Suffer the Children, A Saturday Centus

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Welcome to the fifty-fourth week of Saturday Centus, that mind-stretching, word-counting, baby-chopping, literary exercise in succinct creative writing hosted by Arizona’s second most famous woman, Jenny Matlock, at her blog “off on my tangent.”

Each Saturday Jenny supplies us a prompt and the participants in this meme, or “Centusians” as we are widely known on the interwebs, have a whole week to write short 100 word stories or poems around that prompt. 

If you haven’t tried it, you really should. 

Especially if your name is Jayne.

The rules dictate we can write in any form we want (story, poem, recipe for vegetarian Hungarian goulash, polka song, etc.) as long as we keep it clean and don’t go over the 100 word limit excluding the prompt.  Keeping that in mind, I am climbing up on my political soap box once again to rant a bit.  (I tried to do a polka, but it just didn’t have the impact I’d hoped it would.)  This week’s prompt is “Hush little baby, don’t you cry.”

Here is my contribution to this week’s Saturday Centus.  I have entitled it:

Suffer the Children

“Mama, I’m so hungry!”

“I know, baby.  Ever since the Republicans went to war against the poor and middle class, we’ve had to suffer.  They don’t want us around anymore so they took away our food, homes and medical care.

“Mama, why do the ‘publicans hate us?”

“They just don’t care about us because we aren’t wealthy contributors to their campaigns.”

 

“But I didn’t do anything!” she sobs.

Hush little baby, don’t you cry.   It’s not your fault these idiots were elected.  Let’s look over in that other dumpster.  Maybe there’s something to eat in there.”

And Now My Rant:

Their corporate masters have spoken and now Republicans have launched a full-scale assault on the poor and middle class.   As millions in this country struggle with unemployment, hunger and homelessness, the Republican Party has released their proposed 2011 budget which calls for $6 trillion dollars in cuts over the next ten years.

Their contempt of the non-wealthy knows no bounds as even children are put in their cross-hairs.  The budget calls for billions of dollars to be cut from government support of programs such as special education, students with disabilities, Head Start, and health and nutrition programs for women, children and infants. 

The proposal slashes investment in infrastructure, education, ends guaranteed health care for seniors on Medicare and denies health care coverage to tens of millions of Americans while protecting tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires, corporations and their special interests.  It will also lead to hundreds of thousands more becoming unemployed and cause irreparable harm to the economy. 

You have to wonder why the Republicans  would pander to the top 400 mega-rich people in America that control more wealth than 150 million other Americans, now wouldn’t you?  Over the last 50 years the tax rates for the rich have continued to decline by 2/3 while everyone else’s has doubled, and yet Republicans continue to push for more tax cuts for the rich while throwing middle-class and poor Americans under the bus.  

So stick it to the sick and poor people and suffer the little children, but by all means make the rich richer.  That’s what Jesus would do, right?

And they have the nerve to claim they are the party of “moral values?” 

I think someone needs to get them a dictionary.

Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were 

a member of Congress.   But I repeat myself.     

--  Mark Twain

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