[Dialogue] {Disarmed} Re: [earthrise] A Witness on Dec. 2
Jim Baumbach
wtw0bl at new.rr.com
Tue Dec 5 19:43:19 EST 2006
George, your witness has touched me deeply regarding your comment "I can
see that a poor person could be easily wiped out with such an
incompetent system and a person of color would probably have even more
difficulties." A situation I am aware of, has developed over the past
year for the maintenance person our church hired a couple years ago.
John is mentally slower than normal and has a difficult time expressing
himself especially under pressure.
After years of study and testing, John finally passed his driving tests
and received a license from the state of Wisconsin. It was one of his
proudest lifetime achievements! Another landmark for him was the used
Ford he finally bought using the income he gets from the church.
Several months after he got his license, he was attending a family
outing in Milwaukee. Due to his aunt's slight delay his cousins talked
him into taking her to their picnic. Driving in Milwaukee is much more
complex than driving in Appleton especially for a recently licensed
driver and is even more confusing for a person with the mental condition
of John. As a result, he had an accident in which the second person in
the accident fled the scene and hasn't been found since. John's car was
totaled, his aunt was killed, and he lost his license pending a
resolution of the accident. John is in deep debt for the car because he
was unable to carry collision and comprehensive and he is miserable
because his cousins blame him for his aunt's death.
Despite having pro bono legal assistance to help him sort out the
details, he has little hope of receiving compensation for the damage to
his car until the other driver can be found. Recently, the state
returned his license but he is still unable to afford another car
because the insurance is very high for him and he is deep in debt.
We try to encourage him to stay employed and finish out his financial
commitments even though he has such a difficult time understanding and
communicating with people and it is so very discouraging butting his
head against the DMV.
So I would add to your list of poor and people of color the people with
mental difficulties who quite capable of driving safely but lack the
skills to express their situation so they can obtain justice.
Jim Baumbach
George Holcombe wrote:
>
> Back in April I was returning from a garden shop with stuff for our
> garden; second in a string of cars going through a green light when a
> pick up truck ran the red light and turned our Maxima into a pretzel
> in a second. When I woke up, I was spitting powder from the air bag
> and people were pulling me out of the car and I was pulling my
> sunglasses out of my face. The first policeman who came up was
> convinced I was the cause of the accident and pursued the line of
> questioning whether I was too old to be driving, etc. Fortunately,
> the guy in back of me was still on the scene and stepped in and
> informed the policeman that the truck ran the red light, after which a
> couple of more agreed to witness. The policeman was not convinced.
> It was really my first experience with “ageism.” After awhile the
> driver of the pickup agreed it was his fault. Had Wanda not been in
> Turkey and riding in the passenger’s seat she would be dead.
>
> That was just the beginning of things. I couldn’t get out of bed the
> next morning. I couldn’t take a breath or clear my throat without
> exotic pain. The doctor’s x-rays showed no broken ribs, so it was big
> doses of pain killer and muscle relaxants, which only made me dopey,
> but no real relief. After a couple of weeks one of intense pain the
> Docs referred me to a physical therapist. He got right to it. He
> located ribs out of place and all kinds of small muscle tears. Talk
> about some more exotic pain pushing the ribs around, but within a week
> I was drug free and the worst of the pain was behind me. Two and half
> months of P. T. and I was out of therapy, still fairly sore. My doc
> told me that that wasn’t unusual for seat belt and air bag injuries
> (that wasn’t his story at the start). I had never experienced any of
> this before.
>
> Then there was the insurance settlement, which continues to this
> day. Even with a lawyer not much has taken place. Insurance
> companies change agents, medicare forms aren’t forthcoming; sometimes
> they say it’s the wrong form and then send you the same form all over
> again. I can see that a poor person could be easily wiped out with
> such an incompetent system and a person of color would probably have
> even more difficulties. It’s been another learning experience. For
> me this is not so much a story of woe but a rather up close and
> personal education of a society and world filled with incompetence and
> dishonesty mixed with some rather remarkable folks striving for
> integrity. So many of the people I’ve had to deal with through this
> ordeal have been angry, broken folks with no vision of the future,
> just going through the motions of their “job,” hoping for a paycheck.
>
> Last week when I was getting the oil changed in my “newer” car, I was
> waiting along side a young fellow working on his Ph.D. in education at
> the University of Texas. He summed up his degree as working on the
> same issues that faced education 30 years ago and not likely to be
> solved anytime soon. Down the block is a gentleman who has been to
> Dafur twice; he is in mourning. It occurred to me after awhile that
> we’re part of a very broken system. I was delighted to hear that
> Muhammad Yunus of Grameen Bank fame won the Nobel. When someone asked
> him why his banking methods had worked (poverty has dropped
> significantly in Bangladesh where the bank operates, they have a 90%
> payback rate) while established banks had not, he answered that his
> system was based on trust. Maybe that’s a clue, a word from God.
>
> George Holcombe, I’m an old E.I.’er, who loved the work in the
> villages, misses Asia, and continues the mission out of Austin, Texas,
> the live music capital of the world.
>
>
>
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