The boy was found guilty of murdering his parents, then threw himself on the mercy of the court: “But your honor, I’m an orphan!”

First Gov. Paul LePage and the empowered Republican leadership engineered a tax cut of more than $100 million for the wealthy in Maine, and now they claim they are forced to cut health care to many of our fellow Mainers. “Oh good people of Maine, it’s a crisis!” they say.

What we are experiencing behind the smoke screen is class warfare, but it’s not a war in the sense that the warriors are determined to kill. These warriors just want the real problems of living in a society out of their way and off their radar. As the Godfather would say sincerely and with conviction, “It’s not personal.”

We live on Earth, we live in north America, we live in the United States, we live in Maine, we live in communities of many levels. We each decide at which levels we put our energies, but it is heartless as human beings to live in denial of the realities of our neighbors.

Some people got a substantial tax break, and some have lost their houses and their jobs, and now the administration wants to cut 65,000 of our neighbors from access to their health insurance. It is certainly a crisis, but not the fabricated crisis our governor meant.

It is a crisis of amoral self-interest triumphing over human kindness.

Jim Perkins

Wayne