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Last night there was a horrible racket coming from next-door, and I mean horrible, not the usual annoying barking, but truly heart-stopping dog screams.   The dark grey male pit bull was killed by the other three pit bulls.  They tore into him like lions going after a gazelle.  A bunch of other neighbors  came and tried to make them stop using sticks and branches.   The cops showed up.   Animal Control showed up.   The face and neck of the brown male pit bull was covered in blood which I only later found out was from the dark grey male.   It started before sundown while the people next-door were out.  Somebody apparently knew how to get in touch with them and got them to come home.  By the time they got home it was dark, and the cops, neighbors, and Animal Control were using flashlights and their cell phones as lights as they tried to keep the mauled one separate  from the others, using pieces of our Jimmy rigged fence.   Today the man cleaned up the gruesome bloody mess in his backyard like it was nothing, just another chore, another day shoveling your dog’s guts into the trash.   We put those pieces of our fence back, our feeble attempt to keep out the loose pit bulls that hunt this neighborhood.   That killer brown male pit bull is back in their backyard, still stained with the dead dog’s blood, stalking  up and down the length of shared fence between out 2 yards.  All it would take is one hole in the fence and that vicious brute would go after us in our own yard, just like Anger-Management’s pit bulls.   I have a feeling of dread.  Is it only a matter of time?

  Tonight he and the white female attacked Limpy some.  He cried and rolled over, maybe begging for his life by showing submission.  Guess he’s next.

Animal Control proves their worthlessness yet again.  What would it take for them to do their fucking jobs and remove a dangerous animal before it kills someone?  It’s already put on a bloody show for them!   But they left it here to prowl the fence.  And I guess we’re just supposed to wait for it to kill one of us.   We’ll they did tell us that time to buy a gun.  Maybe we’ll have to do that.   Because I am not gonna just sit by if those motherfuckers attack one of us.  

 

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I think both Bent Ear and skinny orange cat are dead.  We haven’t found any bodies, but we haven’t seen either of them for at least 2 weeks.  They both used to huddle under the heat lamp on the front porch, nap together on the chair, or soak up some sun in the backyard.  And they always both came to eat.  They are gone.   And they received no help at all  from that self-righteous bitch who thought putting them to sleep would be cruel.  Of course she  was also positive that they both just had the sniffles and would be all better in no time, not that she had even seen the condition they were in.  We  fed them, provided them with clean water and what shelter we could, and watched them suffer and die.  But to her we are cruel pains in the ass.  That bitch. 

There was a time when she said she was going to trap all these cats and move them to a barn colony under her care.  But that turned out to be another one of her fairy tales.  Most of what she ever promised us turned out to be lies.  

The 5 pit bulls next door seem to have become the 4 pit bulls next door:  the big brown male, the big muscular dark grey male with his intestines poking out his ass in varying degrees, the white female with the now apparently permanently swollen teats, and the limping adolescent white male.   We think the other adolescent is gone because we haven’t seen it in their backyard in quite some time, and we have kept an eye out for it. The last time I saw it the boy was holding it in their front yard, and it had bite marks all over its face.   The boy looked like he may have been crying, or sick, I’m not sure.  Maybe the other dogs killed it, maybe the people got rid of it, IDK.  Doesn’t look like they’re doing anything to help limpy.   Guess he’s just gonna have a broken leg for the rest of his life.  Typical pit bull owners: violently aggressive when it comes to anyone else’s opinion of their dogs, but they themselves are unwilling to provide anything but the absolute  minimum care for them.  People who own pit bulls just like having something aggressive to display, something they can use to pick fights with other people.  A form of chip on their shoulder.  An annoyingly loud, temperamental, and menacing chip with a predilection for ripping the faces off children.  They want people to object to their dogs.  Pit bull people are much like Open Carry gun nuts.  Neither object really has anything to do with defense.  The people shot with their own guns vastly outnumber the people who’ve legitimately used their guns for self-defense.  And those idiot dogs make such a racket for no reason at all that if they were  barking at a burglar none of the neighbors would notice or care.  And the people pretty much admit that the pit bulls are too dangerous to have as guard dogs by not even letting their own kids go in their backyard.   So all a burglar would have to do is go in the front or side.  The dogs would bark, but how would that be different from any other day?   Pit bull people and Open Carry people just want to put on an obnoxious  show so they have an excuse to fight with anybody who dares to object.  They are mindlessly offensive and have a hunger for violence.   Just like their vicious stupid dogs.

 But if the pit bull needs medical attention or gets picked up by Animal Control for escaping the lazy asshole’s fence, then pit bull people just dispose of it and  replace what to them was never a pet or member of the family, but just a symbol of their aggressive personality.  The pit bull itself is not loved and receives nothing from its owners, sometimes not even food and water.  Not only should pit bulls not be legal, but most people who own pit bulls shouldn’t be allowed to own pets at all or have children.  They aren’t willing to invest time or attention into the needs another living being.  Do the kids wonder: “If I get in trouble will Daddy just tell the police I’m not his and replace me with a new son tomorrow?” 

Plus, the crazy shrew next-door seems to think she can tell us we can’t go in our own backyard, because she can’t tolerate the sound of her own dogs barking at us..  The kids can’t play in their own backyard.   Last time I saw the little girl (Mentally Defective Sociopath #2)  back there, the dogs were attacking her and Mentally Defective Sociopath #1 was shooting them with BBs to get them off her.  We haven’t seen the kids playing back there since.   I’d bet the girl’s mother doesn’t like her coming over here.  I wouldn’t want my daughter having visitation at a drug dealer’s house full of killer dogs and that screeching harpie of a wife.   

Yesterday the slumlord’s Property Manager had a crew dumping furniture and belongings from one of the duplexes near the highway into a giant dumpster.  A city truck later came and hauled the dumpster away.  I think it was from Wayne’s house, but I really hope not.  (Wayne is an elderly schizophrenic man who has lived there for years.  He is kind to the cats.  Pickleson was born in his closet Valentines Day 2011, almost 6 years ago.)  This street seems to be experiencing “White Flight”.   

Almost finished with Ursula K Le Guin’s “The Dispossessed”.  It is excellent,  truly one of her best, and one of the best books I’ve read in a long time.  The chapters alternate between the current storyline and the past which led up to it.  The 2 stories run along parallel and convergent themes, which fits in nicely with the main character Shevek’s physics theory trying to unify linear time with cyclical time.  Highly recommend. 

Next is a book of her short stories called “A Fisherman In The Island Sea.”

Stardate -306056.39 Ever have one of those friends who…

I have this friend whom I like very much.  But my life is not pretty.  We are poor.  We live in a poor neighborhood in a country where the rights of women, workers, and the poor are on the brink of disappearing.  We live skirting the cliff edge  of financial calamity and homelessness.  We don’t just run on a hopeless financial treadmill; we are watching ourselves slowly, dollar by dollar, falling behind.  We will eventually fall off that treadmill.  The only thing that would stop this from happening is death.   And I don’t waste my time prettying up my life for appearances.  The way I see it, I have very little political power, but I do have the power to put some of this uncomfortable  reality out there for others to see, while still trying to maintain my privacy as best I can.  This blog is a small selection of my experiences.   There are shelves full of books and articles describing and analyzing the lives and economic straits of the disadvantaged, but very little written by  we the disadvantaged.  So these are some of my experiences, though I seriously doubt the economists and sociologists who write those books and articles, or anyone else for that matter, will ever read them.

Meanwhile this friend has a neverending list of suggestions that he seems to think would magically make it all better. “Start a local group of like-minded people.”  “Join a protest!”  “Start a website!”  “Sell stuff you crochet online.”  “Fight!”  “Do something positive!”  “Bake your own bread!” 

He seems to think I’m a lazy whiner who just wallows in her misery rather than pulling herself up by her bootstraps.  We could very likely be homeless by this time next year simply due to work hours being cut, another car repair, a raise in rent, or an increase in medical expenses,  just to name a few easily predictable  reasons.   I can just imagine him at the local homeless shelter, giving one of his “pep talks” to the people there.  “If you (in your mismatched dirty cloths from Goodwill) would only go out (with no transportation and no money) and get a job paying $250,000 a year!  Won’t you even try?”  Then he could stop by the pediatric cancer ward and tell a bunch of dying children that they just weren’t putting enough effort into rebuilding their lives, and couldn’t they start a website or something?  By his “logic” the people of Aleppo should just “Stand up and fight!” and “Get politically active!”  Now why didn’t they think of that?  Yeah, if only the millions of Jewish people killed during World War 2 had just stood up for themselves instead of wasting time crying all those tears!  I’m sure there are poverty-stricken people all over America who could “benefit” from one of his upbeat lectures!  Did they try asking Santa Claus for a decent job with a living wage?  Well if not they’re should stop complaining and get to it!

I have tried to explain the reality of my situation to him.  He remains unphased.  He refuses to hear or understand what I say.  He says I should “take action” instead of “just complaining.”   He says I am negative.  No.  I am realistic.   I know that if I take time and money away from our household’s struggle for survival and put it towards one of his wild goose chases, we would be the ones to suffer the loss.   And he would just have another fantastical list of “solutions” that are useless in the real world.   I had a doctor once, an expensive neurologist in fact, who said to me “I’ll pray for you.”   This friend often makes me feel like that doctor did.

Stardate -306051.82 Fever Dream

I’m sick and I had this weird dream last night:

The world was flooding, Katrina-style flooding, and I was in a room with 2 other women.  One was elderly and bed ridden.   The other was younger and up and about.  I don’t remember who they were exactly, or how we all ended up in  this room together.  Outside the sky was grey and stormy.  Wind, thunderclouds, gallons of fast cold rain.  I started to leave, to go out in the storm, looking for what, I don’t know.   The water on the ground was rising and rushing by in the surreal storm.  So I decided to stay and try to survive with these two women whom I don’t think I knew.  Then the old woman in the bed died and the other woman got up off the wet floor and climbed into the bed with her body.  I started to wonder what I would do if she died too.  Did  I want to try to stay alive alone except for the company of 2 dead bodies?  Or did I want to go ahead and try to kill myself now, before I was the last one and all alone?

Then I woke up.  But thinking about it awake I still haven’t been able to choose between the two equally horrible options.   Might be my fever.

Stardate-306046 How To Create a Slum Without Really Trying

I think the people in the old Clownin-For-Jeezus house are moving out.   3 truckloads of stuff taken away.   What a shame.   They are nice people.    Wonder what kind of Neighbors From Hell will take their place.   Guess we’ll find out soon enough. 😕

The woman next-door looks just like Pennsatucky in Orange Is The New Black.   Long stringy hair of an indistinct color hanging all the way down her back in a greasy sheet.   She has paw print tattoos on her boobs that she loves to show off in her wife-beater type shirts.   We hear her screaming at either the neighbors or her own family or visitors outside all the time.    Trailer courtyard, prison exercise yard, her own front yard…all the same to her.   God I hate  this neighborhood.

The people at the end, who walk up & down the middle of the street in the dark screaming at each other, whoever drives the gangsta car is back.   Out of jail again?   Old boxy car, oversized sparkly rims, lo-lo style.   If they’re not gangstas they’re spending a lot of money to put forth that impression.    The house on the next block they go back and forth from also has a sparkly rimmed gangsta car.   Wasn’t that long ago that cops going to that house lined the whole street.   And the time before that.    Almost inevitably will happen again.   Wish the cops would come out of hibernation and get it over with already.   Then maybe the block long yelling arguments in the night would stop.

The nights still wouldn’t be peaceful however,  because of the neverending barking from next-door.   The little shit there  was riding his bike up and down the street banging people’s trash dumpsters with a stick again yesterday.   Smacky saw him as we were leaving & shook her head “No” at him.   He responded by sneering & nodding his head “Yes!”    Then he took his stick, which that day was a long plastic white tube, and started stabbing it into the ground of the yard across the street.   When we came home later our yard had broken pieces of that white plastic tube all over.   Smacky went and asked him if he’d been tormenting the cats in our yard.   Little Sociopath refused to answer her.  So I guess that’s a “Yes.”   In that one house there’s Texa-tucky, mentally defective Sociopaths One & Two, 5 vicious pit bulls, and the work-from-home (drug dealer) father.   The Huxtables they are not.   

So yeah, anybody decent who can afford to get the fuck out of this shitheap neighborhood does.   We can’t afford to move.   With the damage that Republicans will do to the economy, we will never be able to afford to move.   We’d be lucky to die before we end up homeless.   Faced with impending homelessness we may choose to die, and we won’t be the first or the last in America to make that choice.   The landlords are filling this neighborhood with thugs, drug dealers, pit bulls, and criminals.  Decent families (who can afford to leave) usually stay less than a year.   Whether  by intention or apathy, slumlords create neighborhoods where it’s just miserable to live.   

It fills me with a feeling of impotent rage.   We have worked hard all our lives.   We worked  in a prison, not lived there.   And our finances and standard of living have slowly sank year by year.   The car repair, the car accident of 2015, those things happen.   But we never recover from expenses like those.   As hard as we try, 

We Just. 

Keep. 

Sinking.  

So now we’re surrounded by these lowlifes and their delinquent brats.  

There’s a pair of filthy men…muddy?   Homeless?   I don’t know, their clothes look like they rolled in a sewer.   Anyway, they’ve joined the repetitive cycle of people walking up and down the street.   They sometimes have a dog with them.    Just fucking terrific.   More creepy people buying drugs from our neighbors.    I guess a drug dealer’s business model depends upon regular customers.   Their business must be booming.   So do they live in this neighborhood because they can’t afford to leave, or because they need to be close to their customer base?  Hmm🤔

All I can say is that that slumlord would shit herself if she ever had to spend even one night in this house, listening to the pit bulls growl and bark all night, watching crazy, filthy, drugged up people walk back and forth fighting, & put up with the booming stereos as cars come and go from the house next door at 10 minute intervals.   Probably similar to living next to a McDonald’s, if BigMacs were illegal and so addictive that their customers were willing to rob or kill the neighbors just to get a fix.   Once a man in front of Clownin-For-Jeezus’ house took off his clothes and started to “wash” himself with a rock.  Naked in the front yard of his dealer’s house in broad daylight!  That slumlord would be banging on the mayor’s door if she saw something like that in her neighborhood,  but on a street full of run-down hovels she charges other people money to live in?  Meh. 

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Monday we went to Walmart to get some groceries.   The car was fine on the way there.   But when we came out & had our stuff all packed up in the car it sounded different.   It felt different.   It was shuddering & sputtering, not too severely,  just a little, but we both knew something was wrong.   We took the food home, put away only the frozen stuff, and went straight to a place that used to be a Quaker State.   Now it’s something different but still a mechanic shop.   They did a diagnostic and said one of the cylinders was shot and so were the spark plugs.   It would take a few hours to fix it and they were booked up that day.   Could we bring it in at 7:30 the next morning?   Yes!   So we did.   They took us home so Smacky could get some sleep before work and picked us up again at about 3pm.   They flushed the engine, fixed or replaced the nonfunctional cylinder, and replaced all the spark plugs.   This is the car we bought after the wreck in 2015.   The dealership said they’d just put new spark plugs in before we bought it but the mechanic Tuesday said that they were the spark plugs that the manufacturer had originally put in the car 160,000 miles ago.   No, I’m not at all surprised that a used car dealer would lie.   The whole repair ended up costing $630, and that’s with a $160 discount because I worked as a nurse at the Phoenix Veterinarians Administration Hospital.   

It was expensive and time consuming and stressful and Smacky has not slept for days.   So tonight she got sent home from work at Walmart early, because she passed out twice at her register.   She hit her head and threw up and banged her tailbone on the way down.    They called an ambulance on her.   She said the EMTs took her blood sugar & it was 200.    Her blood pressure was about 120/80.    Aside from a blood sugar higher than her usual and a blood pressure lower than her usual, neither number would cause such a severe physical response,  I wouldn’t think.   She’s relatively new to Metformin, but after raising her dose to 2 pills a day she’s actually seemed to have higher blood sugars.    I was worried that her blood sugar would sink and she wouldn’t know it and wouldn’t be able to check it at work, so I told her to keep candy in her pocket just in case.   Apparently she’s been eating the candy and making it worse.   After a few days of having blood sugars in the 60s, she’s been drinking sugary drinks again too.   She seems to have no understanding of the differences between sugars, proteins, etc.   When the EMTs left she ate a granola bar.   I think Smacky needs to take that nutrition class at the  hospital again and pay more attention this time.   I also wonder if her extreme anxiety disorder could have caused this, combined with the lack of sleep, as a delayed response to stress.    Her blood pressure was lower than usual, and that’s after she was conscious again.   Maybe it slipped down,  momentarily, low enough to cause her to pass out.

  I sure hope she’s not getting anemic again.   That turned out to be the problem after a Hellascious summer of her passing out and acting demented.   If the dumbass doctor in the emergency room in the very  beginning could have just looked at the results of the blood work he himself ordered he could have saved us both months of suffering.   She could have gotten treatment before she became so extremely anemic that she was acting like  a crazy person and so sick that she had to be sent to a cancer doctor for treatment.    Texas doctors are horrible, especially the men.   It’s like they think they’re such hot shit that they can’t be bothered with such lowly things as doing their jobs.    I know so many women, including myself, who’ve been misdiagnosed by careless arrogant male doctors.   A doctor who was later arrested for building pipe bombs in his office yelled at me and said what turned out to be a tumor in my right hip was  just me faking to get attention.   I could have died and I did have to sign consent for surgeons to amputate my leg, although luckily the surgeon managed to save it.   One friend had preeclampsia-eclampsia when she was pregnant.   Her doctor told her it was just a headache, although even then her elevated  blood pressure should have alarmed any doctor with half a brain.   She lived but had to have a c-section for a dead baby.   She had had a very difficult time conceiving and has been unable to get pregnant again since.   Later, her mother had bowel intrasussession but her doctor told her it was just the flu.  She ended up with her bowel resected and a colostomy.   The doctors in Texas are idiots.

So I hope we’re not going to go back to the rounds of Smacky passing out all the time, and going all paranoid in the bargain.   I can’t handle that again.  

Stardate -306032.19

More updates on stuff going on:

The 2 sick stray cats: We stopped seeing Bent Ear about a week ago.   The orange cat is still scary skinny but shows up to eat now and then.   The TNR lady who was so upset at the suggestion that maybe these 2 ferals should be euthanized never brought the herbal medicine she insisted we give them & has not called back to ask how they are, or if they are still alive.   Texas takes the same neglectful attitude towards sick poor people as they do to sick stray animals: deny that there’s a problem with the sick languishing without care until they finally die, & then get self-righteous about how immoral euthaniasia (or abortion) is.   Darwinism, social Darwinism… Conservative “values” are disgusting.  And if anybody sees him (the skinny orange cat) on our porch they would probably accuse us of animal cruelty.   I would have to remind them that the “Humane” Society themselves advised us “Just stop feeding them and they’ll go away.”  We haven’t stopped feeding them.   There’s food right there for him.  And he does eat.  And the lady from their TNR group insists he only has a cold (even though she’s never examined him.)   We can’t force her to help him or to listen to us that he needs real help, or at least real relief from suffering, not just her empty promises and platitudes.   He might have cancer or some other serious illness.   IDK.   His death will be slow and painful but the TNR lady sleeps well because she didn’t euthanize him.   Stupid bitch. 

Walmart continues to be Walmart.  In 2015 Smacky got a Christmas bonus, which added exactly nothing to our budget because Walmart then cut everybody’s hours to compensate. But they at least gave employees a dinner in the break room.   In 2016 the new manager began trying to make stinginess into an Olympic event.  In the summer they didn’t air condition the store.  Cashiers who didn’t want to pass out of heat stroke started setting up their own personal fans at the cash registers.  There was no Christmas bonus but she still cut people’s hours.  In 2015 Walmart made a huge public production about raising the lowest paid employees’ wages to $9 per hour.  By the end of 2016 the cutting of these employees’ hours and replacing them with minimum wage temporary workers was, needless to say, much less publicized.   Same with the firing of all the oldest or disabled workers.   Oh, each firing was blamed on the individual employee.  “Lack of productivity gains”, that sort of thing.  But when you look at the forest instead of the trees, you see elderly and disabled workers gone, salaries and hours back down to recession numbers, even the tiniest attempts at compassion for workers, such as the Christmas dinner, vanished.   Now it’s winter 2017 and the manager won’t heat the store.  So employees started wearing their coats during their shifts.  Then she chewed everyone out for that.  Hell, Walmart isn’t even like working indoors anymore!   She must be vying for Walmart Skinflint Manager of the Year. 

Currently reading “Child 44,” the first part of a trilogy by Tom Rob Smith.  It takes place in Stalin’s Russia, 1953.  All this talk about Trump’s conflicts of interest and how he is financially entangled with Russia, but nobody really discusses that Putin was KGB.  He controls his state’s media.  Dissidents tend to disappear or die.  He even had a British citizen killed in London.   Do you really think the Republican Congress and the Republican Senate would stop Trump from installing a fascist police state here?  It’s their dream come true!  The question is how much damage can they do before the 2018 midterms, and would stupid republican voters even care.  The book is good.  Will hafta remember to read the other 2 as soon as time allows. 

Next books after that will be Ursula K Le Guin’s “The Word For World Is Forest”,  “The Dispossessed”, & “A Fisherman In The Island Sea.”

The pit bulls and people next door:  their son and his sister (She only stays a few days a week.  I think she is the man’s daughter and lives with her mother.)  received bicycles for Christmas.   (No basketball hoop. But the people down the street still have one if they want to play.)   They rode back and forth in front of our house screaming and slamming our trash dumpster with sticks.  WTF!  They must be mentally or intellectually defective.  The trashy woman still throws her cigarette butts in our yard.  I’m a little worried that she will set the dried leaves below the tree between our houses on fire.  The dark grey dog has his intestines hanging out of his ass in varying degrees from day to day.  Prolapsed rectum probably a chronic problem.  One of the younger pit bulls now walks with a limp, holding one of its front paws off the ground.   The 2 youngest of the 5 pit bulls are growing up, their growls and barks deeper and more menacing.   No more puppy whimpers in the night.  No sign yet of more puppies from the bitch.

The house across the street has been occupied.  I’ve seen the man walking 2 little dogs, Shi Tzu or Pekingese or something like that.  So no pit bulls.  

#Stardate -306010.27 So I saw this in the news today…

So I saw in the news today that a local woman has been arrested for murdering her mother.   The 87 year old mother had severe dementia and was found in her home by a Hospice worker covered in feces and with multiple bedsores in various states of opening/healing.   She was taken to a hospital and later died.  She was in the care of her 65 year old  daughter, who lived with her & is being charged with homicide.   At her arrest the daughter stated, “I would have taken better care of [my mother] but I was just so tired.”

This whole story does not seem right.  People don’t develop bedsores like the ones described overnight.   And you can’t just spontaneously call Hospice and have them show up at your house whenever you want.  Hospice isn’t 911.   You have to be referred by your doctor to Hospice, and you don’t qualify until you are deathly ill and have no hope of recovery.   Somebody had to have known what condition both of these women were in.  And even supposing that there was an error in the reporting, are we really as a country just abandoning our senior citizens to the care of other senior citizens, with no help or assistance, just so we can then penalize whoever survives when it all goes to shit?  

I am in no way trying to justify actual elder abuse or neglect, but if I were on this jury I would expect the prosecution to prove not only that the daughter  (herself eligible for Social Security and Medicare) was  capable of taking better care of her mother, had access to the means of better care, AND  knew that the care she was providing was inadequate. 

  I’ve never heard of a murderer saying  that they were just too tired.   I have cared for seniors with dementia, and it is very exhausting on caregivers – professional  caregivers, young and  in good health themselves, who don’t have to care for a patient with only themselves for help 24 hours a day.  I can’t imagine a 65 year old being the sole provider of this type of care.   Either the daughter had help (in which case she is not solely responsible) or she did not have help (in which case the Texas health care system failed her and, again, she is not solely responsible).  The fact that the victim was a Hospice patient means somebody should have been monitoring her condition.  Probably multiple people.  Doctors, nurses, aides, pharmaceutical staff.  Or at least, during the time those bedsores were developing, somebody wrote down that they performed the required assessments.   Don’t tell me that all of these people were charting care they supposedly gave (& definitely charged for) but nobody bothered to check how she was really doing.  No, never mind, I believe it.  I went to a local church a few times 10 years ago.   They still beg me for money every month, send a pack of “donation” envelopes in the mail to my house.  They have never once bothered to see how I’m doing,  if I’m  even still alive, but their money envelopes come like clockwork.   That’s how things are done in “Christian” Texas.  Why did Branch Davidians  and FLDS pick  Texas?  Because in Texas, by the time the authorities bother to get off their asses it’s already too late.

To me, this case seems like another person died on Texas’ watch, and what with the Child Services & Foster Care fiasco currently going on, they decided it would be better for them to blame this one on the daughter than to admit that maybe our Mental Health & Adult Protective Services are just as deficient as our CPS.    The daughter doesn’t exactly sound capable of providing much in the way of a defense.  In fact her statement makes her seem mentally incompetent as well, so maybe the state of Texas was already monitoring her care.  Maybe, instead of throwing her under the bus for her mother’s death, whoever was in charge of the daughter’s care should have realized she was in over her head, and done something before tragedy struck.  But Texas doesn’t exactly have a good track record for preventing foreseeable tragedies.   Ignore the problems; blame the victims. That’s Freedumb!

And supposing that the daughter is mentally fit, she is 65 years old.  So when she needed help (as anybody would, let alone a senior citizen) in providing day to day care for her mother, just what do they think she should have done?   Texas did not expand Medicaid.   Nursing homes and hospitals all over the country have been struggling, but especially here in Texas.  Even wealthy Parkland Hospital in Dallas laid off more than 500 people, and specifically sited the lack of Medicaid expansion as a reason.   Many rural nursing homes and  hospitals have closed, leaving not enough beds or care available.  And many of the nursing homes left have cut their budgets so severely that the “care” they provide is barely legal, as they fail inspection after inspection.   Homeless shelters are now dealing with an influx of senior citizens with problems they’re not equipped to handle: how to maintain a hip replacement when you’re sleeping rough, and the like.   With the repeal of Obamacare looming over our heads, America is facing a very real Senior Homelessness Crisis, as more nursing homes shut down, and the elderly have no place to go.    In a civilized society the 65 year old daughter should have been under care herself.  In Capitalist America she’s being held liable for care she  not only might not have been able to give, but might not have even had the ability to access for her mother either.   This is insane.  But in a country where corporations are never punished and poverty is a constant Catch-22, it is perfectly believable.  

Now she could be a horrible person who just exploited her mother for her retirement money.  But she wasn’t off taking a cruise or filling her house with luxury shopping items.  She lived in the same deplorable conditions as her “victim.”  And while she herself is a senior citizen, her “victim” was under the care of others: the Hospice people at the very least.  It will be interesting to see how this case pans out, what details, if any, are eventually revealed.   

A few months ago and woman was arrested for abuse of a disabled person, when the police found her naked adult daughter covered in her own filth in a dog cage.  Her neighbors immediately jumped to the woman’s  defense, saying that she was a “good mother.”  Then not long after that police found a couple of toddlers in a backyard tied to a laundry line.  They were naked and dirty and screaming and dehydrated.   Their mother had no childcare and needed to work to support them.   On the surface these all sound like horrible people.   But dig a little deeper and they sound like desperate people with too few options in a society that is more ready to penalize than help.   And if America wants to claim it’s a “Christian” nation, Hell if it wants to claim it’s a moral nation, then we are the keepers of our brothers sisters neighbors countrymen.  We had better be willing to spend the tax dollars it takes to help people before things get this bad, instead of only being willing to fork over enough to punish them after we catch some desperate person choosing between options that are all bad.  We could have offered each of these people a better choice.   The choices they made suck, but can you really say with absolute certainty that they did these things out of hate?   Maybe they were each exhausted and overwhelmed and desperate and just needed to do something so they could get to work on time.    Maybe if each of these caregivers had had some help…   Again, maybe they really are horrible people.  But maybe they’re not.  Maybe they had no help and really didn’t know what else to do.  And in the cases of the disabled daughter and demented mother, both of them should have been in medical records somewhere.  The medical personnel charging for their care and monitoring have some liability.  They can’t just say after the fact “We didn’t know.”  No, you didn’t bother to check.  And you got paid for that.  Probably with our tax dollars.