A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog.

-- Jack London

 

If you feel like breaking, think of all the other dreams unfulfilled, the children unseen, the books unwritten, the work never to be done, the last nights together, the countless acres of anguish and the darkened haunted cities: consider the pity war distils and ourselves as creatures of luck, compared with the others who can gain no last moments more.

-- Malcolm Lowry

 

 

Sometimes A Great Expectation

by

Justice Putnam

It wasn't supposed to be like this. They weren't supposed to fall through the cracks, but they did. I was really hoping that THIS TIME, the Captains of Commerce and Government would come to their senses. But I've read this book before; something from my grandparents' time. The Captains of Commerce and Government have capitulated in the past and the hungry mother in a cold water flat coughs a feverish cry for help that will come, if at all, in too small a measure; just as it always has been and just as it always will be.

I know hard working men and women who cannot afford dental care, even though they are covered at work. Their coverage may pay for a few cleanings and exams, but heaven forbid that a broken tooth from an old filling needs to be repaired; the out of pocket expense precludes the dental work, so it does not get done and it gets worse and painful and as a last resort the dentist extracts the tooth because the insurance fully covers that procedure, thank you very much!

An elderly diabetic I visit regularly tries to regulate by diet alone for weeks because she is over her deductable for insulin. I guess amputating a limb is cheaper to the Captains of Commerce and Government.

There was a former book shop owner I knew who died of cancer recently and the Captains of Commerce and Government made sure his last moments were a hell of bills, reprisals against family and friends and the erosion of certainty that none of that would happen. Oh, did I mention he never missed a payment on his premium?

But his friends and family still took a collection for and volunteered hospice care. The Captains of Commerce and Government had made sure his coverage considered hospice care to be, "experimental" so he was on his own for that one. It was his 'public option' he joked with us when we came to care for him.

We used to laugh together, when he was a little healthier before the end, where he would hold his soup bowl up and ask in a perfect Dickensian,

"May I have some more, sir?"

"More?" I would respond in mock incredulity, "You want more?"

We would laugh and laugh.

Because we both knew that something as the expectation of another tablespoon of soup sometimes is too great for the Captains of Commerce and Government to provide; and it is that Great Expectation the poor, the forgotten, the old and the infirm take to their grave.

As it always has been and as it always will be.

© 2009 by Justice Putnam
and Mechanisches-Strophe Verlagswesen

(cross posted at Daily Kos.)