Grassroots Tales Of Life In Bushland. Or, Two Little Reasons I Hate Republicans.

So the little shit didn't seem as bad as most of the feral child-beasts that run around the store. At one point he was sitting in front of the reading glasses trying them on and checking himself out in the mirror. A 4 year old kid with a mullet trying on some spectacles can be kinda funny to watch actually, but man, it seemed like this little dude had been hanging around the store a long time, and, now that I thought about it, I'm pretty sure I saw him yesterday too.

Then V comes down the aisle. I'm not sure what V's job is, she changes the prices for the things that go on sale or something, not really my concern. When the little boy saw her, and yelled out "mommy!" I had my explanation. V either couldn't find or afford day care for little mullet-head, so she brought him in the store to keep an eye on him while she did her price thing. For eight hours. Putting aside the incredible boredom mullet-head must have felt having to kill all day in a drugstore, obviously giant corpo-pharmacy can't have it's employees bringing their kids to work every day to be turned loose amongst the merchandise. If whatever day-care problem V had wasn't worked out by the time the manager got back from vacation, she would probably have to start staying home. Corpo-pharmacy misses her work and she misses a day's pay. So not having a sane daycare system in place that working-class people can access makes sense how exactly?

Then there's J. She's a pharmacy tech that started a few months ago. J and I worked together a few years back at another corpo-pharmacy chain. She was an OK tech, a little annoying, but adequate enough to get the job done. When she applied to work at our store she said that she had to take some time off to take care of her dying father. Federal law requires a company to offer at least an equivalent position to an employee who takes a leave under these kind of circumstances, and they did, 20 miles away. J doesn't have a car. She does have an autistic child, and now that she had a new job, she had a 6 month waiting period to be covered under our health plan.

J had issues. Those issues, however, were being taken care of with a dose of Effexor, a little lithium, topped off with some Depakote and an occasional sprinkle or two of clonazepam. You never would have known about the issues if she had been able to afford to keep buying her meds. She thought she could make it 6 months without the medicines she couldn't buy. She was wrong. I watched her slowly deteriorate until one night she became so unhinged I sent her to the back to pretend to work on some computer training crap. Couldn't send her home, no car. I kept going back to check on her and begged her to just let me lend her the money to buy her damn medicine for the month, but by this point she was so out of it she couldn't see anything was wrong. They let her go the next day, turned loose on society with all the demons in her head now out of the bottle and raging in full force. The good news is that now that she is unemployed and unemployable, she'll be able to qualify for public assistance, which means that surely she'll soon get that car she needs. Probably a Lexus. Just ask any white-boy pharmacist son of privilege and he'll never hesitate to tell you all about the welfare people he's seen driving to his store in a Lexus. Then ask him to name one of the people. He'll probably get quiet at that point. Anyway, now that J will be on welfare, feel free to hate her. I know how you upper middle class people love to feel better about yourself by hating the people on welfare.

So because of this dog-eat-dog, kick down/kiss up society that Reagan and his spawn have built for us corpo-pharmacy can't find people to do needed work and people who want to work have to stay home to take care of their children and fight the battles raging in their skulls. Thing is, these are just two little reflections of what we've become. There are other, bigger ones. You probably don't need me to tell you about a place called Iraq.

The election is Tuesday. Do something to help stop this country's bleeding.