For a Brooklyn Woman with ALS, Social Security is Elusive

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Thursday May 21, 2015 · 8:01 PM PDT

2015/05/21 · 20:01

Hi, friends. There are, like, eight other posts that I’ve been drafting, but this is a way more pressing matter. It is a call to action and a call for help.

I mentioned in my last post that I started to assist a woman named Flora who has ALS. I knew when I signed on that I would be helping her, not as a caretaker, but with administrative tasks. Emails, finding gifts for family and friends, organizing her bills as they come in, that sort of thing.

I was also aware that Flora had hired a lawyer to help her in her fight to receive Social Security Disability benefits. One she had been fighting since October 2014, six months after she had to leave her job at Warner Brothers because she could no longer work. (If you didn’t know, that’s how Disability works–you have to be out 6 months before you qualify to receive anything.)

I started working with her in February. It’s May, and she still hasn’t received a penny of her benefits.

lulufogarty

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Monday December 08, 2014 · 3:04 PM PST

2014/12/08 · 15:04

Hands stretched to the heavens,
Wishing they would grab us up
Carry us through a porthole to the dimension where
Fact
Does not have to be proclaimed
By straining voices, stretched banners, drum beats, tweets, and marching feet that hijack the highway tonight,
Weave through bumpers,
Have the right of way.
Whose streets?
Our streets.
Blinding lights above are not the saving force that we want:
The light of Love, coming to make the blind see.
But maybe some will.
I hope that it’s The News not The Enforcement and raise a fist and a peace sign, both, in unison
Imaging a lens zooming in on me, on we the people, carrying our power into the dwellings of the people around the world
So they see that we will not stand for this.
There will be justice.
There must be.

A brown skinned young woman next to me pumps her fist towards the ground, neck craning forward
Lungs aiming to burst out of her mouth
Each word bayed and syncopated with a pump down of her fists.
Pounding the air with a ferocity of someone about to explode with betrayal:
Black Lives Matter.
Black Lives Matter.
Black Lives Matter.
I scream with her.
Throw my arms in the air
Seem to startle a pair of friends who've found themselves next to me and join with abandon, with pride, with ferocity, with the simple belief in the unmistakable truth in the words, without hesitation,
The same way I did.
The feeling of the words exiting my mouth the first time
Bringing clarity to the betrayal
And giving me pause because
How is it even a question?

And I shout.
And shout.
And shout until my voice turns into a squeak that I can’t control.
My vocal cords
Like reeds that need to be replaced in order to keep up with the message,
Like, if I don't get it out there, no one will.
I refuse to be silenced by my own anatomy.
Or my own feeling of helplessness.
But
For a moment everything blurs
In a crisis of faith
As the piece of me that wails for something better starts to think it would be easier to dwell in a sinkhole of bitterness because The Man is The Man and the system is rigged and how can anyone even chose what to fix when nothing is even broken, it's working exactly the way They wanted,
And how can you
Swallow that?
And my lapse is
Shattered by a cabby’s honking horn--
Who could be the father of the boy we’re screaming for--
Who returns my peace sign.
Who smiles at me with something like relief.
We care.
We won't be silenced.

There will be justice.
There must be.

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For a Brooklyn Woman with ALS, Social Security is Elusive

a shattered lapse (for all the beautiful activists in the streets)