Artwork by Matt Bors
This summer, when the Affordable Health Care was under attack from a vicious, callous, greedy GOP, we invited writers to pen their own obituaries in protest. We didn’t get a lot of entries – maybe because PPP was just getting started, maybe because the GOP’s pernicious bills kept getting (narrowly) defeated and people felt like we had this whole thing in the bag… and yet, here we are again.
So we’re going to post the entries we DID receive. And if you want to add an obit of your own, we’ll post that too. Just follow THIS LINK to send it our way.
And in the meantime, let’s make sure the latest effort to strip healthcare from millions and line the pockets of Insurers at the cost of real live human beings, is another festering failure. Because state representatives should be working to FIX our healthcare system, not turn it into an elite privilege!
Here lie the partial cremains of the New Deal, picked at, shredded, then pulverized into ash. The final rites ironically pronounced by Richard Nixon. Its fate augured by a decades-long, slow motion car wreck. So, dearly beloved, we stand with only a shred of protection against the death dealers. Katrina and DAPL. Mortgage meltdowns and pretty corruptions. Everywhere violence and endless spin. Let us lean away from the everlasting arms of credit and positive thinking and fortify ourselves with celebrity. We face a world that is reordering itself. It is neither brave, nor new. Complete recovery might no longer be possible. But we must fight for what remains, candles to darkness.
~Mildred Lewis
Ms Burbano was a writer, an actor and a general pain in the neck. She arrived from Colombia to Cleveland as a little girl, and resented it. Mostly because, well, Cleveland. (If a river is on fire, is there anyone to put it out?) Burbano, in the way of many overprivileged immigrant children, was an A-1 slacker, barely graduating from the overpriced catholic HS her parents put her in in the hopes of curbing her voracious sexual appetite. No, she didn’t go to college.
Thanks to years of therapy and medical marijuana, Burbano became a useful member of society. Thanks to the NEA she found some fame through her filthy, provocative writing.
Regrettably, or not if you happen to be one of her writing students, Burbano was diagnosed with breast and ovarian cancer. She had been a faithful client of Planned Parenthood since an unfortunate incident in Sophomore year. Due, however, to the cuts in funding for medical programs during the blessedly short lived Trump administration, or as historians prefer: The White Trash Rebellion of 2016, Burbano was unable to get even the most basic of medical check ups, and the cancer raged through her body at a speed both startling and decisive.
She lived long enough to see Trump taken away in an orange jumpsuit that matched the shade of his skin, and died with the words, “That tangerine bastard deserved what he got.”
In lieu of flowers, please send donations to her favorite organization, Send Trump Followers to the Underworld, or STFU.
~Diana Burbano
Here lies a woman whose blood pressure couldn’t handle the insidious, fallacious, GOP. A woman whose “pre-existing condition” of common-sense-ness was done in by the sheer idiocy of Trump and all the self-serving elite Republicans using Trump’s Tweet Shield as a diversion to neuter the American spirit under cover of a media too spun out to provide focus. A woman who wants just a few moments of United sanity with which to recover some of her own sanity. A woman who dreams big, but sees only smallness on the horizon with the GOP tightening the noose on millions of working class poor for their own grotesque gain. F*** Trumpcare, and the bullshit-fed, blinded, and abused elephant it rode in on.
~Anonymous
Karuna Das, who, despite having a foreign name (Sanskrit for “servant of compassion”), was not an immigrant but rather a red-blooded native American –but not an actual Native American (red-blooded, not red-skinned) or even an actual lndian (the ones who invented that yoga stuff) — died today of a ruptured aneurysm of the aortic root, brought on by high blood pressure due to anxiety over the state of the nation. Simply put, the deceased’s expansive heart was too hard-working for the body politic encompassing it. In lieu of flowers, please send donations to anyone recommended by Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.
~Karuna Das