Past times

I've had such a lot on my mind lately, and such a lot going on, that I haven't been able to write for a while. So much in fact, that my brain ground to a complete halt where it was so overloaded.
British values include such virtues as fairness and tolerance, so we are told. Well the government's treatment of the disabled is anything but fair or tolerant. It has been so disgraceful that the U.N. has published a damning report on the subject. I don't like to play the victim. It really doesn't become me. I can't help pointing out, though, that most of my year has been blighted by my own personal experiences of this so-called 'fairness and tolerance'. I am in fighting mood, and am taking the government's agencies to court over my treatment at their hands. The papers have all been sent, so now all I am waiting for is a date.
I can hardly believe the current state of things, except that I know my experiences to be true. I can fully understand why thousands of disabled people have committed suicide as a result of the terrible cruelty to which they had been subjected. The government, needless to say, is in complete denial of this fact. I am certain that, were it not for my intellect, I would by now be drugged up to the eyeballs in an institution, living on the streets, or worse. I must be as tough as old boots to have been able to withstand the repeated horrors of this year.
The country seems to have gone back in time to about 1837, when the reforms of the 1834 poor law were starting to be implemented. People such as myself were categorised as "idiot, imbecile, lunatic, feeble-minded". We were the undeserving poor, who found incarceration in a workhouse infirmary (and all the concomitant brutality and cruelty) preferable to starvation on the streets. We were objects
of derision; objects of fun to the morally-upright. We were objects then, and are still.
I can only hope (but not pray. That is outside my experience.) that real fairness and real tolerance will one day find a place in the policies of those who govern us.