The Year of No Small Amount of Magical Thinking

When Senator Ted Kennedy was diagnosed with malignant glioma last year, somewhere inside, you knew he was going to die from it, and sooner rather than later. But this is Ted Kennedy we're talking here. The guy with nine freakin' lives. Politically and personally. Hadn't he survived a plane crash that killed two people? Hadn't he survived Chappaquiddick? The car wreck and the scandal that followed? Hadn't he survived the loss of every one of his brothers and most of his sisters as well?

Surely, somehow, I thought, if anyone can talk or negotiate or legislate his way out of malignant glioma, it would be Ted Kennedy.

I was wrong.

He passed away last night, surrounded by his loved ones, a relatively peaceful passing for one who lived such a tumultuous life.

For all his scandalous ways and his penchant for finding trouble (or for it finding him), for all the public dismissals of him as the least powerful, least potent of the Kennedy brothers, it was Ted Kennedy who left the most lasting imprint on American domestic policy. He has, as Time Magazine noted in April 2006, upon naming him one of America's 10 Best Senators, "amassed a titanic record of legislation affecting the lives of virtually every man, woman and child in the country". He so endeared himself to Democrats in Massachusetts that he was a dead-lock as Democratic senatorial candidate in every election since 1964. He weathered every storm, showed up for every battle, and didn't back down from a fight. When America was French kissing George W. Bush up one side and down the other (and don't look away, you assholes -- you know who you are!), Ted Kennedy openly stood up to the President on the topic of an invasion of Iraq, and took no small amount of flack for it. He was a Democrat and a progressive (not necessarily synonymous these days), and proud of both labels.

As late as last week, when he clearly saw that his end was near, he was on the phone, encouraging Massachusetts lawmakers to allow the governor the power to appoint his temporary replacement, so that the business of the Senate -- including his darling, health care reform -- would proceed unaffected.

The storm of malignant glioma, in spite of all our magical thinking, even Ted Kennedy could not weather. In his passing, a huge gaping hole of leadership has been created. I pray with all my heart that someone with the same kind of tenacity and dedication to public service steps up to fill it.

Rest in peace, Senator. Thank you for making me proud to be a Democrat.

~C~

Our System vs. Theirs, Or You're Bitching About Waiting In Line? Seriously?

A friend referred me to this article which originally appeared in the Guardian. Ex-pat American Bee Lavender spent a large part of her childhood very ill, in and out of hospitals, being poked and prodded and tested to determine what her life-threatening illness was. She writes in shocking detail of the financial difficulties her sickness caused her parents (both of whom had health insurance through their places of employment), and her unique understanding, even as a child, that she was responsible for driving her family to the brink of bankruptcy more than once.

As a now-healthy adult, Lavender eventually relocated to the UK to escape the worry over her future health care and the fear of being denied later coverage and treatments based on illnesses she'd suffered 20 years earlier. She speaks honestly about her experiences with NHS (not perfect, just better).

This is the first perspective I've seen published of an American who has experience with both the United States and the United Kingdom health care plans. What I have seen a lot of are malcontented Brits, bitching because they had to wait on waiting lists to get surgeries for things like knee or hip replacements, surgeries deemed "elective" or non-life-threatening. Many of them later had their procedures, for which they paid nothing, but, for them, like Tom Petty, the waiting seemed to be the hardest part.

As I read Ms. Lavender's account of her experiences with our health system and theirs, it suddenly occurred to me what such whinging was akin to. Brits simpering to us that they have to wait in line to get free health care is like Americans whining to starving North Africans that they shouldn't want our system of food distribution and abundance because we have to wait in long lines at Albertsons.

Unless you've lived for years in this country with no health insurance, struggling to figure out how you're going to get your annual check-ups (because you're at that age for breast/uterine/colon cancer), or how you're going to find a way to pay for your daughter's referral to an out-of-plan specialist, because none of the physicians in the HMO can figure out what's wrong with her, then you need to sit on a broomstick and spin. You don't know what you're talking about. You had to wait four months to get that knee replacement? Really? And how much did it cost you once you'd had it?

I only ask because here in the US, of the 1.5 million families who will declare bankruptcy this year, around 750,000 to 800,000 will do it because of out-sized, impossible medical bills. In 2001, that number would have been below a half-million (still too high). How many people in the UK will be declaring bankruptcy due to medical bills? Look it up in a search engine. You can't find it. I can only assume that means that the number of medical-bill-induced bankruptcies is either zero, or close to it.

So my new rule is that whiny-ass Brits who've never lived in the US and had to fight to get insurance to cover standard, basic procedures, who've never thought twice of taking their children to the emergency room after a fall because you can't help but consider how you're going to come up with the cash to pay for it, who've never had to choose between a treatment or diagnostic test and house payments or groceries, have to just sit down and shut up. They aren't smart enough or informed enough to weigh in on this tender topic. Besides, they need to rest up for all those long lines they have to wait in to get their government-provided medical care, poor dears.

~C~

Today's Favorite Inspiring Quote

"The day will come when, after harnessing space, the winds, the tides, gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And, on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire." ~Pierre Teilhard de Chardin*~

~C~


Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a Jesuit priest and French philosopher who ran afoul of the establishment by putting his own twist on long-held beliefs -- namely, reinterpreting the Book of Genesis and downplayed original sin as the focus of church doctrine. He might be considered one of the forerunners of New Age philosophy. He was also a trained and gifted paleontologist who believed that the study of man's most ancient history could unlock the mysteries of our most spiritual cores.

No Public Option Is No Public Option

Writer Linda Hansen (Huffington Post, The Progressive Journal) chronicles her husband's and her six-year struggle with corporate HR bimbos and insurance goons after his massive stroke in 2003. As people who were employed, and had health insurance Denny and Linda made the comfortable assumption that a lot of us make -- if we get sick, we're covered. After all, haven't we been paying into our insurance plans for just such an eventuality. Unfortunately, until confronted by that eventuality, the Hansens had underestimated the average insurance company's bulldogged tenacity in doing whatever it takes to deny benefits and pump up their bottom line.

Linda's story, chronicled originally on the blog, The Politics of Jamie Sanderson, then picked up by Daily Kos and several other blogs and social networking sites, like Facebook (thanks to Tananarive Due), records her attempts to convey her experience with the current for-profit driven health care system we have now to her senator, Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina). Graham's responses, as you will see, prove a little less than responsive.

Linda's conclusion at the end of the piece -- that her husband "got comprehensive, affordable, easy access health care with no 'delays or denials' only twice in his adult lifetime: While he was in the U.S. Army and while he was a Medicare recipient. Both of them 'government takeover' systems..." -- is one of the most cogent, cohesive arguments that, if our government really wanted us to have affordable health care, we'd have it. Since we don't, we can only conclude that members of Congress stand too much to gain with the status quo to bother changing it.

This debate about private health care vs. publicly funded blanket insurance is so ridiculous as to be insane. The idea that "the greatest country on earth" can't seem to put together a system that logically combines both a public and private option without their tiny, overtaxed heads exploding is a sign that more than our health care system is failing. We are failing -- as rational, compassionate humans. If we were breaking new ground, that would be one thing. But with over a dozen countries' models to choose from as a basis for establishing our own system, there is little excuse for this floundering half-assedness.

It's broken, people. Let's make our Congress fix it. And if they can't, let's fire them and get folks in there who can. And let's start with the so called "Blue Dog Democrats" -- or, as I like to call them, Republicans.

~C~

It's A Family Affair!

(Or is that a "family of hair.")

I have this little addiction. Tiny, really. Annoying, but fairly harmless. It's genealogy. Look, no one is more surprised than I am. I don't care so much for my living family (immediate family, that is -- uncles and cousins notwithstanding). And yet, I have to carefully monitor my time on Ancestry.com, lest I look up at the clock and find I've spent the entire day on the damn thing.

Why? Who knows? Maybe I'm looking for answers. Why is my father's family so freakin' crazy? Why is it so hard to find details on my mother's side of the family, almost as if they never existed? There is a dark secret on my mother's side, one that I'd heard of as a child, but was so undisclosed and tab00 that I thought later I'd imagined it. An uncle brought it up later, so I realized I hadn't. Whether it was true or false, it was something nice families didn't talk about, so was buried, apparently along with any census records of my grandfather as a child. I consider this odd, since, if you can find folks in the middle of a muddy field in Johnson, Kentucky, where my father's family hails from, it seems to me that the Carolinas can't be that difficult. They were part of the original thirteen colonies after all.

But I digress. This blog post is not about family secrets. I'd crash the internet if I revealed all of them now. As frustrating as the search is for old birth and death records, ancient marriage certificates and old census reports, every once and a while, someone from the other side sends you a miracle.

No, not that other side. The other side of the family tree. And tonight, this happened. I found a photo of my great-great great-great-grandfather, James Moses Sowards, born in Louisa, Kentucky, in 1814. Because Moses Sowards was born in a rural area, so very long ago, and under less than above-board circumstances*, I had to do a fairly in-depth search for his records. But, lo and behold, thanks to another branch of the family tree (God love the Mormons and their tradition of pedigree), I found this photo of James Moses Sowards.

A rather stern looking gentleman -- kind of gruff and set in his ways. I'd be willing to bet he was given to a certain amount of cantankerousness and curmudgeonly behavior. Let's see.... who does that remind me of? Hmmmm...

DNA is a mofo beyotch, isn't it? Lord ahmighty, as Moses might have said (if he was given to swear, that is, and only outside of earshot of his wife, Louisa).

Anyway, I'm posting this, then shutting off the computer and getting back to work on my housework before I become too engrossed again. May you never have to be confronted with your nuclear (paternal) or mitochondrial (maternal) DNA with the same "kah-THUNK" as I've experienced tonight.

By the way, I'm related to both of those old geezers. Thank God, I look like my mother.

~C~

* It's an open secret that his mother, Letisha Hall Sowards, was already widowed by 1810, and took up with Peter Ford, the local constable in Louisa, eventually giving birth to two sons, Moses and Lewis, who went off and propagated most of the Sowards you'll find in Utah, Kentucky, Tennessee and Texas.