CBS News Investigation :: "Disabled and Waiting"..

Call it Fate, if you will, in flipping channels one evening a couple of months ago, caught the news feature teaser just getting ready to lead into CBS News Investigation's Disabled and Waiting: Backlog In Disability Benefits System Leaves Thousands Of Vulnerable Americans Stranded story (January 14, 2008)..

And for some reason, I watched..

And (predictably) ended up absolutely in tears before it was over..

Was this part in particular that did it:

A two-month CBS News investigation has found that over the last two years, at least 16,000 people fighting for disability benefits died while awaiting a decision.

Having spent as long as I have with my cyber heels dug deep [1] into some of the best disability (self-)advocacy Internet sites around since my own psychiatric survivor label-garnering experience, I've seen my share of horrible, horrible stories of people with disabilities going through the social security disability payments ordeal and losing everything, everything in Life they have, are, and were while enduring the seemingly ceaseless process..

Up to and including the "s" word.......

Suicide..

The tears shed over Disabled and Waiting come also in part from consciously recognizing every moment I'm still here that there but for the generosity of an ex-boyfriend for the extremist of Life-sustaining staples go I..

Life being what it is, nay, more what the thunderstorms predict it could be in the near offing, I, too, once again entered the Social Security junket just a couple of weeks ago.. While the despair that arises with each attempt is no less than before due to being forced to openly relive everything disastrous that has been the Life these fingertips have seen, this Time very admittedly seems almost pleasant as the wonderful SS lady on the other end of the phone has herself seen Life from this side..

And she knows what it's like walking in these Shoes..

And, more importantly than anything else sometimes, she really does give.......

A rat's patootie about the Human Life within these same worn Shoes..

To the government entities who each have their Hands in the Beastie that is the social security disability payment process, you obviously can access the file that is mine.. That lady there helping me..? She should be one of the Standards others strive to achieve..

And she already works right there within your, our system..

Please......

As much as anything else, if you don't proactively do something to help, you play a part in that "s" word as it applies to some part of those 16,000 people CBS reports..

If you don't proactively do something to help create change, you play a part in all of those some 16,000 precious Lives lost as CBS reports..

If you don't proactively do something to help create change, you play a part in some untold number of persons with disabilities right this moment..

Living on the street.......

Literally starving.......

Them, too, right this very, very second contemplating the unthinkable a forever untold number of others have already done before them for the exact same reasons..

This very, very second as you read this.......

Cyber hugs with a special one going out to the very kind and understanding Mrs. * currently helping me work through the SS process..

.......This time..

[1] A little sidebar on the referenced CNN.com blurb.. Thanks to the very first opportunity I had to speak totally by accident with Yvette with PAIMI over at GAO back in 2003, I had in fact introduced myself to CNN.com as "a person with mental illness".. Editorial license being what it is and thus wholly out of our control the precise moment the "Send" button is clicked, WHOOPSIE, I became a person who "[has] a mental illness"..