March 19, 2008.
I’m not sure of this issue. It seems you have to have had an income of over $3,000 to get the “refund.” I get more than that in Social Security but file no income tax return usually. So I’m told I have to file anyway just to be eligible for the $300 “refund.”
The irony about thinking about this for me was that on the same day I am thinking about the issue of bigots voting (meaning against Barak Obama just because he is black, or Hillary Clinton just because she is a woman), I find a perfect example of how such people “think.” (And Obama came close to saying the same thing.)
I took my neighbor, Carolyn, to visit with her mother and brother in Glenmora, where Carolyn grew up (half-way between Alexandria and Lake Charles in the part of the state that “divides” the Protestant north from the Catholic/Cajun south).
Her mother in most ways is a good woman, in terrible health, as is the brother, both on welfare, but the son, as a start, refuses to apply for Medicaid. He gets help despite himself thanks to his advisors, in mental health etc. We sat down to eat a good southern dinner (lunch), and just off handed she says, “Well, this country will be in terrible shape if they elect that black man president.”
Prejudice? Ignorance?
Then, as Carolyn and I had discussed on the trip down, we want them to apply for the tax refund, as they of all people need it. But, she said, “I don’t think she will, even though our relatives down there have told her about it so she could fill out the form and send it in. Well, we asked her and she said she was not going to apply for the “REFUND.’” She and the son/brother are refusing, for unknown reasons, to file for the money.
A final point about saying the nation will suffer under Obama. My dear aunt, now dead, said the same thing as we were eating dinner a long time ago, long, long ago, when she said Bill Clinton would destroy our nation. Then after he was elected, she said, “Well, he will probably declare some emergency and put us under a dictatorship.”
Now this comes from a woman who was not ignorant in a “forgivable” sense. She was just stupid as she only heard from a few right-wingers and hardly ever left her house. But she had been good to my niece, who eventually killed herself over a man — the 4th one. She had been a stereotypical woman who didn’t feel she could be happy without a man to hold on to.
Well, so I am not surprised at the “thinking” of ignorant people.
The question is if young people will take an interest and understand that, even with such people still around, our nation has grown better and needs them to continue to work for progress.
