Reply #48: I understand perfectly. I live on a too-small Social Security pension...

[newswolf56]

supplemented by the little I can make freelancing -- my journalism career was irreparably wounded by my involvement in the Civil Rights Movement c. 1963 (the unspoken racism of corporate America is truly savage) -- but I nevertheless kept at it, and eventually came to believe that even with my minuscule retirement stipend I would be able to live out my last years on friends' property in rural Washington, growing my own organic vegetables, enjoying the company of my beloved dogs and otherwise living in pleasant solitude within the limits of my income. But the collapse of their own pension forced my friends to sell their land, a member of my alleged "family" who had long secretly despised me bought it, and then in a terminally ruinous act of calculated treachery late in 2004 ousted me without warning and in the most deliberately damaging way possible. This forced me back into the infinite wretchedness of urban poverty, not only denying me the ability to grow my own food (Tacoma is so poisoned by ASARCO that urban vegetable gardening is unsafe) but also condemning me to the prison-like restrictions of "senior citizen" housing -- no dogs, no visitors after 9 p.m., inspections that amount to warrantless searches every three months -- an infuriating cage of oppression from which it is ever more obvious I will never escape save by death. Human interaction can go a long way toward making urban living bearable, but the only city I've ever been socially comfortable in was New York; here in Tacoma I am hopelessly isolated not only by my poverty but by my education, intellect and talent, and my loneliness is intensified a thousandfold by the fact I live in constant nagging terror of the time I will not be able to pay my bills. Yet because my income is a few dollars above the so-called "poverty line," the government officially denies that I am poor. Thus my lot is ever more like the displaced persons of New Orleans -- a condition that will increasingly afflict every American who is not part of the corporate ruling class. Having lost all illusions about America and finally recognizing capitalism for the legalized murder it is, I post on DU in the hope of contributing to the resurrection of American socialism: the New Deal if the ruling class allows it, something rather more sternly Marxist if they do not.


Edit: for clarity.