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laid him off and is now struggling to stay alive. He was part of their legal team that did the intellectual property and patent work for PCS before Sprint bought it. He was supervising some of their marketing issues when they laid him off in 2002. He was approaching 60 at the time, so getting back into the job market was iffy at best and ultimately impossible, though he did, just last month, finally get a part-time job teaching para-legals.
My IRAs lost lots of money when Bush came into office and they're losing lots of money again as Bush leaves office. I will run out of financial resources before I die.
I was also laid off by Sprint, out of work for 3 years, back into a good job with a company that was doing real well, so it got bought out by another company and repurposed, so I was out the door there after only a year. Un-employed again for about another year. I have something good now, doesn't pay as much as I'm supposed to be worth (with my seriously productive resume). I LOVE what I'm doing, but there's this BIG financial hole in our lives now, from our own miscalculations of what was going on and from just simply not having the money for things like exterior maintenance on our house.
BUT MORE, OH SO MUCH WAY WAY MORE THAN ANY OF THAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Every moment of my life is pervaded by profound sadness and SHAME over what we did and are continuing to do to IRAQ! This is not an exaggeration. I started worrying about it in 2002 during the buildup to the Invasion. I called and called and called Congressional members, trying to get them to see reason. I have been with Friends in the Streets ever since, nearly every Sunday. We make our own signs and stand on a certain busy corner in a popular part of town. We've been through several phases down there, from frequent verbal assaults to, now, frequent honking, waving, or, as in many cases, simple smiles and nods from people in passing cars. Sometimes Fundamentalists come up to us and try to tell us about The Bible says everything is okay and the Rapture is coming. It's been a real education for the 20 or so people in our impromptu group.
Though it helps to hear the honks and see the smiles and peace-signs, the basic experience of being absolutely continuously aware of the KILLING, in my name, is still my dominant perception of life now. I no longer go to church. It's hard to believe that my fellow humans are even debating anything about the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq. I CANNOT understand the way that what WE have done is being accepted by people I thought I SHARED something important with. I feel like a stranger, now, in a part of the country that I grew up in and still have an abiding and deep affection for the land and the individual persons who are Us, but I feel like the aggregate, the thing that we are supposed to feel patriotic about, is a self-absorbed, blind, greedy, irresponsible, hypocritical, profoundly materialistic, mean, onanistic, quintessentially violent MONSTER. I'm working hard on not hating (and thus becoming) that monster, by focusing on individual persons, but I know how I really feel about what we've done to INNOCENT people in Iraq is like a poison there inside me. I don't want that feeling to be there, but there ARE some things about one's self that ARE beyond one's own control (and that's a huge thing for this daughter of German Lutheran immigrants to say), so I guess I have two effects from George Bush: how much I hate Killing people who didn't need killing AND the loss of the control over my own feelings about who "we" are. That's not only the loss of who I thought other Americans are, but also of who I thought I was/am.
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