To hold on to a coarse rope while being pulled towards the abyss, knowing that with each tic of the clock it brings you closer to the time when your benefits end. To the time when a forty seven year old woman drives a thousand miles for a new start. Then climbs the superstructure of a hundred year old bridge and dives off the edge. A hundred foot fall to rock hard jagged ice and frigid water, just another suicide in the land that doesn't give a damn.
I've been there, I've been on that edge. It's a suicide all right, but it's an assisted suicide. She was pushed up on to that bridge. Each collection call was a shove! Each threatening letter was a shove! Every unanswered resume's was a push up on to the bridge. When the politicians say, "perhaps the economy will get better in a year or two." They are walking you up the bridge, this isn't TV. This isn't a government form or a statistic. This was a flesh and blood woman pushed over the edge. Rather than spray a crowd with bullets she jumped off of a bridge into a frozen river. Dead is dead, this was someone's daughter, someone's mother perhaps.
How long are we going to tolerate a government that plays games and does nothing to help us? A government that thinks we can return to prosperity if we just lay off a few hundred thousand more people. A government that offers tax cuts for corporations, loans for banks and a blind eye toward the suffering of its people. How many thousands more homes will be foreclosed and families put out into the street to protect the bank and ignore the families?
What kind of country is this really? What kind of government is this, that thinks only of itself and its own survival? If a government's role isn't the protection and preservation of the weak and those in need, what is its purpose? To aid corporations? To build war machines? To enforce the laws that put people out into the street? If so, that's not a government, that is a tyranny, a minder to protect the corporations to big too fail. An agent of enforcement against those too small to live. A monolith of show and glitz and promise and bullshit. Corporate fascism with a smily face, where you clock out with a splash.
How do they sleep at night? How do they not hear the sound of the bodies hitting the water? How do they not count the toll?
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