By: Robert P. Coutinho (guest voice)
I recently received a request by popular demand that I tell my 47% story (okay, honestly, Dr. E. asked me to, after seeing one of my comments—Rcoutme is my pseudonym). What follows are some of the things that have happened to me in my life.
Initially I started writing a short-story autobiography. That won’t work here, so I will truncate a bunch of “stuff”.
My father started as a truck driver (for UPS), got injured and was on (a pitifully small amount of) workman’s compensation. I have five siblings. Money was tight. I grew up having to do summer jobs to pay for school clothes. Generally this consisted of marking softball games for two dollars per game (usually two games per night, the money split between me and my next-older brother).
My parents brought us up with a driving work ethic. By the time I was eight years old I was already responsible for doing my own laundry. My work career (the softball games) began at age 11 or 12 (I forget which).
My father went to undergrad school and got a degree in art with certification to teach K-12 including kids with special needs.
The problem was that he had the bottom four bones of his back grafted together as a treatment from his prior injury. No school system wanted to take a chance on a ‘handicapped’ person.
It took a long time before he found permanent work. He even started up a sign business (made signs for other businesses), which was successful for a while. My mother worked at the local rectory off and on for years (rectory = where priests live). During all of this hardship, my parents were active in the church and with youth programs.
I graduated in 1981. For those who don’t remember that time (or never were cognizant during it), it was not an easy time to find summer jobs. My first year I got a CETA job. The second year was a disaster. I tried my hand at selling (cookware), while applying everywhere, and finally found work in a huge field pulling runners (and pinning some) on strawberry plants. My coworkers were really, really into the Top 40, so I heard “Abracadabra,” by the Steve Miller Band, about one hundred times in two weeks.
The next year, I did not bother with applications. I joined the Army Reserve and used the split-option training program to give me summer jobs for the next two years.
I attended basic training that summer and advanced individual training (AIT) the next summer. Basic Training nearly killed me. I have a foot turned out some, due to a childhood injury and have been told that I likely lost twenty percent of my speed due to it. Meanwhile, I was never all that good of a runner anyways. Throw on top of all that the fact that I have lived in New England most of my life, and was sent to “Fort Lost in the Woods, Misery” (Ft. Leonard Wood, MO). I had gastritis nearly the entire time and you start to get some idea of what I went through.
For AIT, I was sent to Ft. Sam Houston, TX (in San Antonio). My future mother-in-law sent me an article from the Lawrence Eagle Tribune that listed San Antonio as the most oppressively hot city in the United States. They based their findings on the number of days (on average) per year that reached ninety degrees (Fahrenheit) and the humidity. Oh! Did I mention that my reserve unit was a winter fighting unit?
Although I had a full-tuition scholarship, I still received the maximum student aid while attending college. I got Pell Grants, NDSL loans (national direct student loans—created in competitive response to the Russians temporarily beating the US in the ‘space race’ by launching the first successful satellite, Sputnik, into space), regular student loans, and, after I joined, student loan repayments from the Reserves.
I believed that the country had invested in me and given me a lot of chances so I wanted to repay the favor. After graduating college, I became ‘an anti-government activist opposing all chemical jobs.’ Ha! Just kidding! I joined the active Army, went through Officer Candidate School (OCS) and was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the Chemical Corps.
My enormous lack of physical prowess eventually caught up with me though, and I had to leave the Army with a disability—chondromalacia patella (i.e. my kneecaps were fraying away). This occurred almost exactly three years after I had started OCS. Your tax dollars hard at work, my supervisor made me go on a twenty-five-mile road march just two months after I had an operation. That sealed my fate to be discharged.
Oh, did I mention that I was in the light infantry? The light infantry units have very few vehicles—so you march everywhere. Also, my battalion had the goal of every one of its soldiers needing to run five miles in forty minutes. The brigade added on the goal of running eight miles in seventy minutes. General George Patton was quoted (on posters all over my unit) saying, “In peacetime an army should train for war. All else is bullshit.” What were we training for—the Olympics?
Upon exiting the Army, I began my career as a pharmaceutical analytical chemist. Compared to the Army, chemistry was heaven! I was using my strengths instead of fighting my weaknesses. I initially had a job in Pennsylvania. After five years, I took a position in Massachusetts in a biotech firm working on an AIDS drug. Three years later I took a position with a generic pharmaceutical company working on all the ‘hard to analyze stuff’—creams, gels, pastes, etc. I was there for a little more than a year.
Okay, Rob, nice story, but what has this got to do with 47%’ers? I’m getting to that! Sheesh! Try to be a little patient! I told you the above so you can see just how ‘lazy’ I was.
When I was twenty-nine years old I contracted mononucleosis. That is not a good thing. Getting ‘mono’ as a teen is difficult, getting it as an adult is far worse. Ever since that time my health has been, shall we say, BAD! During the following five years I was diagnosed with: dysthymia (chronic mild depression), vertigo, out-of-control migraine headaches, and finally CFIDS (chronic fatigue immune dysfuction syndrome). Today it is often referred to as CFS/ME (chronic fatigue syndrome/myalgic encephalomylitis).
When I got sick with the latter, I had to go on short-term and, eventually, long-term disability. My lawyer, in helping to file for Social Security the second time (everyone gets turned down the first time) explained to me that, as a thirty-four-year-old male, I would be denied again. We would then have to go to hearing to explain why I was 100% disabled.
He was astounded when the Social Security Department accepted my second filing. It had never happened in his career that a male under the age of forty would be accepted without a hearing. My disability was THAT obvious. The private insurance company that guaranteed disability insurance for my employer, accepted my disability status one month before Social Security. I mention this so that you do not get the impression that I was relying on the federal government to take care of me.
As it turns out, the Social Security Department happens to believe that families of six tend to need more resources (read: money) than families of, say, two adults. They have a provision to provide extra cash for families of disabled workers who have young children. Try telling that to an insurance company!
Our insurance company insisted that ALL the SSDI money, even that which was provided to us for the children, was to be used to reduce the amount the insuring company had to pay us. To sum this up, if I had no children or had given them away, the insurance company would have paid me somewhere in the vicinity of $650 more (per month) than they ended up paying. That significant reduction continues until my children no longer receive SSDI due to my disability.
When my wife (a homemaker) and I sat down to plan for catastrophes (long-term disability being one of them), we figured that we could financially make it due to that extra money from SSDI provided for the kids. We had not figured on the insurance company taking it.
Keep in mind, the insurance company did not give us any extra just because we had kids (remember, they accepted one month earlier than the SSA). Nevertheless, they insisted that we had to pay them all the money that the SSA had given us for the kids.
In addition, since we received a lump-sum payment retroactively, back to when it was first determined I qualified for disability, the insurer wanted that lump-sum as well (the insurance company had paid me a lump-sum first).
Perversely, the insurer did not subtract the amount that I had to pay to the lawyer.
Before either the insurance company or SSA began giving us payments, we had to move into government housing. I had cashed my 401k to pay expenses, but that could not last forever.
I have been living in government housing ever since. We have, off and on—mostly off, qualified for food stamps. We also qualified (again off and on, but mostly on in this case) for MassHealth, which is the Medicaid program for Massachusetts. In addition, my wife goes to the local food pantry each Thursday.
Our community has been extraordinarily generous. We live in an affluent suburb in the greater-Boston region. The school system is top notch. The residents are mostly working professionals. They have contributed through church, local charity, town-sponsored programs and in other ways to the raising of our children. This includes Christmas presents, the food pantry, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, music lessons, the lending of musical instruments, and in many, many other small, but very significant, ways.
A few years ago, the SSA started an experimental program to see if they could help disabled people find jobs—either paying ones or volunteer jobs. I was given a personal helper for two years to see if, between us, we could find some sort of routine work that I could do.
I was initially extremely enthusiastic about this! I had written a novel by this time (finally published this year, see below), but wanted to contribute to society in any way possible! I mean, come on! I was a former commissioned officer! I met a lot of different types of people while I was in the Army. I never met a lazy one! That goes double for commissioned officers.
As you may have guessed by my tone, we never found anything that I could do. One of the main reasons is that I have severe chemical sensitivity. The most severe effect so far is narcolepsy, but chemical intoxication is the most routine problem that I face. The other major likelihood is that I get migraine headaches. Try to understand, I am not talking about sniffing paint or glue here. I literally cannot walk down the soap aisle in a supermarket and be expected to come back out on my own!
In case you are wondering why this might affect my capacity to volunteer, think of the perfumes and colognes, hair care products, deodorants, cigarette smoke and any number of other smells that you might encounter in a single day.
Since my disability began in 1997, Governor Romney was my governor for four years. During that time Massachusetts had some financial difficulties. Romney raised my rent (from 25% to 28% of net income), eliminated dental insurance for adults, stopped covering eyeglasses and did a few other cost-saving techniques.
I did not complain. The state needed to balance the budget (unlike the federal government, Massachusetts cannot issue currency, so it needs a balanced budget). I questioned the rationality of balancing the budget on the backs of the poor (raising the rents on low-income housing residents means charging them more—the government already owns the buildings, so there is not much of a cost to them—only maintenance, which the Romney administration cut), but we weathered the situation.
I guess that I now know why Gov. Romney made the cuts that he made. The cuts (including those above) included increasing the quantity of lotteries (definitely not a revenue source from the wealthy), eliminating counseling for gambling addicts, and eliminating funding for the suicide hotline (a program that my father volunteered for).
In Gov. Romney’s mind, it seems, I am an irresponsible, unteachable moocher who will never even TRY to take responsibility for my life.
A side note: [Warning: shameless book promotion following.]
If you would like to try to prove Mr. Romney wrong, you could buy my novel. It is a fictional novel about a young boy who is intellectually brilliant.
Part of the back cover reads: When Robert Crandon was sent to the Waterline military academy, he thought he was being punished for doing terrible things. He didn’t realize that it was entirely by mistake. Now stuck in a system created to deal with the most troubled youths in the country, young Robert must learn to survive and thrive among some very dangerous people. Some of them are his peers in the academy. Some of them are the very teachers who are supposed to protect him.
I have some sequels written as well, so, if this one sells enough copies, I may be able to publish those as well. The book is sad at times, happy at times, and somewhat inspirational—or so I have been told. I actually cried while writing parts of it.
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Robert Coutinho is a disabled pharmaceutical chemist living in Massachusetts. He has been learning about life, the universe, and everything since he was born in 1963. He has had little else to do since his disability began in 1997. He has written a fictional novel, Their Last Best Hope, which is currently available at Tate Publishing, Amazon and book stores.