Look. All I want is to be able to support my family. I don’t claim to be perfect. I don’t claim to have made a lifetime of sensible (or even reasonable) decisions. But looking around at the wealth squandered in this state, trying to squeeze bare-chested between the barbed stucco dams by which others have redirected all of the native opportunities to their own private ponds, I find that invectives that might otherwise seem outrageous are entirely applicable. Furthermore, damn it, I find it downright offensive when corruptive evil is cloaked under a silken gauze stained red from bleeding hearts.
I’ve little doubt that I’m working myself to an early grave and not a little fear that I won’t manage to work that long. In order that public employees can retire to Florida at an age at which I fully expect to be desperate to figure out how to continue laboring despite a deteriorating body, in order that Charlene Lima can wear this smug smile on her plump face while cradling that atrocity of a state budget across the Senate floor, others must live with the knowledge that all of the bogus promises of a safety net will be an ephemeral currency should that heavy fiberboard shelf do more damage than just a bruise when it slips. So that trust-funded downy-bottoms might convince themselves that they are compassionate, others must watch as their representatives debate how long a dog may be left outside without access to a doghouse, rather than how long taxpayers can afford budget balancing by legerdemain.
Sometimes heated rhetoric can be counterproductive, and sometimes even considered writers can take a step too far — especially in the immediate medium of the Internet. In a place of such low indulgences and high corruption, however, we who object have quite a bit of leash before we’ve reason to feel ashamed of our biting commentary. In a land where dreams are born to die, those who lay awake listening to their children’s fitful sleep as the household teeters in tenuous solvency must dispense with the fantasy that soft words are some kind of a talisman against hard times.
ADDENDUM:
A translation… perhaps.