Welcome to Mitt Romney's America

It's 2015, almost three years into President Romney's term.  You're Joe Average American, scuttling home from work to your crackerbox apartment in a medium sized city in America.  You don't drive because gas is $8.00 a gallon and all that "Drill Baby Drill" oil is exported to other countries.  You lost your house in the suburbs after your job was outsourced to India.  All you can get is a manual labor job, just enough to pay the rent and buy bread.  You can't afford milk or meat because the government no longer has a food stamp program.  You've got a pain in the right side of your chest, but you can't afford a doctor and you don't get health insurance. 

On the way home, you pass a couple of teenage hoodlums mugging a man.  You don't bother calling the cops because the depleted police force doesn't come to your neighborhood.  Unless someone is dead and they need to collect the body.  Across town, in the gated community, there's a private police force, ambulance service, and a hospital.  Here in your neighborhood, there isn't even a trash collector.  The hoods beating up your neighbor might have learned respect, education, and job skills in a school but there aren't enough teachers and dropout rates have skyrocketed.  And college?  Fucking forget about college.  No student loans for these kids.  On the other side of town is the nice private school and the charter school for people with means.  Those kids get to go to college.  Someone has to take over the family business or practice when Dad retires after all.

When you get home, the building next to yours is on fire and you pray that it doesn't spread because you can't afford to pay the fire brigade to come put it out.  You trudge up the stairs past the posters that remind you that you're not poor because you have a TV and a refrigerator in your apartment.  Sure the TV is a ten year old model you fished out of a dumpster and the refrigerator came with the apartment and is usually empty, but hey, you're living large.  No right to complain for you.  

Next door, you hear the cries and shrieks of the six kids next door.  There would be seven, but the 20 year old woman who lives there had an illegal abortion in  a back alley.  She hasn't looked so good lately.  Boy, those kids are awful loud.

There's a message on your phone.  Your boss needs you to work a 12 hour shift tomorrow even though you just came off a stretch of 20 straight 12 hour days.  You can't say no because there are no more work week limits.  There's also no minimum wage, so if you complain, the boss can cut your pay.  The sad thing is, there are five people out there who would kill to have your job.  Unions are the stuff of legends.  

You watch some grainy TV, eat some bread, and wash it down with some water that has God knows what in it.  You collapse into bed with your Bible.  You don't have a gun because you can't afford the license fees.  Only rich folks have guns.  Hey, the Bible is still free, even if you know you're on God's bad side.  After all, if you were a good Christian, you'd be rich.