injaynesworld "'We the People' Means Everyone..."

As a child, I recall a woman coming to our door one evening collecting for the poor. I pushed my way in front of my mother who stood in the open doorway. Even at seven years old, the thought of someone not having enough to meet their basic needs was crushing to me. I ran to my room, got my piggy bank and would have handed over my entire savings of $3.00 had my mother not stopped me. I don’t remember what Mom gave her, but the image of that woman standing there is still very vivid in my mind. That may have been the day I became a “bleeding-heart liberal.”

We were not well off by any means, but we had more than some. There was a family in our neighborhood who we gave my school dresses to once I’d outgrown them. They were really the only “poor” family I knew, but at least they had a house to live in.

Eisenhower was in the White House, the highest tax rate was 90%, and the country had never been more prosperous. Those folks in the 90% bracket were mostly the stuff of movies to the rest of us, but sometimes my family would pile into our old Hudson and cruise the rich neighborhood to gaze at all the mansions. Nobody begrudged them their wealth. It gave us something to strive for.

Today the term “wealth inequality” is one we hear a lot. The highest tax rate is supposed to be 35%, but if you’ve made your millions from investing, you only pay 15%, and if you’re Mitt Romney with an investment income of $57,000 a day that figure inexplicably drops to a paltry 13.9.

But who can really fault him? He’s not breaking any law. Okay, those foreign bank accounts of his aren't exactly kosher, and having the tax laws written by the same Wall Street interests from which Mitt and folks like him derive all that dough might be the teensiest bit skewed, but as Romney would explain it -- the rest of us are just lazy, envious, free-loaders.

Ours has historically been a class-based society with extremes on both ends of the money spectrum and a vast middle where the majority of Americans comfortably resided. It was a society where your birth status took a back seat to your dreams, and those “poor kids” who wore my hand-me-down dresses needed only a willingness to work for those dreams to achieve them. I miss that America.

Today, most of those mansion-filled neighborhoods that I drove through as a child have gates around them, and gone from our collective consciousness seems to be the notion that when we all have an equal opportunity to succeed our country also succeeds.

A strong and prosperous society depends on a balance between collective rights and individual rights. Today’s GOP would have individual rights, primarily those of the richest 1% among us, trump all else – except when it comes to a woman’s right to make decisions governing her own body, of course.

Despite what Romney believes about us, I know that given an even playing field Americans are the hardest-working folks on the planet. As for me, I’m still that seven-year-old who wants everyone to have enough. The difference today is, I now also know that there really is enough for everyone.

injaynesworld we make "Final Arrangements..."

She was supposed to have been in Sacramento by two o’clock to go over the final arrangements for the annual partners’ dinner that night, but it must be long past two by now.

Emily liked things to go according to plan – insisted on it – to the frequent annoyance of colleagues who often suggested she try to be more flexible, but “flexible” was just another word for indecision to Emily who prided herself on her decisiveness.

She watched as the large crane pulled her submerged sedan from the lake’s chilly, black water, and knew that lovely new cocktail dress she had so meticulously packed was probably ruined.   The car was slowly lowered down onto the bank where it was quickly surrounded by rescue personnel who now carefully pulled Emily’s lifeless body from the vehicle.

As Emily felt herself floating farther and farther away from the scene, she wondered if perhaps, just this once, she should have been a little more flexible. 

This post is in response to the Five Sentence Fiction prompt “Detour.”  

injaynesworld we're "Tired of the Herd Mentality..."

We're a nation of idiots.

How can any voter be undecided at this point?   Do they live in caves?  

And what’s with these daily polls swinging this way and that?   I feel like I’ve been living in a martini shaker.  Who are these people who keep changing their minds according to what the media tells them on any particular day?  

Okay, that 47% remark by Romney was a big deal.  I understood when he tanked after calling half of America a bunch of freeloaders.  But then he showed up at that first debate, lied about every single thing he’d ever said in the past and bump!  He’s up again.  Granted, Obama didn’t bother to even show up, but still…  Are people’s memories really that short?

I guess I’m no one to cast aspersions on anyone else's memory.  God knows, it’s all I can do to remember where I live on some days, but I do remember my core values.  

Last night as I watched Biden schooling the young Ryan in history, I did so knowing my mind was already made up.   The following two hours where pundits argued about who did or did not “win” weren’t going to make a damn bit of difference to me.   Yet today, everyone’s eyes are once again on those almighty polls like a bunch of sheep waiting to be told which way to go.

We’re a nation that swings wildly from left to right and back again in a time frame as little as a decade.  Is it no wonder we can’t establish any lasting policies that the world can depend upon?   Seriously, who the hell knows what we’re going to do next?

We demand instant gratification.   Problems decades in the making are expected to be solved in as little as four years.   If not, we switch course yet again.   Then we stand around and complain about how nothing ever gets done.

Make a damn decision and stick to it, people!   I’m exhausted!

injaynesworld "Until Then..."

It was nearly closing time and the place was empty but for the usual stragglers sipping the last of their drinks, prolonging the moment when they would have to reenter a world where no one awaited them. 

She placed another quarter in the slot of the old jukebox, her once-smooth hand quivering as her finger found its way to the worn and cracked button.  As the music began, the dingy bar faded away; it was 1962 and she was once again in his arms, a young bride, her head nestled against his shoulder, swaying slowly to the song that would always be theirs.

“I’ll return to you,” he promised only days later as he kissed her one last time before joining the other young soldiers boarding a plane to a war she did not understand. 

Her voice broke as it always did when she sang those last words, “… until then I’ll always be devoted to you,” and watched as the arm of the jukebox carefully picked up the record to tuck it away for another night. 

This post is in response to the Five Sentence Fiction prompt, “Devotion.”

injaynesworld it's "Taxes, Taxes, Taxes..."

I first published this post in April of 2011.   As I'm about to cough over approximately 22% of my 2011 paltry income to the tax man and, in light of the currently political conversation, it seemed a timely post to revisit.  Oh, and I may have tweaked it just a bit...


According to that bastion of celebrity gossip, E! News, Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne owe the IRS nearly $2 million in back taxes and the feds have slapped a lien on one of their houses.

Wouldn’t you just love to have that problem?   Seriously.   Just think about how much money you’d have had to make to owe a tax bill of $2 mil.  Damn!   And to own multiple houses so the tax man has to decide which one to put a lien on?   Why that’s the goddamn American dream. 

I don’t begrudge the Osbournes their good fortune.  At least they didn’t rob any workers of their retirement funds like a certain CEO did while at Bain Capital, or use phony foreclosure papers to steal people’s homes like the bankers we bailed out.   Besides, $2 mil is just the family’s plastic surgery budget.  Hell, Sharon can sell off some of her Louboutins to cover that paltry sum.   

Back in the days when I was writing for television my income never came near rivaling that of either of these families, but it was nice enough that every year I wrote out a check to the government for several thousand bucks.   I grumbled, bitched and groaned about it, but I’d sure as hell like to be writing those checks now.  

I’m not one who's all that adverse to paying taxes.  I view it a bit of like being a member of an exclusive country club; the type of place that has a waiting list of years to get into, where someone damn near has to die for a spot to open up.   

Riviera Club, Pacific Palisades, California

A place like that costs big bucks to join, yet members happily dole out hundreds of thousands of dollars for the privilege of carrying its highly-coveted card, a flash of which tells the whole world they’ve made it.

Now imagine the name of the club is America – land of opportunity from sea to shining sea (if you don’t notice all that oil washed up on shore) – a venerable cornucopia of abundance and excess to the rest of the world who waits outside our gates hoping to gain entry, willing to do anything, risk anything for membership in the land of the free.

Except nothing’s free.   It costs a bundle to keep our club running.   Transportation, infrastructure, water and power, education, wilderness, health care, security – all once the envy of the world – they cost money.    Who would fork over thousands of dollars to join a club where there were gofer holes on the golf course, algae in the pool and cracks on the tennis court?  

Just like it’s a privilege to belong to an exclusive club, politics aside, it’s a privilege to get to live in this country.   Honestly, I feel like I won the damn lotto of life.   While there are a lot of wonderful nations on this earth, any number of which I wouldn’t mind living in, I could have also been hatched in a rural village in Pakistan or the deserts of Sudan.   

Taking all that into consideration, I don’t mind paying the necessary fees to belong to one of the best country clubs on the globe and keep all it has to offer in tip-top shape.   From past experience, I can honestly say I was happiest when I was paying the highest taxes.  While I’ll do my best now, without complaint, to scrape together whatever amount I may owe on an income somewhere in the bowels of the tax code,  I just want everyone else to pay their fair share, too.  I’m looking at you, Mitt and Ann.

This week the President outlined a budget that calls for higher taxes on the people in this country who can most afford it.   To those in that tax bracket who may be tempted to whine about that, I say there are much cheaper clubs you can go belong to, but if you want your card stamped at Club America, pay your damn membership fees, consider yourself lucky, and shut the hell up about it.

Last week, Mitt Romney disclosed that he paid only 14% of his income in taxes.  At least on the part not hidden away in "foreign investments."   I say if you have so much money that you have to hide some of it, it's not going to kill you to fork over a little more to the country where you were lucky enough to be born. 

 

 

 

injaynesworld we meet "The New Family..."

All the neighbors agreed; the new family who’d moved into the old Duncan place on Hollyhock Lane was most peculiar. They’d arrived quietly under the cover of night and few had seen them in the light of day, though those who had reported that they looked rather unseemly and their children tended to bite. 

More than one neighbor told of being awakened in the night by loud moaning and odd shrieks coming from the house that sounded neither animal nor human, while the free-roaming neighborhood dogs seemed to have developed an obsession with the new family’s garbage.

Mable Hollyhock, whose family had once owned most of the land on this street, had been dying to see inside the home, and so it was that on a warm spring Sunday, still dressed in her church finery, her grandmother’s prized emerald-and-gold ring tightly wedged on her finger and a basket of freshly-baked muffins on her arm, rapped her fleshy knuckles loudly on the new family's front door.

No one noticed Mable’s disappearance until a few mornings later when Dobbs McKinley, cursing the dogs that daily dirtied his front lawn, suddenly paused his shovel mid-scoop when a sparkle of green from within one of the mutts’offerings caught his eye and where, upon closer inspection and to his lasting puzzlement, he discovered what appeared to be – by gosh it was – a large emerald-and-gold ring.

This post is in response to the Five Sentence Fiction prompt “zombies.”  

 

injaynesworld "Making Your Writing Intent Clear..."

Those of you who subscribe to IJW may have found a recent post of mine, “Visiting Hours,” showing up in your reader or e-mail multiple times and wondered “WTF?” 

Today I reveal how I royally screwed up that piece of short fiction, the lessons I learned, and invite you all to enjoy my public humiliation in a guest post over at GreatThoughts.com.  

Please drop by and join in the conversation.