Fair warning: political rant ahead.
There’s a downside to our yard sale glut each week. While we revel in our goodies and bargains, there are countless reasons people are selling their things. Ideally it’s that they’re tired of them and got new, or it’s something that’s been sitting in a garage or storage room forever and they just want it out (which is the case most of the time.)
Other times it’s sadder reasons. We run across garage and yard sales that are really estate sales, liquidating the detritus of a life no longer lived. Or like this weekend, for one of our neighbors, it’s a last-ditch action in an eviction or foreclosure. The saddest part about the neighbors (three or four doors down) is that their liquidation sale was such poor quality my husband wasn’t even willing to give $5 for a big armoire. He said he was afraid it would disintegrate before he could roll it a few yards to our house on the dolly.
Most of the things they were selling were things that should have been thrown away eons ago. That this young family was using them until they had nowhere to go just reinforces how little they really had. I suspect they were renting the house here because it’s cheaper than renting a two bedroom apartment closer into town, and it provided a safe neighborhood for their children.
It also reinforces just how screwed up housing still is. It takes three jobs for the average family to afford a decent place to live. I make reasonably good money – excellent money for a single income in Arizona – and we struggle to make ends meet at best. If it weren’t for what G brings in, we’d be living with similar furnishings. I’d forgotten what we started out with when we moved here. We’d scraped enough together to get a new (albeit cheap) mattress and box springs, and our sofa was a cast-off from our son. Pretty much everything else, other than curtains, has been culled from yard sales and the like, thanks to the few bucks from hubby.
I fear for my children and grandchildren. Our nation has become an oligarchy, with only the veneer of democracy in place. Laws of equanimity are enacted and the courts dole out the occasional gesture of justice, but the average schmoe has been marginalized to an appalling degree. California has a ballot initiative to shoot gays on sight. Homeless people can be arrested for sleeping in their cars. Our veterans, who were promised health care and other benefits, instead get wholesale lies and turned out onto the streets. (I don’t think I even need to link to the national fiasco with the VA hospitals and such. That one hit close to home. My cousin’s recent death came after the VA spent years ignoring his attempts to get care. He wasn’t diagnosed with cancer until a week before he died – and the diagnosis only came then because he checked himself into the county hospital.)
I look at our neighbors to the north in Canada. Okay, distant neighbors from my southern perspective, but neighbors in a greater geographical context. There are safety nets there. Yes the taxes are higher, but the taxes go to support the well being of Canadian citizens, vs. the pet projects of the idiocy in charge. There’s corruption there as well, of course. Absolute power still corrupts. But there is nationalized health care, disability is a given when a doctor says you’re disabled, and families are subsidized as a matter of course. When you calculate the real costs we in the US shoulder daily, I have a sneaky suspicion it’s less than the additional tax bill north of the border.
There’s been a proposal (several times) for a minimum income. If this were a democracy I think it would be a slam dunk. Most Americans understand that the measure is meant to help those who cannot help themselves; the most vulnerable souls, including the aged, the disabled and the very young. Sadly, most Americans aren’t in charge.
It’s a scenario played out in other nations, where it turned out to be in everyone’s best interests. It’s a good idea, a sound means of stablizing the entire country to a great degree.
Unfortunately our Congressional leaders are bought and sold like commodities,dancing their tunes to the tiny sliver of power that carries the vast majority of the world’s wealth in its hip pockets. The oligarchy doesn’t seem to get that by pushing its current agenda, it’s setting the stage for its own demise. I’ve said it before and will say it again: America is on the brink of a civil uprising on a massive scale. This kind of gross inequity can’t continue, and it won’t. Unless the powers that be recognize their own slow suicide and turn it around, anarchy is lurking just around the corner.
In my little corner of the world, I’m continuing to plod along. I know I need to get other things done and I will. I started the drawings for the children’s book, and hope to get a bit more done on them this week. Over the weekend my body kind of imploded, though. We did the yard sale run but I was just along for the ride. I got out of the car exactly twice during the entire circuit, and even so came home fully incapacitated. By the time we got to the house, I was done for the weekend, period.
If I can dredge up the energy, though, I’m going to try and get some more things done this week. I’d like to get all of the drawings done and inked, and get some of the coloring done on them. I’d also like to paint.
I’d like to win $150 million post-tax dollars this week, too. Just sayin’.
I’m ready for the road less traveled, methinks. As long as the road leads me home.