Clouds On The Horizon- Why The Health Care Debate Matters To Me (Editorial)

12/18/09-by Bridgette P. LaVictoire
Yesterday, I went a little ballistic over the Health Care Reform and joined the ranks of those who have called for the end of this bill. I did not explain the totality of why. The why of healthcare reform is something that no one seems to want to explain. Before I left Georgia, SCHIP went bankrupt. It ran out of money. The why of it running out of money is simple. Too many people had no choice but to put their children on that program because their employers would not give them health coverage. The largest reason was the Walmarticization of the American workforce where people are given part time work, no benefits and not enough money to pay for healthcare. In the end, this set up made it necessary for people to put their children on the only healthcare program that they could- SCHIP. When the attempt to scuttle the program went through under President Bush, Georgia’s SCHIP program ran out of money.

Americans are not earning enough to get insurance because corporations insist upon squeezing every last cent of profits that they can, often at the expense of employees. I do not mean small businesses, but the mega-corporations which often refuse to give their employees adequate pay, and adequate benefits. “If you take care of your employees, and you take care of your customers, your profits will take care of themselves,” as one person in my life use to say.

The growth that this country has so long enjoyed is an illusion. It exists, but only at the top. Yes, since Ronald Reagan took office, the economy has grown and grown. That is, until you walk through the rotting streets of downtown Brunswick, Georgia. The rich folk on Saint Simon’s Island desperately wanted to build a new bridge at the top end of the island so that people coming to their beaches would not have to see anything of the city, or drive passed the turpentine plant and its toxic cloud of fumes. They certainly did not want people to go down Norwich Street and see the boarded up buildings, vacant eyed residents, and crumbling facades. I lived in that city for eighteen years save for a few where I lived in Savannah and a six month sojourn in England. I saw people scrambling for crumbs who were not idiots and not stupid. Instead, I saw people who had been beaten down for so long by the businesses which told them that they would move the plant out of the country if anyone complained, and churches which promised salvation, eternal rewards, and a belief that contradicting the corporations was somehow wrong.

It would have been better if that turpentine plant had left. The chemicals it spewed into the air rotted roofs on the houses right near by and caused ash to fall like snow on bad days. If anyone complained about the smell, people would say “that’s our bread adn butter.” They fought the environmental regulations which required them to put in a reclamation boiler. They spent more fighting that boiler than it cost to install it! All the time, they did not care if their workers were being slowly poisoned by those self same fumes. They should move away, after all. Move somewhere safer. As if any of them could afford to do that. The plant eventually had to be sold because the company that owned it couldn’t make enough money off of it after the legal battles.

There was an Arco plant there. The land around the plant is so heavily polluted that one person recommended napalming the land in order to clean it. Those chemicals forced the closure of the drive in cinema next to it a long time ago. It did not, however, force the people near that plant to be moved. The soil was so toxic that working around that plant was dangerous. I found the location of a very rare Native American site marked on an old map. That site could never be excavated. The land it was on had been used as a toxic dump site for over a hundred and fifty years. That dump site sat right on the river too. The fish there could not and should not be eaten under any circumstances.

And into this, what I saw was simple. I saw people without hope, without health, and without a future. I saw a society which valued money over people, and did not care about the blood that money was made from. My great-grandfather was, by all accounts, a Marxist. He was a Marxist for largely the same reason I can be counted as such. He tried to help the people around him. He was a pharmacist. He owned drugstores across the Caribbean, and he employed people who could dispense medicine with enough training to also diagnose most basic ailments. He provided the poor with the medical services that they could not pay for at a clinic. According to what we know, he died of a heart attack in a Dominicanan prison soon after Raphael Trujillo took power in the Dominican Republic. He felt that the society should take care of its people irregardless of their age, their race, or their class. Poverty breeds crime. There was a time roughly two hundred years ago where it was believed that the poor were naturally inclined to being both poor and criminal. By “natural” I mean the belief was that the poor lacked jobs because they were naturally stupid, naturally lazy, and naturally criminal. If you wanted to solve a crime, just have the thief taker grab some poor person off the street, beat them until they confessed, and sentence them. Voila, justice was done. Of course, it was not done. In part, this is why the Constitution states that “cruel and unusual punishment” is prohibited. It is to stop mock justice from being done. Our Founding Fathers, and in this case I mean more specifically those Anti-Federalists who supported the inclusion of the Bill of Rights, knew then that torture only muddied up justice. I also muddied up the gathering of military intelligence.

Lloyd Bensen once, famously, told Dan Quayle “I knew Jack Kennedy and you are no Jack Kennedy.” My view of Kennedy is far from being rosy. I have always liked Lyndon Johnson. He may not have been perfect. He was far from the best President that the country could have had, and the era he lived in was almost ungovernable. Still, Johnson at least had courage. He had passion. He spent a stint working as a teacher in rural Texas. He saw first hand what poverty and prejudice do to people, especially young children. President Johnson said before a joint session of Congress on 15 March 1965:

My first job after college was as a teacher in Cotulla, Texas, in a small Mexican-American school…Somehow you never forget what poverty and hatred can do when you see its scars on the hopeful face of a young child….I never thought then, in 1928, that I would be standing here in 1965. It never occurred to me in my fondest dreams that I might have the chance to help the sons and daughters of those students and to help people like them all over this country.

But now I do have that chance- and I’ll let you in on a secret: I mean to use it.”

I live in Vermont now. Outside my window is a view of the city I was born in. It is officially a city. It has seventeen thousand residents. I often hear talk about “Small Town America”. My friends live in small town America. I go to college in a small town north of here. Vermont is full of small towns. I listen to politicians who talk about small town America every day. It comes with the job. Somewhen, not too long ago, people created this myth about Small Town America. They started by taking all their beliefs and ascribing it to the people in small towns across the country. They then sold that vision to people. And then they took on a phony “folksy” accent to make it sound like they were one of “us”.

When I was in fifth grade my family and I lived in the Interbay. It’s kind of sandwiched in between McDill Air Force Base and Tampa in Florida. We lived in a house where the floor was rotting, the spiders were huge, and one good tropical storm, and we were in the ocean. We lived off of the charity of others. My father had lost his job recently. The area was crime ridden, filthy, and scary. Maybe it is because I am empathetic, maybe it is because I care about others, but I have always wondered what happened to those children I spent a year getting to know.

I attended Senator Sander’s town hall meeting in August. The majority of the folks wanted- even demanded a single payer plan because it would put an end to all of the problems that they face. Five years ago, I went into the primary election in Brunswick and cast a single, solitary, symbolic vote for one man, Governor Howard Dean. I did not live in Vermont while he was Governor, and I know that he is not loved by everyone. I do not agree with all of his policies or his political stances. He is, however, someone with guts. He is someone who turned the Democrats around in four years only to have Barack Obama and his crew snatch it away and give it to some schmuck of a Chairman who could not and did not support the base on important issues like marriage equality, but, instead, supported a candidate who barely had a chance of winning election anyway. Governor Dean has stated now on Morning Joe that he will not vigorously support Obama’s reelection. Perhaps, instead, Governor Dean will consider the unusual, and even the unthinkable. Perhaps he will run against a sitting President. Governor Dean knows that he is going to be attacked for his stance. Because of Governor Dean, I have health insurance. I have that dreaded “Socialized Medicine” everyone talks about, and it has not caused Vermont citizens any loss in freedom when it comes to health care.

Jacob Heilbrunn recently wrote about giving President Obama some slack. I have given him plenty of slack. Until the last twenty-four hours, I have given him his fair due. I have argued that he needs to be given time. Time, unfortunately, has shown that Obama is not willing to fight. Time has show that Obama is not willing to take the battle to the enemy. Instead, he has consistently caved in on issues where he needed to be strong. One can argue that had he pulled out of Afghanistan the Right would have gone after him- THEY ARE GOING AFTER HIM ANYWAY. One can argue that he should not have gone after single payer Medicare For All because the right would have called him a Socialist or a Communist- THEY ARE ALREADY SAYING THAT ABOUT HIM. One can argue that he needs to reach out and befriend the opposition or they will oppose him- THEY WILL OPPOSE HIM ANYWAY. President Obama has decided to reach out for his enemy and hope without thinking that they will, somehow, support him. They will not. They will continue to fight him because he is not one of them. They will continue to obstruct him no matter what he hands them.

It is always tempting to reach out to the enemy and offer them your hand in friendship. The problem comes when they will not reach out as well. When we live in a society that does not know the difference between “Socialist”, “Communist”, “Marxist”, “Fascist”, “Nazi” and “Dictator”, we cannot have a discussion based upon facts. Instead, we have an argument based upon propaganda. Hell Fire and Brimstone, we are not even having an argument. “An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition,” as Monty Python once said. What we have here is Contradiction, the automatic gainsay of what ever the other side says. Until the GOP is willing to actually have an argument, then there is no point in reaching out to them. As for those in his own party who are willing to scuttle the bill for personal gain, make it clear that there are consequences to their decision to throw this under the bus. There was an uproar on the Right over pulling Nebraska’s military base. Do it. Tell Nelson that the base will be pulled if he does not follow the will of the party. Politics is nasty, dirty, and painful. It is time President Obama figures out that he cannot get people to follow behind him if he refuses to lead.

In 2012, I will have trouble supporting President Obama. If the GOP wises up and supports someone like Joe Scarborough or if Mitt Romney wakes up and goes back to his old social positions, I will gladly vote for them. I will go further. I will support them. The Left is rumbling. The political storm is approaching.

(I do wish to apologize for the length of this. I usually try to go no more than five hundred words. Unfortunately, this is something I am passionate about. As much as LGR is a blog, I do not do a great deal of editorializing. Analysis, yes, reporting yes, but not much off the cuff opinion work.)