The St Valentine's Day Massacre . .

We live in a world where the poorest, and the most vulnerable, are the first to pay the price of recession - a recession brought on by Banks around the world putting their own greed first. Not only that, they are the first to be vilified and picked upon, when a government needs a scapegoat to cover up their own inadequacy.


Every day, when I look at the news, my heart beats faster, and that sick, heart-sinking sense of despair rises up in me; the sense that, no matter how much we protest, the sick and the disabled of this country don't have a strong enough voice to be heard - and heeded!


I hope, and I pray every day, that this won't be so, but it isn't the sick and disabled with the money and power to change legislation - it's the very people who are causing them to worry themselves into a state of despair, who have the power to change things for the better or worse.


When I first fell ill, I kept on working, despite my problems, until I was forced out of work by new employers who had taken over my work-place, with the promise to my previous employers that all we long-term, full-time, staff would be protected - only to have the first sackings a short time later!
I had hung on, despite their goading, which they used as a way of getting the staff to walk out, until, in the end, they sacked me on spurious grounds - one of the last of the long-term employees to go!


My health hadn't been good, but I had managed to keep working despite this, but now I was on the job-market, in an area that depended on summer tourism for the majority of it's employment, and a plethora of new school-leavers, fit and able - and a fraction of the wage I would, by law, command, and so I spent the next couple of years desperately looking for non-existing work, with my health getting worse with every month.


Eventually, it got to the point where I was using a stick to walk about, and then my health took a turn for the worse, and I ended up bed-bound more than I was up. This was when I was given crutches to help with my walking - when I wasn't in so much pain, and so exhausted from it, that I could actually attempt to do any walking.


I am now at the point where I'm extremely fortunate if I can manage an hour or two in 24, out of bed. My health slowly gets worse, despite a doctor who does all in his power to keep me as pain-free as I can be.


It was after a long fight, and a tribunal, that I eventually won the right to DLA, and I was awarded full mobility and care, indefinitely.
After the sheer grind of filling in countless forms, and having to face, with a great amount of exhaustion and despair, every question on the limitations of my life, I thought that, with this indefinite award, I could at last try to have some small quality of life, by using the money awarded to me, for the purpose it was given.


And now, on 14th February - a day that is supposed to represent love - countless people in this country will learn whether, what they had to fight so desperately in the first place to win, will be still part of their life, in their bid for some sort of independence or, as we all suspect, will be the start of a wave of suicides brought on by despair, and the beginning of a very slippery slope into abject poverty and homelessness because, what many people don't realise, this benefit isn't the only one being made almost impossible to get and, as I said at the beginning of my post, the sick and disabled are now paying the price of the World Banks' greed and profiteering!


I don't know how I'm going to react, when my turn comes at facing this firing squad of so-called medicals, with questionnaires that are being slanted constantly to clear the lists of the vulnerable in society, I just hope I have more staying power, and can face with dignity, and with some spirit, what I'll need to do, to get what I was originally awarded, by a panel of experts!


The campaigns being used to create a society that labels the sick and disabled as 'work-shy', 'scrounger's', and 'thieves', isn't the one I grew up in, and I hope some day ordinary people who are taking up the slogans, don't find themselves in the same position as myself and countless others, to be told they will have to work or starve, whether they can do so, or not!