Imanita P.

I’ve been day laboring. Today was a four hour shift. So, I commute to NPR.

During tonight’s broadcast a reporter mentioned that for prisoners, health care is a constitutional right. I assume that’s because if it wasn’t, that would be cruel and unusual punishment.

The story was about how, of course, they’re not getting it anyway, and dying untimely deaths from often very preventable maladies. It was shocking and heartbreaking radio.

But really, I couldn’t help but wonder …

Why is it that convicted criminals (including the many wrongfully convicted) are guaranteed health care … when millions of working, non-criminal citizens are left without even health insurance, much less real care?

This system is completely fucked up, and in many ways that has been true for two hundred years, straight through the Civil War, the Civil Rights Act, Vietnam, Iraq, and the latest adventure in the puppetry of warfare.

We don’t have money to house people, or feed them. We don’t have the money to give them health care. But oh Jesus forbid that the defense contractors in the Ukrainian money-laundering operation, because that’s what it is, should go a week without another billion dollar chunk of change jingling around in their pockets.

Or that we close a couple dozen of the 800 military bases the Empire maintains worldwide, in order to give a few graduates a way out from under their crushing student loan debt.

To the rich men north of Richmond, and the nice little Puerto Rican rising stars there too, I can only say:

Fuck you people. Fuck you with a ch**ns*w. You want to make the world a better place, do you?

Start in Flint. In Ferguson, Missouri and Jackson, Mississippi. Start in the burned out ruins of Lahaina, and over there in East Palestine, Ohio, where the train ran off the tracks and into a pit of silence after a few weeks.

You vote billions for the entire payroll of the plucky Kiev government. Yes, that’s right–it’s not just the weapons. Without US taxpayer dollars, zero accountants, janitors, soldiers, or Presidents would ever again see a paycheck in Ukraine.

There are prisoners in the jails and there are prisoners in the trailer parks, the people you are supposed to represent, who don’t have it half as good.

Lots of them.

No more votes from me to you until that basic dynamic changes.

No more loyalty, no more patriotism, no more hand over my heart for the Empire anthem.

I know it’s real cozy up at the Marriott and the Hilton. I know the ceviche and the crab cakes are to die for, uptown.

But you ain’t the ones dying, bitches, nor your sons in all those wars.

Anarchy now.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *