Letter to the editor Sad for Arthur Bays; hope he gets help he needs
To the editor: I grew up in Marion. Now 70, I left for the Northwest with my new husband in 1970 after we graduated from SIU-C. I occasionally check into two newspapers, including this one, to see the news in southern Illinois.
Today, I was saddened to read about Arthur Bays, 82, a three decades grocery store owner and, reportedly, a good neighbor in Marion. It appears that he, feeling desperate and on his own, robbed a local bank because he could no longer buy food or pay bills. I read that he lost property to a bank and nursing home. I assume that was taken because he could not pay off bills for care he or a family member received.
I also saw that he had lost his Social Security income for some bizarre reason. I have no idea what a prosecutor or court will now do to him in a "justice" process that will cost more to taxpayers than if his needs as an aged man had been met, but there are some things I DO know.
I know that we Americans have become victims to a corporate blood sucking health care system (despite more than majority support for a single payer or Medicare-for-all health care system) and that any serious level of care will bankrupt almost all of us because of medical, pharmacy and hospital/care home costs.
I know that incomes are stagnant; regardless of how supposedly booming the economy is claimed to be, the income increase one would expect to filter down from employers who respect their employees does, by design, not do that.
We are told we are better off and soon will be better off still, especially since that tax cut is in our hands. Yet I know that the cut will soon sunset for us while the huge larger percentage cut for the wealthy, the corporate "elite," make our cut or our children's cut pale in comparison and, by legislative design, will never sunset.
I know that your senator, congressman/woman and President will not share that with you when they tell you all that they did for you.
I know that we will see even more attacks on the long tattered social safety net because there supposedly is just not money to cover the things we as Americans need, want and deserve from the taxes we pay.
I know that, as always, there IS still ability to cover a $720 million defense budget (which does not include foreign aid dollars). I know that we are told it is still needed, even though we are getting out of the decadeslong imperialist wars that sacrifice our children and slaughter millions.
What I know without knowing him is that poor Mr. Bays was very likely bled dry by a system that does not value the old or the young, that values only obscene levels of profit-making ... for the real bank robbers who rule the world, and not with toy guns like that of Mr. Bays.
In the midst of all that, I hope and trust that some local people in Marion, who now know the real state of a once proud contributor to his community, step up to see that he and people like him are connected to whatever services do still exist, and that this generation of good neighbors in the Marion area, who were and still are the beneficiaries of their parents' and grandparents' previous support and generosity, work to fill the gaps by paying it (the love and the respect shown to them) forward.
Claudia King
Castle Rock, Washington</group><group id="BA6EB644-327C-41F6-B336-402FDDD7EF77" type="seoLabels"><seoLabels></seoLabels>