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07-28-2005, 08:01 PM | #1 |
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Clarity Rose
Yesterday morning I got up at 5:00am to drive my friend, Clarity Rose, down to the local Independence Center for the disabled. It was a cold wet morning with clouds and fog blotting out the mountains to the west. Clarity Rose was waiting anxiously for me by her front gate when I arrived. Her long red hair was the one bit of color in her grey neighborhood in a grey chilly dawn. "Play that song," she exclaimed as she climbed in the passenger seat of my car. I knew that she meant the song, "I can see clearly now." I found the CD and slid it into my car stereo.
"I can see clearly now, the rain has gone I can see all obstacles in my way Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind. It's gonna be a bright, bright sun shiney day!" Clarity Rose and I sang along in unison and she made me repeat the track three times in a row on our drive downtown. We pulled up to the entrance of the building and saw that at 6:00am, there were already three people huddled out in the morning cold and damp, waiting for the doors to be opened at 8:00am. One was a young man with Down's Syndrome, another was a Gulf War Vet in a wheelchair who flashed us a peace sign, and the third was a man who had three heart attacks, followed by cancer of the larynx. He couldn't talk, but he was able to write quickly on a yellow paper tablet he carried. He wrote the number "4" on the tablet, tore it off and handed it to Clarity Rose with a smile. I had driven Clarity Rose down to the Independence Center that morning because she had recieved a letter in the mail informing her that a wait list for 25 precious housing vouchers would be made available on a first come, first served basis, starting at 8:00am that morning. We live in a city of over 500,000. Clarity Rose suffered a brain aneurism several years back. She was in a coma for three days and almost died. After her surgery, she was in rehab for 6 months, learning how to walk and talk again. She's friendly and cheerful and can't add a column of simple numbers or fill out a simple form without assistance. She was a housewife most of her life - married twice, divorced twice. After her aneurism, she met a man who was also handicapped and they lived together for some years until he died of a heart attack last October. They never married because Clarity Rose's SSI would have been taken from her, and her friend didn't get enough from SSDI to support two people. As it was, Clarity Rose's SSI was stopped for 4 months when she got a small insurance payment of $4,000.00 after her friend's death. Her SSI will be $579.00/month when it resumes - the maximum disabled people on SSI can get in the state of Colorado. I am worried sick about her. How is she going to pay rent, utilities, and the most basic living expenses on that tiny sum? She needs a housing voucher, but housing vouchers have become as scarce as ivory billed woodpeckers or black footed ferrets or any other endangered species. People have heard of them. They are supposed to exist. But no one has seen one. According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, 3.5 million Americans experienced homelessness in 2004. 36% of them were either children or a member of a family with a child or children under age 12. Here in Colorado 18,938 people were homeless last year for 6 months or longer. 12,054 of them were members of families with children. The monthly income of a single adult on SSI falls $10.00 short of the fair market value of the average rent nationwide. Their income is about 19% of the income average for single Americans as a whole. And these folks are the disabled - those in our society least able to care for themselves, least able to dodge the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. A young man who was blind in additional to having a developmental disability of some sort was dropped off from a van and tapped his way with a cane over to join us. The mute man handed him the number "5". "That's 5," I said to the blind boy. "You are number 5 in line." He turned his sightless eyes toward me and thanked me, then tapped his way over to the brick wall of the building and leaned against it, his collar turned up against the unseasonable chill. A man who appeared to be schizophrenic got number 6, a woman using canes got 7. A slender black girl who said nothing to any of us got 8. By 7:00am, the mute man handed out number 25. Those who arrived after that turned away with their shoulders slumped and walked away silently. When we were finally allowed into the building at 8:00am, 3 clerical workers handed out application forms and we were herded into a meeting room to fill out forms (I helped Clarity Rose with hers). A tired looking administrator told the assembled group not to expect anything. They'd only been admitted to a wait list. "Go on about your lives," she said. "It could be years." When Clarity Rose and I walked out back to my car, I tried not to let her see how defeated and worried I felt for her sake. "I'll get one!" she said cheerfully. "I think God wants me to have one." God might, but the American people don't. I've been angry for the past two days. |
07-28-2005, 09:22 PM | #2 |
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Well. I just got back from the transition conference. There was a lot of talk about what is needed to get the disabled to work. In one group everyone was asked to list these items. Some people chose things like 'positive mental attitude', but almost everyone went for 'health care, housing, and transportation'.
It doesn't take a genius to figure these things out. Getting politicians to listen is much harder.
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07-28-2005, 11:35 PM | #3 | |
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07-29-2005, 09:08 AM | #4 |
dar512 is now Pete Zicato
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Mari, that was beautifully written.
Two things occured to me while reading this thread - 1) Politicians are not really in the business of helping the people. They are in the business of getting reelected. That's one of the reasons I favor term limits. The result is that politicians won't do anything they think might disfavor them with voters, even if it's the right thing to do. and 2) Many Americans have lost the will or ability for critical thought and can't distinguish between people who won't work and people who can't work. I hope your friend gets her voucher.
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07-29-2005, 09:43 AM | #5 |
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Thanks for the compliment, Dar. Yeah, I think you are right about people getting confused between the disabled and welfare queens. What makes me really mad is that the people who are dishonest somehow seem to get their claws on an inordinate amount of benefits (naturally, I suppose) while the people like the ones who were standing outside the Independence Center that day go without. I know a woman who was in prison for 5 years for running a meth lab. She got out and got pregnant right away. The child's father vanished quickly. She went down and got the state of Colorado to give her a pretty nice home with all the trimmings. When it looked like she was going to have to go to work, she went out and found a second sperm donor and this time had twins! I imagine she'll just keep scamming the system. Next time they ask her to go work, she'll have triplets! People react against folks like her and the ones truely in need suffer. The ones like her don't.
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07-29-2005, 10:01 AM | #6 | |
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07-29-2005, 10:20 AM | #7 |
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I really admire your friend's cheerful spirit and I hope that she gets her voucher as well as the other people in the line.
I happen to know some very good politicians that really actually do help people and would probably be doing there damnest to get these people their vouchers really, really quickly. Unfortunately, those individuals are the exception, not the rule. I think this story is also a reminder to us who are not disabled to be thankful for our current situation and to realize that things can change in the blink of an eye. Best of luck to your friend and thanks for sharing.
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07-29-2005, 10:52 AM | #8 | |
dar512 is now Pete Zicato
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I knew a guy in Bellevue Washington who was a football player in high school. Popular. Says he dated one of the Wilson sisters (Heart). I don't remember which one. He was quite circumstantial, so it might be true. He did have a number of newspaper clippings to attest to his football ability. Then a neck & head football injury caused permanent mental and physical disabilities. I met him because he was in a special needs group in the church we went to.
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"Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain." -- Friedrich Schiller |
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07-29-2005, 11:29 AM | #9 |
Come on, cat.
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Why will it take years? What is the wait list waiting for, are there a certain number of vouchers that are available and she's waiting for one to be turned back in? Is it a percentage of the population? How does it work?
I just looked and there is low income/sliding scale and sec. 8 housing available in CO... some of it is just sitting there empty for months at a time. Why? I realize no one cares about the people who need the housing, but what about the people who own the sec. 8 properties? They can often be influential, and certainly can't be happy about paying their own mortgages.... why aren't they causing a stink? Like this place. No voucher needed, income based rent ($72-$431/mo)... sitting there for 3 mos. I'm confused.
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07-29-2005, 12:43 PM | #10 | ||
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Last edited by marichiko; 07-29-2005 at 12:45 PM. |
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07-29-2005, 12:58 PM | #11 | |
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Despite it all, he has retained a sense of humor, and sribbled down all sorts of jokes that had the rest of us laughing when I read them aloud to everyone. I am SO greatful that I have a condition which has proved amenable to treatment and I have been able to start back to work part time with an eye to one day being fully employed again. Many others are not so fortunate as me. There but for the grace of God... |
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07-30-2005, 12:57 AM | #12 |
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Good luck to your friend. And I hope the baby machine gets hoist by her own petard in some fashion or another. I think that system abusers need to be gone after much more aggressively, and kicked out on their unworthy asses. I see far too much of that kind of nonsense not to get torqued over it.
What I'm finding unbelievable is the $579.00 amount ... I regularly see disability checks (never employed, non-depdendant) of $1000-$1300. Most of my patients have more walking around money than I do.
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07-30-2005, 05:04 PM | #13 | ||
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Unfortunately, a significant portion of this country's disabled acquired their disability AFTER age 18. Someone who was a housewife, for example, married for less than then 10 years like Clarity Rose is just out of luck and in Colorado, anyway, expected to get by on that $579.00. This is also often the case with schizophrenics. The age of onset of schizophrenia is generally between the ages of 18 -22, as I'm sure you already know. Such individuals are thrown onto SSI and get only the $579.00/month. And that's if someone in their family has the stamina to corral them up and get them through the process. Then someone has to encourage them to stay on their meds which schizophrenics seem to hate taking. That condition has got to be the most profound, difficult illness for both the family and society to deal with. Schizo's off their meds can be extremely spooky and they comprise a large segment of the homeless population. I 've had the occasion to deal with a number of them (I'm sure you've seen zillions come through the door where you work). The ones that I know who stick with their meds are like children, telling me the most amazing stories of their lives - all hallucinations, of course. But they're just so damn helpless and often predators will take advantage of them. |
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07-30-2005, 05:10 PM | #14 | |
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The number varies, but in the average year we'll eat from 1/2 million to 1 million in unpaid hospitalizations. We also don't "Line item bill" for stuff like medicines, nursing care, seeing the doctor ... if you want to consider us prix fixe, go ahead. Your rate is the same whether you are getting a 25 cent pill or a $50 injection.
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wolf eht htiw og "Conspiracies are the norm, not the exception." --G. Edward Griffin The Creature from Jekyll Island High Priestess of the Church of the Whale Penis |
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07-30-2005, 05:13 PM | #15 |
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What's "prix fixe"? Was that a typo or an actual term?
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