I'll get to the actual convention coverage tomorrow, but for now..
( I love watching neo-cons implode. )On a personal note, and because I'm too damn tired to do that broadside I mentioned earlier to the level of venom I promised, I give you
this.
What does that have to do with being on a personal note? Let me lay something on you: my mother, who works for the United States Census Bureau in Jeffersonville, Indiana, was recently layed off from that job for the third time this year because there just isn't enough funding or work for them to make her permanent even as long as she's been there. Just about twenty plus years and some, as I recall it.
I get a call from her today, on the verge of a nervous breakdown and in tears, that her unemployment benefits ran out with this last check and she will be getting 96 dollars from that check. 96 dollars, people. She's looking for work but it's hard for a 57 year old woman to get work that gives them any kind of a living wage. My brother still lives at home and helps manage one of the local Pizza Huts, and is going out to San Diego to work in Greg DeFatta's Haunted Hotel again this year, but times are Very, Very Bad for the woman who gave me life, and there's not shit I can do about it.
Do you understand what I'm saying? She wasn't worried about herself. She was upset because she can't give her father the burial he earned.
But the thing that pisses me off most and the thing that had her in such a state and me waiting for my grandfather's military records was the fact that his ashes are still kept in my mother's bedroom cabinet because she can't afford to get them to Arlington National Cemetery for the burial the man earned and dreamt of.
The man was at D-Day in a tank squadron, and to the day he died still had a Nazi office flag and Luger he took from one of the places they captured.
So what does Bush do? Does he fund government offices and programs to keep people working? Extend unemployment benefits? Anything like that? Hell, no. That simian sonofabitch resurrects Star Wars.
I don't know John Kerry will do any better. I don't know he'll do any worse. But I do know that life for my mother and a far too long delayed Arlington burial for the man who taught me to love big band music means the man in charge now has to go.
If you'll excuse me, I've run out of kleenex and patience.
