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Wednesday, February 11. 2009
Frustration — An American Value
Ever been embarrassed? This is embarrassing: Since February 2nd, I’ve been under the impression that Monday I would be undergoing a heart procedure. Well, just out of curiosity, I called the cardiologist because I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to be fasting for the procedure. The doctor didn’t say when we spoke on the 2nd so I called. Well, as it turns out, the doctor visit yesterday was just a consultation, no procedure.
For a week I stewed about the various possibilities, told all my friends I was worried, got all sorts of sympathy and support, had people making plans to visit me should I end up in the hospital for an extended stay … and now I’ve been telling people, sheepishly, all the worry was premature.
On the other hand, the anxiety has been replaced with annoyance …
•••• •••• •••• •••• •••• •••• •••• •••• •••• ••••
Waiting and waiting … While I wait my bank account gets deeper and deeper in the red and nothing happens, I run out of food and nothing happens. We cannot depend on government of course; government hates us.
Especially if we have no money. The poorest among us are not welcome. The poorest among us ought to die. In America we do not hate on the basis of ethnicity, skin color or religion, we hate on the criteria of net worth.
I’m always waiting for shit. Always waiting. Waiting and waiting. My frustration is boiling, my anxiety high, I’m just fucking stressed. I’m tired of waiting. I’m in hate mode right now and every little thing pisses me off. I just want something to break my way today. Just one thing.
Right now, I need something to take my mind off of reality. My reality sucks right now and it’s getting near impossible to cope anymore.
The reason poor people commit crimes is not that they’re inherently bad people, it is because they are desperate and cannot cope anymore in a world that wants them dead. Desperation is the motivation for most crimes, certainly 95% of the crimes committed in any city. You get tired of being broke, tired of hustling for every crumb in life, tired of watching other people at McDonalds, knowing you cannot even afford one item on their fucking dollar menu.
You get tired of people looking down on you as the excrement of society, wondering if they should call the police because now I’m staring back at them and the desperation that had been in my eye all morning has just been replaced with rage and is now focused squarely on you. Truly, if I had a gun at this moment you would be dead.
And then the government fucks with you. Yeah, they do that and they take a certain amount of pride in making the lives of the poorest among us even more miserable. It’s what separates us as Americans from the rest of the civilized population of the world. In America, being poor is a crime punishable by institutionalized suffering and if a poor person finally snaps and acts out in frustration, they make sure that person goes to the type of jail we are most familiar, with bars and armed guards.
The state of California, with an immigrant as governor, an Austrian whose father was a neo-Nazi, this state has taken the art of screwing with its citizens to levels few other states could imagine, let alone experience. They will not come out and say they do not want to give us unemployment compensation, so they devise every type of delaying tactic to make it almost impossible to collect; they actually sent a letter telling me to send them proof that I had been employed after October of last year and had a total income higher than $625.00.
Yes, I had the same thought you are having right now ... yeah, I am insane, but I’m talking about the next thought: Employers are required to supply information to the state regarding every employee’s status, when they worked and more importantly, what is being added to the state unemployment trust on my behalf.
It begs the question: why would these [expletive deleted] need that information from me? The game is on for all they care and the game is simple: make it as difficult as possible to collect unemployment compensation. People who collect unemployment are just leaches, lowlife scumbag punks; lazy people who just want a hand out from government and are content to live off the hard work of others. So they make it hard — extremely hard — for the poor to collect.
By now some of you are secretly thinking we should do away with unemployment compensation because for people who do not want to work it is an incentive to remain unemployed. “Why work if you can get paid for not working?” That’s the general attitude of Americans inclined to the Republican point of view: People who collect unemployment compensation do so because they are lazy.
But the payments suck for unemployment. You get slightly more than half of what you had been receiving when you had a job. The idea that getting that “free” money somehow sets you free is just the creation of the Republicans who do not believe in helping the poorest among us and the people collecting unemployment are freeloaders.
Several Republican senators used that as their argument in opposition to extending unemployment benefits. In this economy, where 8% of (working) Americans are out of work and collecting unemployment, over 15% in places like Elkhart, IN and Detroit, MI, the reason people stay unemployed after the initial 26 weeks couldn’t possibly be because there are no jobs available, it is because the extended benefits encouraged some to stay unemployed.
So, I send the EDD a copy of my pay stub dated in the last week of December. A few days after putting it in the mail I get yet another correspondence from the EDD that confirms the employment with the company that had just laid me off — including the total income from this company — the very information they asked me to provide in the first letter.
“No harm, no foul,” I tells myself when I read the second letter. It just cost me an envelope and a stamp to send off the pay stub, no big deal, until I get a call this past Monday from a young woman in the EDD. It seems that the EDD hasn’t received the letter from me with the pay stub. I can send anther if need be, but I ask, why do they need this proof if, as the second letter confirms, they already have the information requested as provided by the employer?
The young woman, with a thick Filipino accent, says the information they have doesn’t confirm the amount of my income after October of last year although the second letter clearly shows EDD has that information. I bite my tongue and refrain from arguing with the young woman. The primary directive from the foreigner governor is to make life difficult for the unemployed. She is doing a good job. My unemployment will be delayed at least one more week.
Maybe I’ll die before I can collect. That would be good in their estimations because this is America — the poorest among us are a plague on the rest of us. God bless America.
For a week I stewed about the various possibilities, told all my friends I was worried, got all sorts of sympathy and support, had people making plans to visit me should I end up in the hospital for an extended stay … and now I’ve been telling people, sheepishly, all the worry was premature.
On the other hand, the anxiety has been replaced with annoyance …Waiting and waiting … While I wait my bank account gets deeper and deeper in the red and nothing happens, I run out of food and nothing happens. We cannot depend on government of course; government hates us.
Especially if we have no money. The poorest among us are not welcome. The poorest among us ought to die. In America we do not hate on the basis of ethnicity, skin color or religion, we hate on the criteria of net worth.
I’m always waiting for shit. Always waiting. Waiting and waiting. My frustration is boiling, my anxiety high, I’m just fucking stressed. I’m tired of waiting. I’m in hate mode right now and every little thing pisses me off. I just want something to break my way today. Just one thing.
Right now, I need something to take my mind off of reality. My reality sucks right now and it’s getting near impossible to cope anymore.
The reason poor people commit crimes is not that they’re inherently bad people, it is because they are desperate and cannot cope anymore in a world that wants them dead. Desperation is the motivation for most crimes, certainly 95% of the crimes committed in any city. You get tired of being broke, tired of hustling for every crumb in life, tired of watching other people at McDonalds, knowing you cannot even afford one item on their fucking dollar menu.
You get tired of people looking down on you as the excrement of society, wondering if they should call the police because now I’m staring back at them and the desperation that had been in my eye all morning has just been replaced with rage and is now focused squarely on you. Truly, if I had a gun at this moment you would be dead.
And then the government fucks with you. Yeah, they do that and they take a certain amount of pride in making the lives of the poorest among us even more miserable. It’s what separates us as Americans from the rest of the civilized population of the world. In America, being poor is a crime punishable by institutionalized suffering and if a poor person finally snaps and acts out in frustration, they make sure that person goes to the type of jail we are most familiar, with bars and armed guards.
The state of California, with an immigrant as governor, an Austrian whose father was a neo-Nazi, this state has taken the art of screwing with its citizens to levels few other states could imagine, let alone experience. They will not come out and say they do not want to give us unemployment compensation, so they devise every type of delaying tactic to make it almost impossible to collect; they actually sent a letter telling me to send them proof that I had been employed after October of last year and had a total income higher than $625.00.
Yes, I had the same thought you are having right now ... yeah, I am insane, but I’m talking about the next thought: Employers are required to supply information to the state regarding every employee’s status, when they worked and more importantly, what is being added to the state unemployment trust on my behalf.
It begs the question: why would these [expletive deleted] need that information from me? The game is on for all they care and the game is simple: make it as difficult as possible to collect unemployment compensation. People who collect unemployment are just leaches, lowlife scumbag punks; lazy people who just want a hand out from government and are content to live off the hard work of others. So they make it hard — extremely hard — for the poor to collect.
By now some of you are secretly thinking we should do away with unemployment compensation because for people who do not want to work it is an incentive to remain unemployed. “Why work if you can get paid for not working?” That’s the general attitude of Americans inclined to the Republican point of view: People who collect unemployment compensation do so because they are lazy.
But the payments suck for unemployment. You get slightly more than half of what you had been receiving when you had a job. The idea that getting that “free” money somehow sets you free is just the creation of the Republicans who do not believe in helping the poorest among us and the people collecting unemployment are freeloaders.
Several Republican senators used that as their argument in opposition to extending unemployment benefits. In this economy, where 8% of (working) Americans are out of work and collecting unemployment, over 15% in places like Elkhart, IN and Detroit, MI, the reason people stay unemployed after the initial 26 weeks couldn’t possibly be because there are no jobs available, it is because the extended benefits encouraged some to stay unemployed.
So, I send the EDD a copy of my pay stub dated in the last week of December. A few days after putting it in the mail I get yet another correspondence from the EDD that confirms the employment with the company that had just laid me off — including the total income from this company — the very information they asked me to provide in the first letter.
“No harm, no foul,” I tells myself when I read the second letter. It just cost me an envelope and a stamp to send off the pay stub, no big deal, until I get a call this past Monday from a young woman in the EDD. It seems that the EDD hasn’t received the letter from me with the pay stub. I can send anther if need be, but I ask, why do they need this proof if, as the second letter confirms, they already have the information requested as provided by the employer?
The young woman, with a thick Filipino accent, says the information they have doesn’t confirm the amount of my income after October of last year although the second letter clearly shows EDD has that information. I bite my tongue and refrain from arguing with the young woman. The primary directive from the foreigner governor is to make life difficult for the unemployed. She is doing a good job. My unemployment will be delayed at least one more week.
Maybe I’ll die before I can collect. That would be good in their estimations because this is America — the poorest among us are a plague on the rest of us. God bless America.
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