...at least this year with our taxes. We will get some $$$ back from the Feds and will owe the state a few. All in all, not bad. The downturn in our income, now I'm not even working part-time for the bank, has meant we get a break. Thank goodness. There's plenty of places for that money to go.
But sometimes poverty doesn't pay. I'm thinking of all the children we treated at the Children's Hospital where I did CPE last summer. We never turned a child away for lack of insurance, but I watched parents struggle to even get back and forth from home to visit their sick child because they didn't have a functioning car and didn't have bus fare. The social workers did what they could, but our ability to help was limited.
How can we live in a country where people casually spend $600 on Botox injections, a couple of hundred dollars on a bottle of wine, a grand on a purse that will only be in style for one season, $50-75,000 on a luxury car (which has miserable gas mileage), and some people live on spaghetti or beans and rice and have no means to get to their job interview?
Our priorities, as individuals and as a culture, need to change.
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2 comments:
Amen, Sister!
Out in this very poor state in which I live there are many folks who can't afford to get where they need to go, and services are so concentrated--if someone who lives on the reservation needs a six week course of radiation therapy and has no car, they have to take the one bus to the center each morning and hang around all day until that bus takes them back at night--all for a fifteen minute appointment. So even a low paying job is out of the question during those six weeks; one can't get back to go to a job. I have a few more stories as well.
I'll be visiting BOS this time next week--hope to see you then!
Can't wait to see you and give you a hug!
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