NYS wants to cut Medicaid by a half-billion, trump wants to cut it by a trillion. What, exactly, do they plan to do with the elderly?

How are we going to care for them? The elderly paid into this Ponzi scheme their entire lives. It is not an entitlement. This all started when Reagan put their money into the general fund. This is the result, more trickle down economics.

Have any of these lawmakers ever cared for the elderly. Do they have any idea how much work it is? its 24/7/365 impossibly hard work.

Dealing with the logic and maturity of a five year old, in a ninety year old body, that can’t get itself to the bathroom and needs a very messy diaper changed, and is mad as Hell about the need for this care.

It’s daily dealing with broken people who can’t stand or get out of their wheelchair. Once proud strong people who are now embarrassed, sad, defeated, incapacitated and helpless to help themselves no matter how desperately they want to.

Have these decision-makers even ever been to a nursing home? Do they understand the level of care required? Can they even comprehend the thankless work that the amazing people who staff these places do every single day, with love and a smile? I often wonder where they find they find the courage.

You’ll see overworked and understaffed people doing physically and emotionally exhausting work.

What’s impressed me the most: Watching someone like Anna Wardach in the middle of a double shift, doing a job none of us would ever want to do. Dealing with sad, broken, confused people, and all that goes with that, with a smile, no matter how hard her day has been. They want to make this impossibly hard job harder?

This is where they decide we need to cut funding?

They want to cut eldercare and education. They want to screw us from cradle to the grave. Then, in the same breath they want to increase the military budget another 5% to, presumably, keep us safe from the ISIS Air Force.

These are our parents and grandparents. Some, many, members of the so called “Greatest Generation.” The ones who fought Hitler and Mussolini and Hirohito. You can’t throw them out like garbage.

Of all the wrongs I’ve seen in my life I’ve seen this government try to pull, this is the most atrocious. This is sub-human.

I was not a fan of Mohammed Ali, I was a follower.

In a time of complete chaos and societal breakdown, and a time when the old bastions were falling and failing and revealing an ugly truth, Ali stood up and demanded a courageous honestly.

His demand crossed lines and barriers of religion and political views and nationality and color. With a great sense of humor, he related stories of winning the gold in the Olympics only to come home and be called, “Boy,” and told to eat at the colored table and use the colored bathroom. You could sense his rage, but he didn’t betray it, he smiled and rose above.

Ali was a follower of Malcolm X. It stands to reason I listened to this man too; trying to learn from his words.

There is a myth that Malcolm was a racist and hated white men. That is absolutely not true. Malcolm stood up to injustice. He stood up for the oppressed and wrongly accused. Malcolm encouraged you to be polite and dignified, but if someone crossed your line, where ever that line was, whatever that line was, “send him to the cemetery.” As I watch this world burn and watch the fearful being lead by truly gutless political and social leaders, I crave the courage and honesty of men like Ali and Malcolm X.

I’m not real smart. Never claimed to be. I’m listening to this justification to the 18 year old war in Afghanistan.

So far I understand this: Some Saudis hijacked some planes and took down the World Trade Center. George Bush bombed the living shit out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama ended the Iraq war. That was good, or bad, or both.

The Afghanistan war rages on. Syria has been blown to little pieces of concrete for a reason I cannot connect.

Bin-Ladin was in Pakistan and died there.

The US never bombed the shit out of Pakistan… or Saudi Arabia.

Some nonsense about freedom and shock and awe and a bunch of flags and stuff.

We spend $1,000,000,000,000 to “keep us safe,” from some scary people 7,500 miles away, who don’t have planes…

We listen to cowards who have never served a day, glorify war and make millions…

‘Murica

Like I said, I’m not real smart. It’s almost like it doesn’t make any sense intentionally…

Down here in these trenches lives a girl. She told me to call her Layla. Her skin deep beauty left awhile back. All that remains is a gray leather shell and purple and yellow track marks on her legs and forearms.

She hopes to get a job at Burger King. Right now she’s living in a motel, two-hundred dollars a week.

Smoking a menthol outside the Sunoco and asking me for spare change, offering blowjobs for twenty dollars and talking to me about her little girl. The baby lives with Layla’s mom. The baby-daddy died last year from a heroin overdose.

She hopes the fast food job will help her bring her baby to the motel with her.

I pass a comment, unintentionally glib, sincere I thought, about aiming higher than Burger King.

She looks me cold in the eye and says, “Old man, you don’t know shit about low. Maybe you think you know low. Trust me, I’ll dream the best day of my life to see your lowest day.

“We live right the fuck out here among you, every day you walk by. We are here. We are living and breathing and dying right here. Don’t think you are better than me, life has just been kinder to you.”

I remembered the frozen faces of Dicken’s Ignorance and Want clinging to the robe of the ghost.

I gave her twenty bucks, passing on the blowjob.

She was right.