Melançon Enterprises • a multidivision multinational since 1980

The U.S. Postal Service is required to compete without government subsidies while serving a public purpose, and being denied (by legislators, not courts) the ability to compete with private industry in new areas. Perhaps because it succeeds, reactionaries are trying to kill it (and, with the aid of mass media that hasn't told much of this, succeeding).

While my mother was on Cape Cod taking care of my grandfather, hospitalized with what we believe to be an intensely painful compression fracture, she went home for a day of picking up mail and rest and found the neighbor had torn our fence down.

Fortunately she had left her dog with me at my grandfather's house.

We can be so certain it's the woman driving things, because we've seen her tear down the fence with her bare hands herself. Twice.

Pain under control, taking back in charge of every aspect of his life, we expect him to come home from rehab as early as next week-- and that's only so we can get a proper walker ordered, and the wheelchair ramp to the house (that was already planned before his fall) done.

From Kaveri:

Dear all, thanks for all the support, I'm fine. EWS quarters residents are not.

Now the EWS quarters have been almost completely demolished by BBMP via constant harassment and threats. Out in the cold, many have not slept for days as they have been harassed wherever they sit or move their meagre belongings, without any facility for food or water, while they have no funds to pay for the customary advance (safety deposit) required to be paid before renting even the lowest cost house in Bangalore, nor even to pay for a vehicle to move their belongings.

This morning Grandpa is lucid and *not* wanting to die.

Instead he is saying, "if they aren't doing anything for me, why do i have to stay around here?"

And: "I can afford a private nurse at home." (This is a very good attitude: as positive as he started out, and practical.)

***

15 minutes late on the pain medication-- nurse Wayne was waiting in vain for an increase in the dose.

"Why do they do this to me? Why don't they let me die?"

Finally gets the medicine at about 10:30am.

And the goddamn jerks saying he was refusing oral medication.

[Background: Walking to a gas station convenience store last Friday, on the way back from a trip, my grandfather tripped on a curb and fell, hitting his knees on the sidewalk and his head on the door. In the emergency room in Connecticut, pain not from the extremely painful immediate fall, but in his back and sides, began following (coincidentally or not) a tetanus shot, according to my mother, who was with him. That is the pain that has not abated. After i met him at the Sagamore bridge around 11pm Friday and brought him back to his home in Wellfleet, he held court until after 1am.

Knowing a person is in terrible pain, emotional or physical, and not being able to do anything about it, distresses me, as it does most people.

I am sitting in exam room 5 of Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis, watching my grandfather bear with pain he says is worse than any broken rib or surgery he's had,, including for anyeurisms and a hernia. He has been in pain since two days ago, Friday, after a fall.

Wars are not won buying ammunition from the enemy

Thirty-six, thirty-seven million dollars has a way of making a point. If we're lucky, one point will be that a thirty-million dollar advantage spent spreading slander and disinformation can only almost sway thirty percent of an electorate away from voting for what they want and believe.

[Because i worked at a newspaper and part of what i did there was write obituaries, i've written one each for my grandmother and my father. I realize since starting this (and turning to an opinion piece instead) that it is not my place to write an obituary for Andrew, but instead to simply give testimony to the parts of his life it was my honor to be part of.]

I'd expect this news to be suppressed in China, but why isn't it bigger news here?

http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/12482/will_peasants_and_migrant_wo...