The Crippling Of The Elderly

Are the elderly, the ones who made this country great, being treated with respect by our government?  I would be the first to say that the government can’t do everything.   But, they do have a  moral responsibility to do  some things and protect the weak and less advantaged.

I have worked in a service industry (real estate sales) in a county that is more than 50% populated by seniors.  Not only have I seen neglect of real needs of seniors,  I also see some alarming trends of the government preying on their vulnerability.   For example, here in Florida, the state has cut benefits to the disabled, many of whom are senior citizens.  During the same time, state taxes have been used to buy swamp land in the name of ecology and purchase large sports stadiums.

Many of the very oldest of our seniors are living on $300 per month in Social Security benefits.   And the IRS has the gall to tax their meager proceeds.  How does a person pay for housing, eat, buy clothes, see a doctor, and go to the dentist?   Sadly,  I have seen many end up homeless.  Talk to any Florida based organization that helps the homeless and ask how many senior citizens are on the street.   You’ll be amazed at what you hear.  Better yet, volunteer to help a homeless feeding program and you will see for yourself  many seniors living on the streets -  it will break your heart.  In the City of Tampa, FL alone, there are upwards of 8,000 homeless.   Sadly, many are older Americans.   Sadder still, is that many are veterans who fought to keep us free.

A factor that has been widely overlooked is the hidden and unhidden inflation in our economy.  The meager income paid to seniors is shrinking due to inflation.   Many are predicting hyper-inflation in the next few years.

Then, there is the marriage penalty that pressures seniors who would have married, to live together.  Many do so with great feelings of guilt and shame.  Seniors who live together draw more Social Security than couples who marry.  This is wrong.  Many a politician has campaigned on the promise to change it, but we’re still waiting.

One of the greatest tavesties of justice is the disappearance of retirement funds.  There has to be regulation put in place to keep retirement money safe.  When people work and save for an entire lifetime some money for their golden years, that money should be held sacred by our laws.  Those who would plunder those funds should do a life sentence.

The high gasoline prices have severely hurt many senior programs such as Meals On Wheels.  The slow economy has limited job opportunities for seniors who need extra income.  I see my own mother considering moving across the country to get lower rent.   It seems the deck is stacked against our senior population and with the exception of election years,  no one seems to be souding the alarm.   Growing tax pressures,  indifference from the state and federal governments,  a suffering economy and shrinking job market, all these things are making the golden years much less golden.

We owe a great debt to our seniors.   They fought our wars,  built our industries, raised up our institutions, and for the most part paid their own way.    We send billions across the sea to people who despise us.   We can do better than this for our own.

The American Caste System

In India they have a social pecking order called a caste system.  The lowest people class is a group known as the untouchables.   Privileges afforded to the higher castes are not accessible to them.   We look at that here in the United States and we think how archaic that is, and  how odd it is in modern life.   We think ourselves to be more advanced,  more educated, and definitely more sophisticated.   I would propose that all of our sophistication and American pride is a smoke screen.  The reality is that we are more backward than they are.

First of all I would observe that human rights and freedom are not accessible to all.  For example, if a rich man gets accused of a felony, he would immediately call the family attorney, make bail, hire expert witnesses to tear down the prosecutor’s case, and either get a greatly reduced sentence or be aquitted altogether.  But, if a poor man was accused of a felony, he stays locked up during the trial,  he gets a free public defender.  I’ve actually observed trials where the public defender didn’t even have a conversation with the accused until minutes before the trial.  Their reputation is that they carry a heavy case load and are forced to do the bare minimum for their clients.   At least they can wave bye to you on your way to the big house.  There is not justice for all – only justice for those who can afford it.

Then there is the credit reporting system.  Once an individual has a tainted credit score, they will have very limited access to housing and to employment.  So, how can someone get ahead if he can’t access housing or get a job?  And to add to the pain of the credit damaged ones, the insurance company will jack up your insurance rates if your rating goes down.  This creates a slippery slope for those who are struggling to avoid homelessness.

My next exposure of the American caste system is our health care system.   I can remember when my wife’s uncle needed a new liver.   He was told that unless he could ante up $6000 to make a down payment on rejection drugs, he could not get on the list to get a new liver.  Uncle Bill died.

Finally there is the matter of how we deal with life.   Medical technology has advanced to the place where people are killing the handicapped before birth and calling it choice.  Already in this country the elderly routinely get overdosed on morphine as a form of mercy killing if the care givers determine that their quality of life is not worth saving.  The systematic killing of the unborn and the elderly is vigorously defended by the liberals.   One of the first presidential orders signed by President Obama was to allow our tax money to be used internationally to kill unwanted children.  Meanwhile there is a huge shortage of babies for adoption, forcing many in North America and Europe to travel to Asia to adopt a baby.   When we were in China adopting our daughter, we met couples from England, France, Spain, and Italy who were there to adopt.  When people ask me why we didn’t adopt an American baby, I reply that the liberal political system is working overtime to kill them all off.

Your value as a human being should not be determined by your checking account, your credit report, your disability, or your age.  Let’s be the civilized society that we claim to be.   That would be true progress and justice for all.

The Destructive Power of Cigarettes

They came asking for help, they had children in need who might not get fed, but they had cigarettes.   They needed assistance for school supplies for their poor kids, but they had cigarettes.   They sleep under the stars with no home to call their own as they chain smoke cigarettes. 

How costly is it to an individual and his family to smoke?   Using a $2.50 per pack average figure, it would cost $75.00 per month,  and apporximately $900 per year.   Calculating the cost with 10% interest:   $56,952 in 20 years;  $169,536 in 30 years;  $1,299,329 in 50 years.   Hey smokers, your wealth and your future are going up in smoke!  Now triple all of the figures above for a 3 pack a day smoker and it really gets rediculous.

Perhaps you say, I’m doing good financially and I’ll do as I please and it is no one’s  business.  There are 100 million orphans in the world who desperately need our help.  What if you quit smoking and spent those millions you’ll spend on cigarettes over your lifetime on helping someone else rather than on destroying yourself? 

Then there are those who say you want to quit, but you just can’t quit.   If there was a 10 million dollar reward for quitting for good, you’d figure out how to quit even if you had to chain yourself to a tree until you kicked the habit.   So it’s not a lack of ability or opportunity, but a lack of desire that keeps people from quitting.  Or perhaps we should say it’s a love of self that keeps smokers smoking.

The financial burden on the U.S. economy is staggering :  over $92 billion is lost productivity from smoking related deaths and $100 billion in health care costs.  That amount of money would go a long way in helping our country recover from this recession (and possible depression).

I’ve worked a lot over the years helping the poor and it amazes me how people who are desperate and their family is doing without can come up with the cash for cartons of cigarettes, large cases of beer (that are hastily consumed), and costly tatoos and piercings.   Personally, if they can come up with the cash for all that stuff, they don’t need my money or time.   Once while visiting a man who was aggressively asking for my help,  I walked to his refrigerator and opened the door.  He became enraged.   I didn’t care.   I’m tired of seeing the donations of hard working people go to those who do not want a permanent solution or accountability.

On the other hand, we sometimes help those we really don’t want to help because of the children.   Who really gets hurt by the poverty that is worsened by cigarette addiction?   It is the weakest and most vulnerable of our society, the children.

Whatever Happened To Mental Patients ?

The mother just accused of a kidnapping hoax is obviously not in her right mind. She stole money from work, fled the state with one daughter, left two children at home, and was found (where else?) in Disney World. This woman is more of a mental case than a criminal, but after she goes into the system she’ll be a crazed criminal.

As someone who has worked for many years with the homeless, I have observed many mentally ill and mentally handicapped people wandering our streets with no idea how to get out. We have to accept the reality that everyone is not like us. We were not all born with the same tools. Not everyone has the ability to figure out the next logical step.

My twin sons, 25, were born with Down Syndrome. They couldn’t survive the streets. I see a lot of street people that are obviously mentally handicapped and wandering the streets, sleeping in the woods, harassed by deputies who regularly shred their tents in an attempt to get them to travel to the next town and be somebody else’s problem.

Laws were changed several years ago that made it harder to have someone committed to a mental institution. Patients who demanded freedom were loosed to the streets and the churches and social services have been maxed out ever since. One former patient pitched his camp behind our church. His collection of debris included large knives, dead squirrels (for future meals), and stolen property. When we finally got him placed in an old folks home, his pile of stuff weighed over 2,000 lbs. at the county dump weigh-in. And ….. he demanded a release and this old veteran of foreign wars with a 24 hour memory bank is now roaming our community again.

My Hero

My wife Pam is my hero. She is the kind of person they make movies about after they’re gone. At age 20 she gave birth to our identical twin boys, Joey and Matt, who were born with Down Syndrome, a genetic disorder which results in several mental and physical disabilities. She gave the prime of her life making sure they had every chance to be all they could be. As a stay at home mom, her days were filled with physical, occupational, and speech therapy appointments and a variety of doctor appointments.

In time, she helped start a parent support group to help other parents who were going through the same agonizing process of raising handicapped children. She always had time to go to the hospital to meet with a new set of parents of a Down Syndrome child or take an out of state call from a new parent who had no support structure in their area. Soon, we would travel to our state capital to lobby the state legislature and get new resolutions passed that would form the foundation for new laws protecting the disabled.

At 18 months, Joey had an unusual accident. His little toe got twisted backward in his shoe and he kept saying “ow.” When we figured it out and took his shoe off, his toe had turned black. The doctor in the emergency room said that the toe would be fine, but he wanted to run some blood tests because of an odd rash and some bruising. We were asked some very probing questions about the bruises which irritated me, and I just wanted to get my family out of there. Pam insisted we let them run the test. The doctor came back and told us to drive directly to Shands Hospital in Gainesville to their emergency room and not to delay. Something in the blood was not right. After a few weeks in Shands, we learned that Joey had a rare form of leukemia, and was not expected to live. The next two and a half years were like a bad dream that you couldn’t escape. There were spinal taps, chemo-therapy, and many extended stays in the hospital. The hospital was an hour and a half away. Pam stayed with Joey during the days and I stayed all night. We passed each other every 12 hours as we changed shifts. Pam was vigilant during this time staying on top of Joey’s treatments and organizing his medications. At one point he almost died from pneumonia. Joey didn’t die and survived the intense treatment program. His doctors were brilliant and heroic.

There were also huge financial pressures that we had no idea how to handle. It would take nearly fifteen years to see resolution to some of the bad debt we incurred during this period. To this day, she still feels embarrassment and shame for bills that were out of our league and beyond our reach.

During this time, Matt, stayed mostly with Pam’s parents and started calling his Grandpa, “Dad.” Pam still found time to help others and help me hold our family together. She still made holidays special even though two of our Christmas Eves were spent in the hospital.

Toward the end of this ordeal, we had a pleasant surprise, our daughter, Kristin. Blond hair and blue eyes, we jokingly called her “our perfect child” because she would sleep all night from the very first night, and rarely cried or complained.

As Joey and Matt matured, Pam kept them in the mainstream as much as possible throughout their growing up. They played T-ball, soccer, and later in high school, were on the weight lifting team and the football team. They are 24 now, but their old coach still comes to visit them and takes them with him to games. They made a big impact on the entire school. All of this happened because Pam wouldn’t allow them to be classified as retarded and shoved back in a corner. Her advocacy for our sons literally revolutionized the way our school system deals with the disabled.

With all this responsibility and crisis in her life, Pam always had time to lead youth groups and mentor other teenagers. Our home was always filled with teenagers coming and going and it was Pam’s influence that kept them coming back. We jokingly called them our entourage because everywhere we went, even on family vacations, she had a following. Even today, when I take her on a date, I have to insistently say, “just you!”

Two years ago, we adopted a baby girl from China. Once again, I watch in amazement as Pam works through the special needs of an adopted child with our new daughter, Hannah. She has also just completed her Bachelor’s Degree and taken a social worker’s position with the State Of Florida. She is already making a big difference in the lives of the people that she comes in contact with in her new job.

Recently, Pam was awarded “Most Admired Woman” in Citrus County by the Altrusa Club. She is a very special person, my wife, and my hero.