The Baltimore Banner and others paint a haunting picture of the suffering of alleged gunman Luigi Mangione. While I do not recommend or endorse solving one's frustrations, no matter how chronic, at the point of a gun, no matter how many, say, lawyer jokes flash through my head(What do you call a car-full of lawyers at the bottom of the ocean? Answer: A good start.) as I read about it. I feel how even one year of constant struggle can make someone feel that there's no hope. Maybe he had tunnel-vision too severe to consider things like chiropractic or acupuncture, which working-class people might quickly run out of money for, unlike someone like Mangione.(Have to admit, though, despite my all-too-American urge to forensically roll up my sleeves on his and our culture's behalf--this America, man-- there's plenty of pain and suffering that is undiagnosed and untreated as I sit here and type this right now. I have no idea if this man's pain was in that group.
Bureaucracy may as well have eaten my 2012.And not because I was reaching for something I shouldn't have had, just me trying to keep what I had in the face of my state's Medicaid trying to tighten my belt for me. Even the moments not spent trying to document our needs, including knowing that strangers would read about constipation or incontinence, were ruined by a gradual tunnel vision that made it hard to think or talk about anything that wasn't in those rapidly-swelling evidence folders. (Of course, some evil people benefit from the fact that Medicaid beneficiaries are generally too messed-up to strike back lethally.) But if I were in more pain than usual, I couldn't say what might have gone through my mind, but maybe there is a blessing as well as a curse in the fact that I have known from my earliest beginning how little I could do alone. Reaching out tends to be what saves me, to the extent that I'm ever saved.
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