C.J.Sellers

by C.J.Sellers

Your eyes are the stairs I’d never again go down,
not even when the light was on.
Grasping, before the hidden switch was found,
safe, from the stairtop I’d peer down to where world-light
streamed through dusty darkness from some glassy cinder-blocks.
The light stopped far short of the old oak cask lording the unturned dirt
floor, long ago soaked and soaked again with bourbon–still there,
its brine souring the gloom up to the floorboards with a vintage musk of neglect.
Your vacant eyes remind me of the silent poverty of that place
and its aberrant hole in the far wall I’d once ventured too near.
I’d stood before it assaulted by the stench of age
from the crumbling crawlspace. Where did it lead to?
If I’d sunk my hands down in that dank,
forbidden earth, would rotting hands have
reached back to snatch and pull me through?
I might have tried it just to know the rest but you rescued me
with your scoldings and Grampa followed with his threats
of fetching a good switch to teach me a lesson
not to go down there again. You said
you were convinced I didn’t need it yet. Instead,
you sat me in a chair with a cup of beer and stroked my hair
’til I forgot. It chokes me now to see you lost.
You’ve gone in and shouldn’t you know better?
Isn’t this the lesson that you kept me from?
I watch you absent there and wonder if
now I should be saving you
but no answer comes and so 
I press your withered hand in mine and
pray I find a switch.

The Brits are sneering…yes sneering at the Democrat “majority” in play. But who cares what they think anyway. According to a CBS poll from February, 70% of Americans are angry and dissatisfied with Washington. This health care reform debacle is just a distraction from the really annoying fact that we were only just slightly ahead of Mexico for total % of population that’s currently below the poverty line BEFORE the recession hit. But Bob Herbert totally GETS IT.

“How loud do the alarms have to get? There is an economic emergency in the country with millions upon millions of Americans riddled with fear and anxiety as they struggle with long-term joblessness, home foreclosures, personal bankruptcies and dwindling opportunities for themselves and their children.

The door is being slammed on the American dream and the politicians, including the president and his Democratic allies on Capitol Hill, seem not just helpless to deal with the crisis, but completely out of touch with the hardships that have fallen on so many.

While the nation was suffering through the worst economy since the Depression, the Democrats wasted a year squabbling like unruly toddlers over health insurance legislation. No one in his or her right mind could have believed that a workable, efficient, cost-effective system could come out of the monstrously ugly plan that finally emerged from the Senate after long months of shady alliances, disgraceful back-room deals, outlandish payoffs and abject capitulation to the insurance companies and giant pharmaceutical outfits.

The public interest? Forget about it.

With the power elite consumed with its incessant, discordant fiddling over health care, the economic plight of ordinary Americans, from the middle class to the very poor, got pathetically short shrift. And there is no evidence, even now, that leaders of either party fully grasp the depth of the crisis, which began long before the official start of the Great Recession in December 2007.”

Full op-ed:  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/23/opinion/23herbert.html