Ihave been panicking, me and husband are both on soc sec disability, he has been on it since 1991, I have been on it since 2001. Prices keep going up up up------we had no saveings, I worked for min wage all those years, makeing up deficits in finances by working 16-20 hours 7 days a week. I cannot make up deficits now.
Our saving grace was we had a tiny house, bought when difficult child was born, a "starter" house never meant for all of us to live day to day in it. Made worse becuz difficult child is severe agoraphobic as is husband, and son is homeschooled, and now easy child is not going away to univ in fall, after all, but rather her and her unborn babies daddy are now also living here. and the baby will also live here.....in our whopping 900 square feet. while easy child and daddy to be work and go to community college....so we do have people home all day every day, round the clock.
BUT what is even more scary for me is the effect on the violence level out in "the world" I have cancelled all sons eye surgeon appts at the univ teaching hospital where he goes since spring becuz the level of extreme agressive violence in chicago has gooten SO bad and it all seems to happen in the very neighborhood where we would be. Add in that it is a 5 hour each way trip and price of gas, YIKES.....I just do not know how I could pay for that?
And I have been sitting in courtroom now 3-4 times a month for over 2 years now, and what I see going on there appalls me to no end. I am afraid it is partly related to economy.....there are overworked prosecutors, too few police for the population explosion my county has had this last deacde, so, detective work is incoplete, inadequete, charges dropped on most crimes all the time, others dragged out becuz not enough prosecutors to keep up, one case we have been going for monthly for 2 years involveing a multiple victim pedophile and it is still not even to pre trial stage!
I watch at the docs and hospitals how things go, I pick up paper daily and read how more services are vanishing, for battered women, autistic kids, developmentally challenged kids and a dults, mentally ill kids and adults.......have been watching them lose services, lose places to live, lose group homes, I watched last year our school district had been in a larger Special Education district and it folded.....
I watched my mom, end stage caner, my best friend, end stage cancer, and no help from anywhere for daily care needs, insurance keeps cutting back, social service agencies cutback, people have to work more hours and are even less available to have time/effort to take care of their loved ones in need.....
Our school district no longer provides any kids with textbooks at all......they are cutting back all electives......for awhile our school had absolutely NO art, library or music at all in early 90s due to financial problems.....altho our real estate property tax which mostly goes to our schools is the highest I have ever heard of anywhere AND our school also has extremely high "registration costs" and several "mandatory" fundraisers thru the year-PUBLIC school......
on one hand, we are lucky. we do not have to worry about loseing a job and not finding another one..... and when we first had to learn to cope with my husband being disabled, I had to take a crash course in running our family on one tenth of what we previously lived on.....
and no I no longer have to worry about appropriate clothes for work or child care.....nor transportation to/from work....I also have no way to increase our income, or stretch things much further.....and I do still need to figure out how to keep us getting to those doctor appts etc.
The grocery bill scares me a lot. we used to eat a lot of rice, eggs, pasta but they have gone up SO much in price this year.....and now with my diabetes found in march and easy child preg.....I am not sure I can continue to afford proper types of food. My blood sugar test strips I can no longer afford and my GP is a jerk and while he demands I test 8 times daily, he refuses to write it as a concrete diagnosis in my records yet......so insurnce will not cover them.....and I cannot afford them.
The vandalism rate and violence rate here in my town has also risen dramatically since winter. It is so bad some days I am rather glad my dtr and husband are agoraphobic and easy child is too miserable to go anywhere these days.
Tooday I drove her to er and the road rage in drivers was so extreme, it gave ME a run for my money. Seems everyone everywhere is just so discouraged with the economy etc, and it is keeping everyone on edge so bad.
I know lots of people ay it is worse now, and until say Jan or so I did not really think life was all so scary.....I thought the life I lived in the 70s was pretty extreme, rough hard, fast lane dangerous etc......but since january, now, I am very nervous how it all will continue.
I grew up dirt poor, I lived very poor, and that does not disturb me quite as much, I have learned how to add more water to the soup so to speak, but the frame of mind it puts everyone in? THAT scares me a lot more. The way the things like police dept, judicial process, etc are now working, that scares me. The coldness, selfishness, greediness, it bothers me to my core. at the er today the other people there seemed to me to be so lost in their own worlds, I cannot even count how many people, staff and other patients - ran into us, nearly knocked us over at the elevators, at the front desk.....some were lost in thought and not watching where they were going, some were just being outright rude.....but as the economy worsens I see these behaviors and attitudes getting more and more common.
It is very very sad, very distressing, and yeah, it keeps me up at nite, in tears far far too often.
