out.  The patient’s figure once of such girth now lies frail and thin.  The fuel is running out.  How low must the fuel go before the machine cares?  I suppose the fuel would have dry up to the point where blood cells stood stalled on the arterial highways. 

From the parade of medical terms marching out of the doctor’s month, I see “white blood cells.”  Like the veterans in the Veteran’s Day parade, the white blood cells hobble and crank by in wheelchairs, their fortitude admirable but their numbers dwindling.  This once formidable patient now lies vulnerable to any and all attacks to her immune system.  I wonder does the machine care of her weakening defenses. 

The doctor clips the CAT scan to a light box hanging on the wall.  “Here is the remarkable thing.”  I lift my eyes heavy with exhaustion to view this black and white image of the patient’s grey matter.  “Such a unique case qualifies for the research in neurology.  Her insurance isn’t covering this so might as well free up this bed.  Neurology would be thrilled, I’m sure. The brain activity for a person with this much failure in the respiratory system is remarkable.” 

So is this what the machine cares about?  Brain activity?  Even though the patient seems so disconnected with the things going on around her and in her, somewhere the mind activates… what?  Dreams?  Visions of happier days to come?  Why do the dreams go one when all else fails?  Is this what the machine cares about?  Does the machine defy every other sign of death because of brain activity?  Could be?  The electricity that flows through the machine’s wiring might pick up some kind of interference from the electricity in the brain.  Is the machine betting that as long as it can keep the dream alive, it will have a purpose and not be unplugged and shoved into a storage-closest?  

 “That must be it!” I exclaim.  The doctor who confers with a nurse stops mid-sentence.  The machine has nothing to do with actually healing the patient’s failures and making her dreams a reality.  The machine only needs to keep the dream alive.  Keep the dream alive.  Keep the dream alive just so the patient muddles through this less than life, life.  “Unplug the machine.”  I announce.  The doctor barks about the constitutional rights of the patient.   He speaks of the right to life.  I proclaim the right to a free life.  I announce and proclaim though they lean in close like I’m panting out words clouded in mucus-y odor.  The nurse looks between the two of us, “She is speaking.  Doctor, you must listen.  She has opened her eyes!” 

My dreams are on life-support because that’s all of me that’s left but at some point the decision has to be made to pull the plug.