The Petty Pace Picks Up

This is the quiet before the storm in my house and yet it's a place I have been twice-once very recently and once exactly twenty-two years ago today. 

I work for the Federal Government-feel free to sneer, many people do and I have unkind thoughts about each of you since I am keenly aware of how good I am at what I do but how many obliviots are uncontaminated by any clue. Fair enough.

I spent most of  this past summer not getting paid 20% of the time because the cretins we elected to a variety of offices in the our Nation's Capital are too petty and pusillanimous to understand what the word 'compromise' means. 

There were things in my house, probably like yours for similar reasons, that we did without because we didn't have the money. Feeling bad for the CEO of AIG wasn't on my list of concerns and I can empathize if you didn't care either. 

Today might be my last day with pay for an 'indeterminate period of time' which is bureaucratese for fugifIkno, which is not an acronym but rather a statement of exasperation. 

I'm not liking the feeling in the pit of my stomach today because it's identical to how I felt twenty-two years ago on this, my last day of ever working in Germany at a job I very much loved. Wiedersehen macht nicht immer freude.

It's not just the loss of control over my own life, or any control if I were being honest, though that certainly is part of it. I think for me some of it is anger, if not outright rage, at how history repeats itself and how often it's the same same shirt just a different day.

I have chosen to be angry with the Tea Party and the jackals, worms and gnomes who sup at their table. They would like to pretend after years of NOT offering any constructive idea for universal affordable health care that they are unhappy at the shape of the program slated to begin tomorrow.

Their counter proposal two weeks ago left the 46 million currently without health care, still without health care and their magic phrase, "market solutions," is big money code for devil take the hindmost-as long as it doesn't impact the well-off.

I'm worrying that one American Revolution may not have been enough and if we're living through the beginning of the end or the end of the end. And if you think I'm being melodramatic or overly self-pitying as you wonder why you're fresh out of cake remember: me today, you tomorrow. Count on it.
-bill kenny