Most days, my job is pretty dull. Make coffee, make copies, fax stuff, collate, mail stuff, help the people with Master's Degrees figure out how to operate the folding machine, answer the phone, swallow my frustration at people who don't seem to be able to answer the question "would you like to leave a message in her voicemail?", enter data, drink coffee, listen sympathetically to my co-workers complain about each other....ad nauseum, day in, day out.
But then there are days when I have meetings, which I enjoy only because it means I get out of the office for a little while, sometimes I get a free lunch, and occasionally, the meetings are interesting.
Today, we had a meeting about homelessness in the Hartford region. We had a speaker who works with an advocacy group for supportive housing. His specific responsibility with this group is as a lobbyist at the federal level, so he printed out a bunch of information about the Bush budget for housing. Despite the fact that the HUD page has a blurb about how the wonderful Bush administration has given just oodles of money to solve the problem of homelessness, the fucking asshole Bush administration has actually cut tons of money from the budget. They've moved Section 8 away from HUD into the Commerce Department (because surely people who have no experience dealing with housing problems are the best ones to fix the problems). The same group of people who use the services that are being cut are losing other services at the same time, from child care and education programs to health care programs.
Anyway, one of the people at the meeting, a woman who has been working on housing issues for 40 years asked the speaker if there was some sort of "grand plan" that the Bush administration was going for, something that she couldn't see from the information she had in her hand. Our speaker told her that the only grand plan that he can see is that they want to cut everything, and let each state and municipality deal with the problems however they can - he quoted Grover Norquist's bathtub statement and then he said "basically, this is an economic group that they just don't care about". There was a lot of angry discussion, including some input from people in Economic Development, who one would think might be more conservative, who are frustrated at the fact that effective working programs are being decimated and in some cases eliminated altogether.
And this is just going to make things worse where we live. Crime will increase. Health problems will increase. The lessons that this country has learned are being flushed down the toilet, and our country is going to go with them.
This is why I loathe the Bush administration - because I love my country and they are fucking it all to hell.
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