10
Marcy’s family was not large. She only had one brother whom the children knew affectionately as Uncle Dave. He was a good looking man. He was unmarried, a confirmed bachelor, and they all knew that he was gay which was all right with them. They still loved him. He was theirs. Marcy was laid out in her open coffin for all to see. Her friends from church and from work came and went during viewing times. Other than that, it was mostly her husband, her two children, and Dave. When the time came, Minister Frank Long gave a nice eulogy.
“My friends, we are always sad when a loved one passes into the other world where God awaits all of us. I like to celebrate the life of the person who has passed on rather than dwell on their suffering in the last days of their lives, because we all live and therefore we are each of us slated to pass away to the other side.
“The Lord tells us that we are allotted only one death. It is a blessing that we die only once in our life and that we never have to experience the pain of death ever again.
“I see the sadness in this room every time I gaze into your eyes, but I want to let you know that Marcy is still with us. She is up there with her Lord in everlasting life. She is right now looking down upon all of you. Marcy is right here listening to every word I am saying to you, because she is not the type of mother who would ever leave her children. So, I know she is listening. Because you are close together and listening, Marcy is right here with us, also. She hears what we are saying at this very moment, and, as your life continues, know that she will continue to be inside you from up there in heaven above you. Marcy looks down upon us wherever we go in life, going everywhere we go, listening to our conversations, smiling inside us, crying whenever we cry, and laughing whenever we laugh. Mothers like Marcy shall never leave us. We know this in our hearts, and our hearts do not lie about these things. This heart of ours is the strongest organ in our bodies, and the heart is there inside each one of us to tell us the truth as we proceed down our life’s road, because the heart can never lie to us. Understand me. There isn’t one particle inside of our hearts that can lie without us knowing it as a lie. Our heart is our conscience and our guide. My heart and your heart is merging right now with Marcy who is still alive inside us. She is going to follow each of us wherever we go in our lives as we leave her funeral and go about our business.
“She is in eternal peace. She never died, because she believed in Christ, and as John three sixteen tells us, “whoever believes in Him, meaning Jesus Christ, shall have ever lasting life.” Marcy is not dead. She believed in Him. She is in the arms of God at this very moment, just as all of us are promised who believe in Jesus when we are alive.
“Shall we pray?
“Lord, we have enjoyed the grace of having lived with your daughter, Marcy, and we rejoice in how you have taken her into your arms and protected her just as you did when she was here. When we cross that great divide, Marcy will greet us as we enter the streets of gold where she now resides and that is exactly where she will welcome us into our spiritual eternity. It is the same place where she now enjoys her own eternal gift of life forever. Amen.”
Marcy’s family didn’t buy a single word of it. She was dead, and they were pissed. It was Obama Care that killed Marcy, and they all knew it.
11
Barb Smothers and Rod Lancaster were regular listeners to short wave and Internet radio “Indie News Shows.” They were committed to all of these independent or Indie commentaries concerning news happenings all over the world. The tea party members like Barb and Rod mistrusted the monopoly media giants who were owned and operated for the benefit of banks and related corporatists. They listened to Glenn Beck, Fox News, Alex Jones, and read Breitbart News, The Huffington Report, and Drudge Report. They had little interest in NBC, ABC, MsNBC, CBS and those whom they considered the other useless and lying trolls of the American news establishment. These news giants were the enemies of America’s constitution who posed as supporters of it but had done everything possible to destroy it.
Instead, the giant presstitutes were known by tea baggers like Barb Smothers and Rod Lancaster and their associates as sell outs, traitors, and idea monopolists. These were highly overpaid corrupt people who were in the business of propagandizing the world at large. They were merely corporatist entertainers who pretended to be disinterested journalists. They were not disinterested. They were not objective. They were subjective and manipulating corporatist shills who had purposely merged journalism with entertainment. They were monopolists who worked for those who owned all of the frequencies through which they broadcast their lies into the homes and cars of millions of passively massaged listeners and viewers. These passive audiences had been trained by years of TV and radio to turn to certain approved channels and frequencies where they were spoon fed what the government wanted them to know. The news commentators even apologized for government mistakes in an effort to support the corruption that congress, the presidency, and the courts handed out on a daily basis.
Barb Smothers and Rod Lancaster and most of the Tea Baggers considered themselves as the true patriots who were interested in maintaining laws underwritten by the United States Constitution. The problem as they saw it was that the government was dedicated to overthrowing the constitution and to defeating all guarantees of freedom, because it had become a government of the world’s most greedy power hungry thugs. So, they joined with the tea party. They wanted to change the world. Instead, Glenn Beck usurped the entire movement. He had grabbed its reins and had taken almost total control of its energies as its default spokesman. In doing so, he transformed the tea party into a vehicle for the preservation of corruption for the elitists whose main goal was the destruction of America and the constitution. In short, he made it into his own personality and caused it to became a black flag movement for those who owned everything and wanted to keep it all for themselves, because they allowed Beck to control their thoughts and to do the work of the rich and greedy. The tea party became a brilliant operation that stood up for the international bankers who were the actual government and pretended at the same time to represent the people of America which was not true at all, because Americans were merely pandered to and not really considered as important in the party’s rhetoric.
At any rate, the tea party proved its power by standing up before the microphones of the false representatives in Washington who were bankrupting the American people while enriching the bankers and corporatists who owned almost everything. They appeared at speakers forums in many if not all of the states, standing up and stopping the speeches of representatives and senators with questions about overspending, payments to banks, acceptance of donations for campaign expenses and how these things affected their votes in Washington. With Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and others leading and waving the American flag, they at least became the first force for change in America since the 1960’s anti-war movements. They masqueraded as common citizens against the banks and corporations, even while as false conservatives, they were actually false supporters of the greed oriented system which had caused these bad things to happen to America all along.
“We need to protest Obama Care,” Barb Smothers shouted through the microphone to the assembled crowd of tea party protesters, “Because the system will totally destroy the independence of doctors, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and related persons. Once the insurance companies have control over every consumer needing medical care, they will begin to overpower the traditional manner in which doctors were able to perform what was needed for patients. Under this government mandated care, the insurance companies are right now undermining our rights by establishing what I call their corporatist death squads. These evil people will insure that millions of us are given substandard care instead of what an independent physician would prescribe to cure diseases. This is precisely why protesters whose relatives have died from these death squads are now shooting up innocent citizens in their misguided revenge plots against not only the government and insurance companies, but against the American peop
le themselves, people who had nothing to do with the back room decisions to take their medical choices away from them. I relinquish the microphone.”
Another week, another tea party meeting. At this one, Lucy Daniels came to the microphone to say, “I support what Barb Smothers told us last week. That was when Barb told us how we are indeed caught inside a monstrous governmental dilemma of death wherein our loved ones are now being mistreated by what we now know as Obama Care. This is because Obama Care, as it is called by most, is a very deadly program. In fact, it is immoral. It affects you and me, our family, our friends. We are all under attack.
“Our mortality is hanging from the creaking door hinges leading into every physician’s office in this land and trailing from his back door into the insurance board rooms where profit is their only motive. Instead of the forked stick and serpent of Hippocrates’ logo in the ancient world, we now see only dollar bills. These paper dollars represent profit oriented medical decisions for the benefit of insurance companies. Today’s decisions by a physician are not for the benefit of their patients, meaning you and and your loved ones, those who are supposed to be their clients but are only their under insured shills. They are the ones who now suffer from this program of medical isolation and lack of care which the insurance magnets have sadistically engineered for us.
“We, as patients of Obama Care, have been tossed under the bus. We languish in pain beneath the insurance company’s crushing tires of indifference as we are squashed down into the pavement by its heavy passing weight. In the midst of their cruelty, life passes us by, because our diseases go untreated. We are expected to remain silent while this happens to us out of political correctness.
“The tea party will never remain quiet over the slaughter of our people under the heavy weight of death that Obama Care dishes out to our friends, business acquaintances, and relatives. Instead, we pledge to scream to the hilltops, to picket hospitals, to place YouTube videos of our discontent all over the web of increasing social networks to alert the world of how much we actually care.
“Yesterday, I attended the funeral of my neighbor who died on the cross of Obama Care. Her name was Marcy Adams. She lived on the same block. I grew up with her. She was a wonderful lady with two wonderful children. But Obama Care told her that she was not worth saving, that so many persons with her condition died no matter what treatments were offered that it would be a waste under the present system to even treat her. Treatment of Marcy, it seems, was detrimental to the profit incentive.
“The insurance planners, you see, never worked for Marcy. Instead, they worked for unseen people inside the hierarchy who deemed people like Marcy to be expendable just so long as it brought them higher profits. She was only one of many whom they saw fit to toss under the bus whenever they saw that it would benefit them to do so in the name of their corporatist greed, so that the insurance companies might cram a few more pennies into the bulging pockets of their investors.
“Therefore, people like Marcy Adams have to die earlier than they would have under the pre-Obama Care system. Now, inside the inhumanity of the death squads of the federal nightmare we live within, we must die so that people like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney or capitalists like them might enrich themselves from their investments and continue to capitalize on our deaths. To do that, sometimes a Marcy Adams has to die. She had been tossed under the passing busses of a thousand points of corporatist profit, the same way our soldiers had their arms and legs blown off so that Halliburton investors wouldn’t go home penniless without the Iraq War filling their illicit coffers.
“I ask you what has America come to? In our short lives, we have watched our nation’s representatives vote down our rights with the Patriot Act, NDAA, and other anti-constitutional laws. Did you ever ask yourself how a law could be passed that short-circuited your own guarantees to life, liberty, and freedom that were guaranteed to you by the constitution for over two hundred years? Wasn’t that document passed in order to stop congress from passing laws that denied those guarantees? Yet it only took congress fifteen minutes to destroy the constitution in the passage of the Patriot Act which was thousands of pages long and which no one in congress was allowed to read. The way it was done simply takes my breath away. I mean Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin must be standing proud every time the representatives and senators enter the capitol building. The fascist-communist infrastructure of those sessions up there that regularly toss all of us under the federal bus are the perfected fruition of the anti-democratic fantasies that fester inside the corrupted minds of every two bit dictator on this planet. The houses of congress paint themselves in the colors of corruption as they regularly vote against our guarantees of fairness in their support of the growing powers of the federal government in its reach toward higher taxes and its desires for centralized expansionism just as long as it continues to benefit their corporate cronies and make them wealthier than ever while they ride roughshod over the backs of the working poor.”
12
After the meeting, Barb Smothers and Ron Lancaster went home as they always did. Home was their shared apartment. Although they believed in the sanctity of marriage, they had refused to take the plunge. Instead, they lived in what many tea party members would call a sinful nature, unblessed by God. Barb and Ron sort of believed in the religious sanctity of marriage themselves, but they were also quite happy with what they were doing. Besides, they hadn’t yet had any children. If a child were dropped into their laps, they’d sit down and seriously consider marriage. As for now, they were okay with simply sleeping together in their apartment behind their closed doors. Besides, everyone else was doing it. To them, it was not a problem.
They watched a video of their protest meeting on television, arm in arm. There was Barb speaking to the audience. There was Ron, also as he gave his own speech to the group. Bob was saying, “We are a great movement. We stand for the constitution. We stand for independent businessmen and professionals who are college educated people, for millions of struggling high school graduates who cannot afford outrageous college tuition as well, and for everyone who gets up in the morning and trudges to the workplace and puts in a full day’s work for a full day’s pay and gets taxed to death for his efforts. Nonetheless, we are proud of America. Our nation is strong, and we want to keep it that way. We want the international bankers out of our government. This is America. We do not live in Europe. We live here, in the states, where a constitution delivers unto us a set of freedoms guaranteed to keep each of us a free person forever. But that can only happen with low taxes that allow us to keep our earnings so that we can save some of our paycheckes for retirement, for the purchase of a home, for food and clothing to insure that we have the right stuff to be good workers who are not afraid to help our bosses to earn an honest dollar and to turn around and share it with their workers. We believe in the concepts of free enterprise with all of our hearts and minds. We stand for freedom. Our freedom. And we intend to see it through to the end. This is not a fly-by-night party, and we are not quitters. We are here to stay to the end!”
Barb looked at Rob.
“You were great, dear,” she said to him.
“So were you, hon,” Rob assured Barb.
They touched and kissed. It was a good relationship. Both of them were respectable. Each believed in the good life that could be earned through hard work and loyalty to their company, their nation, and their people.
That night, they showered before bed, then lay together and cuddled.
“I love you,” Barbara said.
Robert smiled.
“I love you even more,” he said.
They kissed as they fell into a deep sleep nestled within each other’s arms.