My friend filled with right wing information believes the Muslims want to come and take over our country.

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Walking on the board walk this morning, I ran into a friend I had not seen in a long time.

  She looked a bit haggard, not quite the gal I'd seen about a year or so ago. Maybe it was the humidity. These days the humidity makes anyone look haggard.

  While visiting her relatives she was diagnosed with Macular Degeneration, she said. Adding, "For me, this is a feared disease. I have a brother gone blind because of it. Luckily, there is now a new medication they can inject directly into the eye," She says. "So far I can keep driving, taking care of me, and playing tennis with my senior citizens group. The medication is expensive like there is no tomorrow. My HMO won't cover much on it. My doctor's co-pay is $40. The co-pay for the injection itself is $95. I have it twice a month. Each month I am out $300."

Then, fighting back some tears, and sounding rather mournful she adds, "I won't be able to get a new car."

I say nothing, though I sense a certain fear--will her car keep running. Now that her car is looking as haggard as she, will her friends think less of her?

What does this really mean to her? What would it mean to me?

From there we move the conversation along, on to a political thread of our own, on how this country is on the wrong track. How, we, seniors, matter little to the powers that be anymore--what, with their not giving seniors a cost of living increase in social security, with all the talked about cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and other entitlement benefits, she says, the outlook for Seniors is bleak.

I agree.

However, the outlook for the country's young is as bleak as well.

  Just a day or two ago there was a Jobs Fair held on the University of Miami Campus.

Hiring were companies like Winn-Dixie, Verizon Wireless, Pollo Tropical and others.

None of the jobs offered at the Job Fair were professional jobs requiring professional degrees, yet some of the applicants were degreed professionals who had lost their jobs, or they were recent college graduates who had not been able to find jobs in their line of studies.

None of the jobs offered were career service jobs--either Federal or State. But I digress.

My friend and I proceeded in our chance encounter to, "fix the world."

  Neither one of us is an Obama fan much less an Obama supporter. Her antipathy for Obama is linked to a fear that through him, or because of his background, Muslims are coming to take over the country.

"Oh! Don't believe that," I said. "That is just a bunch of malarkey being spewed by those who want to keep your focus away from what is really happening to the country. Those who want you to keep your eyes away from seeing their stealing of our social security and Medicare monies to fund wars that should not be taking place and tax breaks for the wealthy and the corporations. Obama is one of those taking money from our coffers, but so are others." I added, "I am sure that Boehner, Perry, Ron Paul and others wouldn't blink an eye while taking money from you and me, and many others to fund whatever greedy wars they want to, or give tax breaks to greedy corporations just like Obama doesn't blink an eye either."

"Who put Obama in there?" She asked. "That, I don't know. I know that I did not vote for him. I voted for Hillary and he took half of my vote for her to put himself at the top of the ticket so he could be elected."

"The young people must have voted for him," she said. "Yes. They did. But so also did the vote changing machines run by Republicans," I said.

She didn't like this last statement too much. In looking for a way out of this, "screwed-up place in our history that we find ourselves in," my friend casts her sights towards the Republican Pac.

  She firmly believes that Muslims want to take over our country and unless a Republican is elected to office, we are doomed. She tells me that she reads a lot everyday on her computer.

Fearing that she is full of right wing information, I repeat, "No. It is not the Muslims. It is the Republicans and their marriage to the corporations, such a Judge Roberts' alliance with the corporations and his giving them a voice in our elections process." --"They, after all," I say somewhat emphatically, "have lots more money than you or I, therefore they have a more resounding voice than either of us--not the way it should be in a democracy," I say. "They also have control of the voting machines. Those machines which change our votes " All that vote changing which started with the election 2000 from hell "."

She tells me she was a Democrat all of her life, "" until Bill Clinton did what he did at the White House"" I stand there sort of knocked over for a loop. I don't know what she means but then, it hits me, she is talking about the Clinton/Lewinsky affair.

I tell her, "that did not affect your social security, or Medicare " it had nothing to do with politics. It had a lot to do with human nature but nothing to do with politics."

She is now ready to move on--not before casting a skeptic smile my way. I stop my rant dead on its track, though before she goes, I add:   "visit OpEd News sometime."   She looks at me as if to say, "You are not going to make a convert out of me."   I let my voice trail, "" that is, only if you want to""

Long after she has left the thought comes to me, "Oh, if only I were a Quick Thinker on my feet! I might have added, 'It is we who are trying to take their oil away."

Authors Bio:
E.T.SIMON ... Keeping the Bio Real and Transparent ...
E. T. SIMON is more often like a transplanted palm tree from the land of Santiago de Cuba where she was born to a Cuban, Tulane University, lawyer educated father and, a Mississippi, mother, great-granddaughter of American Revolutionary War hero, Brigadier General Andrew Pickens who is credited with the victory against the British in the Battle of the Cowpens. Although at times, E.T. Simon is more like, the fruit of the pecan of her Mississippi grandparents pecan farm of long ago, or even like the Sycamore so firmly rooted in the Florida Peninsula. As such, the daughter of bi-cultural, bi-lingual parents, E.T. Simon navigated the bi-cultural ties, bi-lingual shores of her birth, while learning to appreciate Cuban and Southern cuisine and cultures, from a very early age.

At the age of 15, two years after her mother's death, she dreamt about running away from her home to join the , "Bohemians" of the 1950s in New York's Greenwich Village and become a writer. She did not. In 1961, at the age of 18 her father sent her across the pond to her mother's family in Mississippi in an effort to keep her from falling prey to Fidel Castro's repressive agents who were on her trail for her opposition to Fidel Castro.
Bumpy rides, or not, In 1976, E.T. Simon, after twelve years of part time studies, with in-between times-off for parenting, obtained her B.A. in English with a Major in Literature and a double minor in Psychology and Philosophy. In 1985 she obtained her Master's Degree in Counseling and in 1987 her License in Marriage and Family Therapy.
Her quest to pursue a MFA in Creative Writing was derailed when a stuffed shirt Chaucer Literature Professor graded her paper on The Prioress Tale short of the A she needed to establish her credentials in the MFA Creative Writing Program, even while receiving the support of the Academic Dean who told her with a certain urgency, "don't stop writing. You'll find a way."
Prior to pursuing her graduate studies in counseling, Ms. E.T. Simon joined a Creative Writing Group where she honed in on some of the art and craft of writing and had the pleasure of attending poetry readings by Tess Gallagher, Denise Levertov, Rutabaga Rose and others.
Following her 1985 graduation, Ms. E.T. Simon proceeded to work as a counselor/family therapist until 1998 when, following surgery, she became a near recluse and has remained a near recluse for the last twelve years or so.
It was during those years that she worked as a counselor/family therapist that Ms. E.T. Simon learned that grief is a powerful agent which often contributes to the derailing of families; that human hearts can bury grief for generations and generations with the grief popping up unexpectedly as a symptom anywhere, sometimes even in someone else further along in the generations.
Ms. E.T. Simon also learned that when careful unearthing of buried grief happens and a person is enabled to truly grieve the pain of a loss they have been holding on to for years, then rebalancing of the derailment takes place and true healing occurs.

Writing is a lifelong love of E.T. Simon's, and whether she kept her writings buried in dusty drawers, or shared them with university professors, writers' groups, editors, or published them, the writer's flame burns undying in her. The flame of truth also burns in her along with the need to stand up for the underdog, of which, today, she finds herself to be one. This blended well in her throughout her years of computer activism for peace and social justice.

E.T. Simon's articles have been published under the name of TERESA SIMON-NOBLE, the pen name of ELENA DUMAS; and at times, under the additional pen name of SKYAGUNSTA, or SKYAGUNSTA PICKENS, both of which are a direct reference to her great-great-grandfather Brigadier General Andrew Pickens who was named "Skyagunsta," by Native Americans who came to appreciate him as a man of conscience. Please also know that whether the articles have been signed with one name, or another; with a pen name, or another, the writings have always come straight from my heart, my perception, and my core values.
In other words, it has always been me, and only me, writing the articles.