I am so sorry to have been MOL (missing online) for the better part of the past three weeks. This car accident and its attending Doctor’s visits, treatments, tests, and insurance company verifications, has taken the stuffing out of me. That and the number of people in my life needing a shoulder to lean on right now.

I have realized that not only am I in the center of a personal  financial storm, but so are almost all my social niche, the formerly hard-working, hopeful, I’m going to make it lower middle class….or upper lower class, as I have  often called us. The ones who are hanging on to the next ledge of financial stability by their fingernails and hoping not to let go and drop into the pit that they have been working so hard to get out of.

However, while our community organizer is trying out his tactics on saving the world (and our fine leaders in Congress debate additional debt over health care….we will definitely be needing free access to anti-depressants for the whole country soon…), I am observing one after another of this sea of people going under. They are giving up, much like someone who surrenders to the enemy. Although this time I see them deciding that it is time to give up on the American Dream….they have lost the battle to keep their house (although no one will really tell them that, nine months of trying to save it  have certainly proved futile) they can’t make it, and they will make almost as much on unemployment and welfare or disability as they did working every day….so they have decided to join the ones who don’t try anymore. In fact, the system has beaten them.

I wondered why I have bordered on depression for the past few weeks, but now I can see where my being the champion of  “this is just temporary, there’s a light up ahead, c’mon we can make it out of here,”  has just exhausted me. The hope I have offered isn’t coming through this time. The programs designed to help them have no people at their center who give a flying leap, everyone is putting everyone on hold while we wait for someone who cares, but they haven’t shown up.

Perhaps the burden is so great that they are exhausted too…..perhaps the world’s problems seem easier to solve right now than those at home. I don’t know. I just know that I am trying not to drown and trying to throw life vests to everyone I know, but I am wondering how long we can wait for the big ship to see us and help us out of this stormy sea. It seems not to even be looking for us anymore. We are invisible because there are so many of us in the dark. Are there no searchlights on the boat…or did someone forget to pay the electricity bill?

I just noticed that I bit off all my fingernails in the past few days, something I haven’t done in ten years. Doesn’t bode well for hanging on to that ledge, does it?