I try to speak for others like me and my associates who are largely the once "upwardly mobile" elderly, disabled, and struggling Americans who are being denied the vaunted promises of America. We have become the "leeches on society" who are now dependent on the "mommy government" and the kindness of strangers. But we also know where the bodies are buried and we have long memories of the would-be leaders of our nation and the means they accessed to reach their current positions.
We were the ones who paid the taxes to bail them out of the messes they made when they were young, wide-eyed, and bent on doing good if they had to screw the public to accomplish it. And we remember! Perhaps that is why it would be more comfortable for the theoretically-advantaged big shots who have had their lives handed to them from a silver tray of privilege that was financed by our sweat and suffering.
We are the only ones with nothing to lose! We do not fear being swept up and deposited in the threatened "death camps." We're accustomed to "eating light" and standing in line for our sustenance. We are no longer, if we ever have been, accustomed to being treated with respect. We don't quake at the possibility of being hassled at airports because travel is prohibitively expensive as are most modern niceties. We may grumble about the cost of health care because we can't afford to access it, even when we need it, until it is a life-threatening emergency, and then recovery causes even more stress and anxiety as we try to deal with deductibles and co-payments while trying to hold back enough cash to allow us some simple food to last until the end of the month.
One might even envision us as the Madames de Farge of present-day America, sitting placidly as the heads of the nobility roll but concentrating intently on our chosen pastime while enjoying the nice day out-of-doors and sitting in our lawn chairs that were salvaged from the local dump. Bitter? Hell, no! Those are our children out there; our children and their friends, their children and their children and we love them dearly even though they have long forgotten us in their lifelong struggle for the fattened purse.
We remember John McCain in his Navy dress uniform, standing tall and proud as he went off to war, we prayed for him when he was lost and breathed a sigh of relief that he was alive, though imprisoned, just as we did when our own siblings went down over France and were at last located in the Stalags, surviving on watery boiled cabbage fortified with maggots for protein... We remember when John was rescued at the end of the only war we ever lost, the decimated man whose suffering showed on his no-longer-so-handsome face, and we no longer cared much whatever it was that he had to do to survive his ordeal.
It is one of the pleasures of the old and the disabled to just sit and remember when times were better, when our children were small and we were the centers of their lives, the ones they ran to for hugs, kisses and Band-Aids to soothe their concept of a kind and loving world; to remember their young friends as they grew and learned to deal with the vicissitudes of life, as they accumulated their friends and chose their own paths toward the life they desired. We hold these memories dear and re-live them in our minds in times of trouble to soothe our own souls, making what life we yet have a bit more bearable.
And, yes, we remember Johnny McCain. We recall his first wife, so mangled in that auto accident that, by the time she healed, she would be two inches shorter than she had been. We remember her suffering too and the fact that she would allow no publicity for fear her dear husband would learn of it and he had enough trouble dealing with the treatment of the deadly Cong. We recall, too, his triumphant return, the hero from the war, how stalwart he appeared, and how he enjoyed the pleasures of his restored freedom! And, yes, we remember his shameful abandonment of that wife long before she had regained her health.
We forgave him as he re-married a beautiful woman and began his life anew, grateful that he went on to dedicate his life to public service as a member of Congress. We felt that veterans who had suffered the vicissitudes of war and imprisonment would certainly oppose war in all its forms with its destruction of even those lives which had not been destroyed in battle.
Now, perhaps he can forgive us, speaking from our "rocking chairs," when we raise our voices in opposition to his attempts to steer our beleaguered nation once more into a needless and unwinnable war.
We have one last request for our aged and belligerent hero: Please, John, retire. Take your liberal pension. Go home, sit on the veranda of one of your multi-million dollar mansions, and SHUT THE HELL UP!
