I sit silently biting my tongue because I am no longer willing to fight with people. It's hard when you subject yourself to so much of the harm people do by reading the half truths and in many cases lies that spread like wildfire on the internet.
It gets harder when you see the unfortunate being verbally trashed. Even harder still when you witness the plight of our veterans used as a rallying cry against refugees, but no one bothers to address that plight in any substantial way. No one bothers to inform themselves beyond Facebook or Twitter memes supporting our troops and I'm left with a sense that my entire world is filled with shallow people spewing their ignorance in my path.
Nearly half a million veterans find themselves homeless on any given day. There are 1.4 million more living on the edge of poverty and in need of help in the form of food stamps, rent and heat assistance and medical care. Why do they not have that? Why do people who scream that welfare is too costly not understand that among those welfare bums, that they claim are fraudulent, are the very troops they claim to support?
Why isn't it fraud that the Walton family can be worth 50 billion dollars plus by employing people at wages which require their employees to apply for welfare in order to feed their families? If those are entry level jobs and they can get better ones elsewhere, according to those who complain loudest, where do they think the money to educate themselves sufficiently to qualify for a better job is supposed to come from? They're employed in jobs that are now considered temporary and they must sign a contract agreeing to that in order to be hired.
I'm watching small businesses locally struggle to survive and they won't make it without a miracle because people shop at Walmart for cheaper prices. They're even telling crafters at the fairs the same thing.
When stores close because people shop more online, why is it that the newly unemployed get the blame when they can't get another job and need to use public assistance to eat?
How is it supporting our troops when we kiss the asses of the very corporations that are creating veteran unemployment and then condemning those veterans for applying for public assistance?
How many single mothers has your war created? How many veterans commit suicide each day leaving their families behind? How many able bodied veterans are among those you denounce as cheats? How is this supporting anything but ignorance?
How many self absorbed idiots are there on the internet anyway? How do I keep them out of my real life these days? They've gone forth and multiplied and it's ugly.