Blackie's Unemployment Runs Out

I'm one-wording my wife tonight.

"Are you sure that's enough soup?" she says as I heat my pre-writing chicken soup.

"Yeh," I say, stirring soup in the pan.

And downstairs, in my none-too-comfortable basement, Blackie the cat sits in a too-small black wire cage and waits. He's going to the shelter tomorrow, where he will get a slightly bigger cage. They have 100 cats at the shelter. He's lucky to get a spot.

Blackie's lived in our yard for nine months and we paid to have him fixed. When the temperature fell into single digits, we caged him in the basement so he wouldn't freeze to death. We'd keep him but we already have a very frail, 18-year-old cat who loses his balance fairly often and who cannot live with, fight with or even play with another, younger cat.

And I'm one-wording my wife, not because I think we should do something else with Blackie, but because, when I was a kid, we moved a lot. On my 10th birthday, we gave away my dog and we moved from a house in Massachusetts to an apartment in Maryland. My folks bought me a cat, which we gave away 11 months later when we moved again. Blackie's in the basement and I'm 10, watching strangers drive way with my dog.

And you, down there in the economic basement, just a little more comfortable than you'd be if you were living in a ditch, you look up and see Congress, which is a cat box of another kind, and they're dithering and dickering and thundering and flubbering over extending your unemployment benefits.

On average, nationwide, unemployment benefits amount to about $256 a week. With that kind of money coming in, a man can live like a cat in a cage.

And so can his family.

But you can't have that $256, not until every dime of it has been chewed over and "debated," not until the tea party has made you feel like you're out of work because you're a bum, like you're some kind of embarrassment to the nation because you lost your waitress job or your truck driver job or your factory job or your job in the accounting department.

You wanna know why you're not working? Because there's NO work, a fact that can't make a dent in the Republican bowsers who take their orders from billionaires and creep-job fundamentalist preachers.

Blackie the Cat is out of time. So are you. We're sending him to a no-kill shelter where, if he's lucky, he'll get a nice family to take him home.

This could happen to you too, if, just after your unemployment runs out and just before you starve to death, some nice Republican congress person adopts you and your family and takes you home and pets you and lets your wife wash the floors with her hair and sends you and the kids out to cut the lawn with your teeth.

Never give up hope.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Marc Munroe Dion's books, "Between Wealth and Welfare" and "Mill River Smoke" are available for Nook and Kindle.