This week in dailykos, in a post entitled “And then he kicked the chair out from underneath his feet.” Debbieleft wrote:
He was a machine operator - a factory man. He spent his whole life employed in the factories that made business forms, water pumps, thermoplastic sheeting. After almost forty years as a dependable american worker he was tossed aside and discarded from our society. He managed two years unemployed and over a year with only food stamps to help out. It was obvious he had become very ill, lung cancer? We didn't know. But he was sick, out of money and out of time. Had he called we would have taken him in and helped. But he was a proud man. Yesterday he wrote a note to his children, tied a noose, stepped up on a chair, placed his neck in the noose and kicked the chair out from underneath his feet.
Had this unemployed, ill factory worker, Dennis Paul, been living in today's Venezuela, as I am, he would likely still be alive.