The Inside Story of a Disability Scammer

"I know there are people scamming the system -- I've seen them." So said a guy about a year ago who was then renting a room in my house. I tried to tell him that people had previously told me he was scamming the system, in an effort to make the point that unless you really know someone, you can't judge their disability, but every time I tried to say that, he got very defensive about his genuine need for assistance. I didn't question his need, and I told him so, but he couldn't understand how anyone could think he was a scammer, and he kept telling me that he knew for a fact that undeserving people were scamming the system. Along the way, he also mentioned skin color at least once or twice when referring to the scammers, as often happens when this subject comes up.

I've heard the stories for most of my life, and without knowing the facts, I tended to believe them early on, though life has since taught me many times not to make such judgments without first-hand knowledge of the circumstances. I remember an apartment manager in Alameda, CA, telling me a few entertaining and unusual stories, and then among them he threw in the usual disability scammer tale. The person collecting the disability check, who rented a place in one of the managed buildings, supposedly had severe back problems, but, as the tale always goes, the manager witnessed the disabled guy doing things that someone with such back problems could not possibly do, leading to the obvious conclusion. I believed the story-teller's first-hand account of what he had witnessed, and at the time I had no possible counter explanation, but life can teach you some answers if you actually want to learn them, and since then, I have learned quite a few.

About that guy living in my house, I had truly been told that he was scamming the system, and the people who told me this cautioned me against renting him a room. I could tell from just knowing him a little that he was a bit of a get-over, and I couldn't tell how much I could trust him, but I also knew that I couldn't judge whether or not he had good reasons for his disability status, and that I'd have to know him better before I could make that judgement.

Initially, I did think maybe the guy was getting over on the system. He told me he had, in his younger years, worked hard and made a 6-figure salary, but he felt frustrated that most of his money went to pay for his alimony and child support, so at a certain point he decided there was no point in working so hard, and he just gave up. That sounded like a scammer. In addition, he was generally a cool guy, who had been a biker until the injuries finally caught up with him and he had to sell his Harley. He also had some programming and electrical skills, which included showing me how to wire an electric dryer circuit. Added up, that mostly looked like a scammer, although the biker injuries did give me a clue that maybe he might have some genuine need for the disability status.

Over time, though, I began to notice and understand the pattern, and I eventually figured it out without him admitting it to me -- he was bipolar. That explained his alcoholism, and also the days when he didn't seem to sleep at all, contrasted, only a few days later, with days when he seemed to not get out of bed for 36 or 48 hours. Sometimes he could barely get up and down the stairs, due to his back pain, and other times, he almost bounded up and down those stairs. If you saw this behavior from a distance, you might think he was faking it with the back pain thing, but he had no reason to put on an act for me. 

Understanding the nature of bipolar disorder, I now believe that it holds the key to many, and possibly even most, of those disability scammer stories. If you didn't know my renter's tale, you could easily believe he was scamming the system, and some people who knew him did believe that. If you saw him out in public, when he was at the top curve of that cycle, he seemed fine, and he didn't look or act like he was in pain, because he wasn't, but you also wouldn't know that maybe 2 or 3 days of the previous 7 or 8, he was in so much physical or psychic pain that he didn't even get out of bed, and that on other days, when he did try to get out of bed, he could barely make it up and down the stairs. As is so often the case in life, once again, the lesson is Judge Not, especially if you don't have all the evidence. My renter hadn't learned that lesson, and so, ironically, he was looking at other people much like himself, though he couldn't see the similarity, probably due at least in part to his focus on the color of their skin, and he was judging them to be scammers, just as others judged him. Knowing his story, I knew he wasn't a scammer, and if I could know their stories, I would bet that most if not all of the ones he judged to be scammers are in reality not scammers either. Not knowing their stories, I'm more than willing to grant them their benefits without any great concern about how they might be getting over on the system -- I'll bet they're not.

Government by the S

Beginning in 2001, George W. Bush introduced me to a new concept that I hadn't knowingly met before -- government by the S, as in DUMB ASS. I started finding out about GWB by watching a TV presidential debate, and on first impression, I couldn't believe that the Republican party would nominate a candidate so stupid, regardless of his status as a presidential son. As the Bush/Cheney years progressed, and I got to know the VP a bit better, I quickly concluded that he had a few more working brain cells than his partner, but I have lately realized that I gave him much more credit than he deserved.

During the Bush/Cheney era, progressives often remarked on how the B/C crowd made Orwellian use of the English language, and consistently implied, but never directly stated, that Iraq had some connection with 9/11. When questioned directly, they denied making any such connection, yet they continued to imply it in their public statements. I assumed that they knew they were lying, just as I assumed Donald Rumsfeld knew he was lying when he claimed in a televised national press conference to know the location of Iraq's phantom WMDs.

Lately, however, in the face of mounting evidence, I've concluded that Rumsfeld actually believed in those WMDs, and I also now think that most of the Bush/Cheney crowd believed in the phantom 9/11 connection. They knew that troublesome reporters from the liberal media (or the nuanced media, as I explain in my 3/10/14 blog) would dog them about something they couldn't actually prove, so they never directly asserted it, but I think they did believe it.

How could someone as smart as Dick Cheney believe something so absurd? Easy -- he's actually not that smart. Mr. Cheney has a manner of conveying his thoughts and opinions in a way that makes him sound informed and intelligent, but if you actually pay attention to what he's saying rather than the way he's saying it, and you know the facts that contradict his assertions, you will know that he's actually talking nonsense most, if not all, of the time. For example, as I pointed out in my Hobgoblins blog (3/22/14), his 1% solution to foreign policy threats was, in reality, an admission of his own inability to distinguish between a 1% threat and a 100% one.

At the root, the hobgoblins that haunt the right-wing mind lurk there for one simple reason -- these people are stupid. There are levels of stupid, of course -- someone who talks about members of the Muslim Brotherhood hiding in the executive branch of the U.S. government is obviously a few rungs further down the ladder than someone who claims to have lists of secret communists there -- but none of these accusations ever made any sense. And did McCarthy have no sense of decency? Actually, he had no sense at all. Do Bush, Cheney and most of their crowd feel any sense of remorse for the way they destroyed the lives of thousands upon thousands of people? No, because they also have no sense. When you elect people this stupid, you get stuff like 9/11 and Iraq, and stupid people believing that the 2 are connected, when the only thing that really connects them is the stupid people who couldn't prevent the first and who caused the second. While government will always include some representatives from the ranks of the stupid, I hope we're moving in the direction of having more smarter people involved in governance, though from, say, the look of the current majority on the Supreme Court, we sure do have a lot of room for improvement.

A Puzzling Metaphor

The house I now live in came with lots of stuff, much of which I don't need or want, so I had to begin a process of weeding out the excess baggage and trying to figure out a good destination for it. Among my newly-acquired possessions were more than a dozen puzzles, and while I enjoyed doing puzzles back in my school days, they had come to seem like a quaint relic from the pre-PC era. In planning to sell them, though, I ended up putting a few together, and enjoying the process once again. Along the way, they inspired a few basic thoughts about how they went together. 

Which piece counts? They all do. What's the most important piece? At the moment you're working, it's the one you can't find, but for the whole picture, no one piece matters any more than the rest. Also, every piece has a slightly different shape, size and coloring. Some pieces may be very close in shape, size and coloring, but no two are the same -- every piece is different. 

However, the pieces usually fall into basic shaping groups, some with 3 tabs and 1 slot, some with 1 tab and 3 slots, some with 2 each on opposing ends, and some with 2 each on adjacent ends. Then there's the edge pieces, which have 1 flat side and every possible combination of tabs and slots for the other 3 sides. Some puzzles expand the shape possibilities even further, but the point is that you can group puzzle pieces by these basic categories, and sometimes doing so will help you to find out where they belong, although usually you're better off grouping them by color values. However, some more modern puzzles actually move beyond the basic 4-sided piece concept altogether for some of their pieces, so many of those will defy any sort of categorization.

Sometimes you think you know exactly where a piece goes, and then you try it and it doesn't work. Sometimes you can put the wrong piece in place, and it seems to fit, both visually and in terms of shape, but it can still be the wrong piece. How do you know when you put a piece in the wrong place? You figure it out when the pieces around it don't fit into place. However, not fitting in doesn't make the piece bad -- it just means that the piece belongs somewhere else. Also, sometimes you can try a piece when you don't think it's the right one, and it will surprise you by fitting exactly into place. 

As to the political implications of this puzzling metaphor, in a movement for social justice, some will find their place sooner than others, and some will seem to matter more than others, but in the bigger picture everyone matters, and everyone's contribution to the whole end result matters, whether large or small. Some may have similar skill sets and similar talents to offer, but still, everyone has a unique and important role to play, though some may need a take their time finding their place in the grand picture. Some may think they know where they belong, only to find that somehow things aren't working out, and they'll have to try something else. Some may think they won't fit in somewhere, only to surprise themselves by finding out that they actually fit very well. The best way to judge whether or not the pieces in a section fit together is to step back and look at the bigger picture.

A long time ago I heard of a movie that begins with a scene of someone cutting puzzle pieces to make them fit, and the understated humor of that scene fills in the remaining spaces of my puzzle metaphor. Unfortunately for honest people, in life cheaters often do prosper, contrary to a common childhood teaching, but once in a while a cheater cheats themselves in some spectacular way, because cheating is all they know, and the result provides some satisfaction to those of us with a deep longing for genuine justice. The person who cuts puzzle pieces to make them fit does not finish the puzzle sooner, but rather ends up with a picture that makes no sense, and one that inspires only laughter and scorn from those who look at it.

It Depends on the Meaning of the Word "Future"

This morning I found a op-ed in my local newspaper by our local Congressman, which he entitled Keystone Pipeline Will Secure Our Energy Future without a single hint of irony. Going for an even greater level of unintended irony, he begins his piece with a short ramble about how his political colleagues in Washington and in Albany (this being New York State) are good at "kicking the can down the road and putting off important decisions" and how they "drag their feet on facing up to challenges."

My Congressman then goes on to suggest that we should kick the Transition From Fossil Fuels to Renewable Energy can down the road by investing a greater stake of our energy future on further and more extreme fossil fuel extraction -- a process that by definition has a limited horizon. This vision of the future extends for, at best, only a few decades, and would make the transition to renewable energy much harder to achieve.

Along with more extreme methods of fossil fuel extraction, such as tar-sands oil and fracking, come more extreme air and water pollution, plus more extreme and more common accidents such as the recent Lynchburg train explosion and the nearly-constant gas pipeline and well blow-outs, explosions, fires, and major leaks. Who pays for these problems? Judging by past behavior, we can expect the extraction companies to pass on to the rest of us a large share of the cost of their screw-ups, and of the pollution that their regular operations cause. Some people will unfortunately pay with health problems and decreased quality of life for the extreme profits of the greedy petrochemical industry.

In his op-ed, the Rep repeated some dubious industry job claims, but made no mention of the possible climate consequences from more extreme greenhouse gas emissions, or the probable export of large portions of the extracted fossil fuel products to countries where they'll fetch higher prices. However, what if, instead of following the Congressman's short-sighted advice, we now move aggressively in the direction of safe, renewable forms of energy? Where will we be in 30 years? Or, if we follow his advice, in 30 years, what then?

If we build the solar and wind farms now, in 30 years we'll still have the solar and wind farms, as will the generations to follow. If we build the Keystone XL and thousands of gas and oil wells, rather than focusing on solar and wind farms, in 30 years we'll have much more polluted air and water, and not enough solar and wind farms. Is that really how the congressman from my district wants to secure an energy future? Perhaps he doesn't plan on being around that long, and doesn't care about what happens after he's gone. Personally, I'm grateful that at least some of the statesmen (and women) of previous generations took a longer view than that.