Making ends meet

There are just some things you need to say, but you keep them bottled up inside. You don’t want to upset anyone. You want to keep your ship steady as she goes because the world around us is filled with so much chaos and you think if you can just adjust this, tweak that, you might be able to fix your little parcel of the world and all will be well.

But at this moment chaos reigns and there doesn’t seem to be a way to mend fences, reconcile differences, heal broken hearts, and get feet on solid ground. Winter is uncomfortably close, expected to be long and cold. When the buzzards depart Nov. 1 to winter in the south, maybe I wish I was flying away with them. Things that should have been taken care of weren’t. No garden, no harvest. I really wanted a garden. I wanted to put up tomatoes, freeze peppers, make jams and jellies beginning in June with strawberries and working my way through the fruit seasons. Someone has to clean out the rain gutters on the house where trees have begun to grow. Someone has to caulk the windows to keep out the cold of winter. Someone needs to patch the garage roof, find the reason why the security light kicks out the breaker every morning when the light clicks off, cut the dead branches out of the oak tree and that’s just the outside work.

I was searching online for information about senior resources and ended up researching a news headline: “Report: Drug dealers buying prescription painkillers from Ohio senior citizens.” It sounds like there are folks who have it worse off than the rest of us. Seriously? Selling their potent prescription painkillers to street dealers??? The Ohio Substance Abuse Monitoring Network reported, “Drug dealers around Ohio are developing new sources for prescription painkillers by buying them from senior citizens, sometimes as the patients leave pharmacies.” The said report “shows Ohio’s prescription painkiller epidemic is continuing and in some cases, may be getting worse. (http://blog.cleveland.com/health_impact/). The release is dated Oct. 4, 2011. “The network cites reports from Dayton, Toledo and Youngstown of drug dealers buying painkillers from seniors WHO OFTEN NEED THE MONEY TO MAKE ENDS MEET.” (Emphasis mine.) And that reportedly is the Youngstown area.

The drug dealers convince the seniors to go to the doctor, fake pain, get prescriptions for Oxycontin, etc., then take them to the pharmacy to get the medications, and then pay them for the drugs. I can’t…comprehend…This is the literal “last resort” to providing for an individual’s needs??? Why does this smack of irresponsibility? Drug dealing is illegal! Conscience—doesn’t anyone know anything about conscience and honor and doing the right thing? What if their own grandchildren were on the receiving end of those medications…and something terrible happened? Of course, they would never know. Not seeing the faces of the people who will use those drugs makes it alright?

Yet another news story caught my eye over the weekend. More Americans than Chinese are going hungry. Makes me ask if Washington DC really thinks we believe the Great Recession is subsiding. Really? As hard as some have worked to “dumb down America” maybe we’re smarter than “they” think. So, how are we all going to survive the winter?

I started out this blog entry complaining about the windows that weren’t caulked, the garden we didn’t grow, the tree branches, long dead, that fall to the ground when a gusty wind hits them just right.