Jack Spratt

120923 12:28 my humiliation
© 2012 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved

--Michel de Montaigne
Montaigne's axiom: "Nothing is so firmly believed as that which least is known."
Walking on eggs?
Who Me?
. . . was it because of something unsaid or undone?
"NO! BECAUSE __________ !"

Humiliation is an excellent teacher, in fact it is "quite Buddhist" in origin. Well. Actually in Classical Greek Gymnasiums . . . .I suppose some would call it hazing these days!? . . . or sexual harassment?  Oh Well! The list regarding many things considered now P.C. (Politically Correct) is endless and actually boring while being astonishing at the same time.

McGraw-Hill's "Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions" lists under 'Politician:' "baby-kisser, backslapper, flesh-presser, glad-hander, palm-presser, pol." Not oddly I consider those to be kind describing a person who is actually compelled to beg for attention and funds to get or keep his/her job. . . .To not mention the cost of television advertising in the age of TiVo and the Internet . . . there's always radio . . . but I listen to Public Radio; exclusively.

"A man of understanding has lost nothing, if he has himself." 
"Ambition is not a vice of little people.."
"Everyone calls barbarity what he is not accustomed to."
"Few men have been admired by their own households."
"For truth itself does not have the privilege to be employed at any time and in every way; its use, noble as it is, has its circumscriptions and limits."
--Michel de Montaigne (died 1592 unable to speak)

In times of turbulent epochal change -- exactly where we are -- and I especially am now -- it is good to have wise friends who accept you/me exactly as we are and love us nevertheless. 

I talk to people everywhere I go; especially the poor. Learn from, thank, then bless them as they do me with their transparency. Distressed since nearly all indicate disinterest in voting; they feel helpless regarding Voter Identification, etc. It seems Carl Rove is at it again. Instead of voting for George W. Bush and getting Dick Cheney for President. It is now Vote for Mitt Romney and get Exxon for President. . . . Senate, House and The Supreme Court bought and paid for. 

Materialist are intelligent rich people who seem interested in the bottom line regarding what they earn by investment -- not labor. As a conservative primarily interested in power for its own sake. It, more often doing harm than good, via State or Federal Government & Religion, I can and am willing to debate the issues on their own merits. I think we have had enough of ideal dreaming never-never-land by the Masters of the Universe.

Seventy-Two in a month or so I find myself destitute of a quarter million dollar investment account. Add to which I am complicit when self-employed I attempted to game the FICA or Social Security payments due by spending on consumable assets then taking short depreciation. 

Now I am living in sub poverty desperately clinging to $2,000.00 an advance on my grandmother's bequest once used to purchase my first house. Earned by sewing buttons, hemming blue jeans and taking in laundry all her working life. Not merely complicit but guilty that I betrayed her ideals. To whom, or who do I turn? My father stole my investments in his business; claiming I'd left him no heirs to carry forward the family name; they both died and he then called my adopted daughter a nigger.

Sincerely I have benefited from my inherited poverty. I now am no longer White from Greenwich, Connecticut, U.S.A. one of the three riches addresses in the world -- once-upon-a-time -- but a citizen of the world's destitute poor finding a new culture and family here. Absent religion, government, ambition save in telling others like myself there is hope.

"Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil." 
-- C. S. Lewis