Blinding Pain

is making it difficult to focus on political issues. I had a simple replacement filling done yesterday, but while my jaw was numb, apparently some violence was done to my lower left jaw. It feels bruised and swollen and very painful. Now waiting for my dentist's office to open so I can call.

This has not been a good week in the universe of homeless services. A long time client died peacefully in her sleep over the weekend, and everyone is on edge about it. Many of the women are refusing to sleep in the shelter where she died. More and more people are showing up at our doorstep, lost and confused and terrified at being homeless.

I place their dilemma squarely at the foot of those idiots who cut taxes while funding a war, thereby making it necessary to cut physical and mental health services and underfund the court systems that ensure that people eligible for social security disability get it. I know one client that has been waiting for three years now. During those three years, he has been in the hospital an average of one week out of four, has had multiple systemic infections of unknown origins, and has lost most of one foot to the effects of those infections.

I place this dilemma at the foot of public policy makers that wrote policies that supported the overbuilding of McMansions while safe housing for people of limited means was demolished or gentrified out of existance.

I have been existing for the last several months on a low, constant burn of anger at our "leaders" in Washington who continue to listen, again and again, to Reagan-era "thinkers" who justify "trickle down" theories and theories of "as corporate America goes, there goes the economy", when both economic theory and empirical evidence have conclusively shown that they're full of shit.

Ron Paul said once that he doesn't ride buses because he doesn't support the concept of public transportation. The person that published that linked to conclusive evidence that the US infrastructure devoted to our automobile lifestyle receives several times more public funds than "public transportation" does. I'm not going to dig up that evidence again. If you don't believe it, dig it up.

The point is, nothing is as simple as movement Conservatives would like to convince the world it is. Multiple institutions interact in such a way to advantage some human beings unfairly over others, and movement Conservatism would have us believe that the solution is to abandon the rough attempts at balancing institutions, such as affirmative action, that seek to correct this imbalance. Movement Conservatives would have us believe that money thrown at corporations to encourage "outsourcing" of US jobs to people in other countries is a net benefit to all Americans, and not simply a way to further institutionalize class differences that are beginning to border on caste differences.

Perhaps in my pain this morning I'm a little incoherent. Certainly the pain is not causing my anger to abate, only to exist in a fog of pain. The only thing that would cause my anger to abate would be the restoral of civil liberties to Americans and the reversal of several decades of laws that treat corporations as persons while treating actual persons as interchangeable cogs in the corporate machine. How the hell are we going to get there from here?