you say you want a revolution........

i love the beatles. i love their music. and while i love love love their song "revolution", i've always had issue with the line "but if you wanna talk about destruction, don't you know that you can count me out." ok, maybe not always. in the past, back when my wages were decent and health care and housing affordability wasn't a really big issue, i loved the song in its entirety. i believed the problem was that i needed to free my mind instead. and i could resist the need to revolt in an aggressive way because, afterall, don'tcha know it's gonna be allright.

well "allright" has yet to happen and i have grown up and out of the new age/hippie la la land to know that freedom is not just a state of mind. and today i am tired of hearing rich types spew such mantras. being poor in america 30 plus years ago was a lot different than it is today. take my dad. he grew up in the 40's, poor as you can imagine. his mama worked part-time in a dry cleaning facility. papa was a jeweler, who oddly enough in his eccentric ways, refused money for his services but rather, suits. despite all of this, they owned a home. it wasn't glamourous by any means. in fact, it was old and run down. but they owned it and the land that it sat on. today if you are poor, you can barely afford to rent a home much less own it. bottom line, incomes have not kept up with the cost of, well, everything. back then you could be poor and yet still own a house and get by with just one person working.

today as i wrote out my bills, i longed to write "electricity monopoly" and "insurance monopoly" in the "pay to" section. and one look at my city of corvallis water bill brought forth a scream. $58 fucking dollars?! upon closer inspection i noticed, quite inconspicuously, a little note that said as of february 1st, water would be rising approximately 4.3% per month. nice of them to tell us this after the fact. 4.3%. hmmmm. my hourly rate did jump up last month. let me calculate how much................. .025%. water bill, up 4.3%. electricity up another 7% this past year (approximately 35% in the past 5 years). rent, 10%. my income, up .025%. spouses, up .050%. yep, seems fair to me!

i wonder if john lennon is paying attention. if so, i wonder what he would have to say today.......