Ah, this is how Sunday was meant to be. Peace and quiet, a few good books and a Poirot mystery on channel 20. Add in a fridge full of leftovers, the crossword puzzle and Pudding-Tat actually coming in for a visit and contentment sets in. Since Florida does not like you getting too comfortable, I wonder what is about to go wrong. Me, the perpetual optimist.
Poirot starred in “Appointment with Death”, he is the screen equivalent of Ellery Queen. There are never enough clues given to catch the bad guy on your own. I like it as the only show with no commercials. This episode was a classic, with seven murder suspects. Alas, the murder scheme was so complicated it would never have worked in real life and was not believable. As for Poirot, it’s a little fishy how he somehow figured out all seven were related to each other when they didn’t know it themselves.There was a documentary from the northeast (on my news feed), showing the vastly increasing numbers of Americans dependent on food banks. The message was that the poor are an invisible class, that it has become socially acceptable to be prejudiced against the poor. I disagree, because that theory implicates those who are not poor as part of the cause. I am not personally responsible for anyone else being poor except myself. I feel Americans don’t take enough responsibility for their own actions. Don’t come up with schemes that encourage people shift personal blame to others.
In scenes reminiscent of the Great Depression, it showed families living in cars and abandoned basements. It is easy for outsiders to conclude America doesn’t have any social programs. We have plenty, but the fact is they don’t work well for people who consistently make bad decisions. This is not Canada, where you can be a dumbfeck and get away with it for life. The system up there is totally unfair, with millionaires in West Vancouver collecting monthly welfare checks. The inescapable bottom line is most poor people in the USA have had a hand in their fate. I’ll explain.
There are fewer barriers to getting ahead in America than in [most other places in] the world. However, that freedom has a price and works both ways. The moment you stop trying to get ahead, you instantly become more vulnerable to economic downturns. Around 60% of those below the poverty line are single mothers, but that doesn’t seem to deter them in the least, many having a second child while already on welfare. Almost hereditarily, we have the self-made rich but we also have the self-made poor. And America is strange in that you cannot suddenly stop and be left alone. Unless you are continually striving, you can't just exist--very easily I mean.
I question the validity of giving poor people cash money, as their inability to use it properly has always loomed big in every last one of their situations. I was raised with eight people in a three bedroom house, so I am hardly moved by horror stories of crowded living conditions. I used to dread entering that house on winter days because that meant walking into pre-breathed air. I had to chop firewood for years as a child, and while I understand why so few want to, it cannot bring me to tears.
What I got from the program was what I’ve been saying for decades: most people are woefully wrong about their ability to survive bad times. Their brand of tolerance means when their turn comes to look for minimum wage work, they’ll find they’ve been putting on a good show for a little too long. Construction jobs in this area now pay minimum wage and there are forty applicants for each position, up a little from three months ago. (Minimum wage is currently $7.25 per hour.)
My apologies for the lack of photos these days. I carry my camera but there is a paucity of interesting subjects. Don’t run away, I have reason to believe this will change very shortly. In other news, I can now sing twenty songs with reasonable confidence. This doesn’t put me in the big league. But that is striking distance to my goal of 32 tunes to get out and play on weekends. Except for the most familiar of my choices, I still have to focus on getting every note right, something I know for a fact that talented singers find natural, or at least don’t have to think about. Thus, Arnel was right. He’s the guy that threw me in the ocean, figuratively. What’s more, teaching myself to sing was not all that difficult. I have been singing now for eight months.
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