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“Preach the Gospel at all times.
If necessary, use words.”
- St. Francis


Health Care Reform: Now Is a Good Time
Mary Litchfield Tuel – 11 September


President Obama is trying to pass health care reform. To many of us, this seems like a no-brainer. Why doesn't America take care of its people at least as well as Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Cuba, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Seychelles, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, and The United Kingdom?

People in this country are suffering medically, financially, and emotionally, because we do not as a nation take care of our own. I have heard people screaming about socialism because national health care is being proposed. I beg to differ.

Socialism, like Christianity, is an ideal to which many have aspired but few have put into practice. I believe that people are not afraid of socialism. They don't have the first idea what socialism is. They are afraid of totalitarianism. Totalitarianism is an idea that has been put into practice many times, frequently by people who have claimed to be socialists, and we have seen that we do not like it.

Threatening people with socialism is an old bleat, and for some reason, to some people, still an effective one. People toss the word “socialism” around like PETA members throw red paint.

Speaking of red, when did Republicans become red? To an older person like me, who remembers when being accused of being red was a vile slander that could ruin a person's business and life, this whole “red is conservative” thing is confusing. However, I do feel a certain perverse joy in thinking of someone as one of them Republican pinkos.

But I digress.

I have heard people saying that if this socialized medicine scheme goes through we will not be able to choose our own doctors. This is an empty threat to me – we had to stop going to our doctor because my husband got health insurance at work and our doctor did not have a contract with that company. The doctor I go to now is a great doctor and the nurse practitioners in his office are great, and it is more than great to have health insurance, but it would have been nice to keep seeing the doctor with whom we had a history and whom we trusted.

If we were rich we could. We could buy health insurance from some one who contracted with our doctor, or we could pay medical expenses out of pocket. There are always options for the rich.

Are you rich? If the answer is “yes,” then, hey, no worries. For the rest of us – worries.

I wish President Obama well with health care reform. It's a long time coming. As a country we are heartless bastards about our poor, our hungry, our widows and orphans, our handicapped, our elderly, our veterans, our children. We pay great lip service to ideals of respecting and caring for the weak, the heroic, the young, and the indigent, but in fact we allow people to languish in poverty, to starve, go homeless, and die without giving them a thought.

See, it's like taking care of your teeth. Say you go through life expecting your teeth to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and take care of themselves. You never brush, you never floss, you never go to the dentist. If you're lucky, your teeth survive. It is more likely that your teeth will go bad. You'll end up with a sick, stinky mouth and a few dingy, ugly teeth that can no longer do for you what teeth are supposed to do. The health of your entire body will suffer.

That's what I'm saying here. The country that does not take care of its own is not a healthy country, and has cultural bad breath.

Support health care reform. It's a no-brainer. Even if you don't care about yourself, you might have children or grand children you care about. Do it for them.

And now I feel an urge to brush my teeth.

Visit Mary's own "Smart Aleck" blog...



And our pal, Susan Bardwell, from the Weekly Journal of Angleton TX, writes:

Praise for the people who do the real work
By S.K. Bardwell – Mon 7 September

It’s Labor Day today, a day for celebrating the working person. All the papers will be full of features about people with dirty jobs, people with hard jobs, people with odd jobs and, this year, the millions of people without jobs.

I choose today to sing the praises of our garbage collectors. I’m sure garbage collectors everywhere deserve kudos, but I wish to single out specifically the three-person Waste Connections crew that picks up garbage here at The Last Homely House. Every Tuesday and Friday, these heroes go above and beyond the call of duty.

I may never have noticed what great people they were, if it wasn’t for the grandboy. He loves trucks almost as much as he loves bananas – any kind of truck, the bigger the better.

One Tuesday I heard the grunt of the garbage truck’s air brakes down the street, and took Ian to the window to watch as it lumbered by, the guys on the back running this way and that to empty the cans and pick up the bags along the curb.

That was so much fun that on the following Friday when I heard the truck coming, we went out onto the front porch to watch. Now Ian hears the truck when it’s down the street, and runs to grab my hand, screaming, “Truck! Truck!”

We go sit on the porch and as soon as the truck gets to our house, the woman driving it waves and touches the air horn lightly. This sends the grandboy into giggling ecstasies. The guys wave and yell “Hi,” and Ian waves and yells, “Hi.”

Ian’s a good audience. He applauds every time they empty a can into the back of the truck or toss in a bag. Last week one of the guys yelled, “Watch this,” and sent a bag soaring way up in the air, to land neatly right where it was supposed to. Ian was agog with the wonder of it all.

In addition to the show they perform for the grandboy twice a week, let me just mention that I have seen these guys spend long minutes picking up small pieces of trash that overflow from the cans of a neighbor who doesn’t bag, and that even as they streamed sweat during that horrendous heat wave they did their jobs well and waved and greeted us.

These are great people, doing a great job. It’s all the more impressive when you think of how rarely they must be thanked, appreciated or even noticed.

Watching them makes me think of all the people who are without jobs, and wonder. Figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show the greatest number of unemployed are from “sales and office occupations,” with “management, professional, and related occupations” coming in a close second. The fewest unemployed are in “natural resources, construction and maintenance occupations,” and the next-best field for staying employed is “production, transportation and material moving occupations.”

That looks to me as if the people doing the actual work are keeping their jobs a little better than those who answer phones and e-mails, forward papers, and supervise the ones doing the actual work.

To draw anecdotally from a field I’m familiar with: In fat times, major metro newspapers have about 10 editors for every reporter. Maybe more. No kidding. There are copy editors, assignment editors, managing editors, city, state, national and international editors, photo editors, wire editors. Then there’s a whole layer of assistant, deputy and assistant deputy editors, some of whom no one ever sees.

When times get lean, guess who are the first to go? Of course, that isn’t to say that a whole bunch of reporters haven’t gotten the axe – papers everywhere are drawing in their coverage areas, shutting down their bureaus, and exhorting the few remaining reporters to “do more with less” and “work smarter, not harder,” which usually boils down to covering events by telephone and e-mail.

But the newspaper-reading public – what’s left of it – would notice if all the reporters were gone. They don’t generally miss the odd assistant-deputy-managing editor.

I wonder if all the out-of-work supervisors are looking for new supervisor jobs that don’t exist right now because supervisors are a luxury, and employers only have enough money to pay the people who do the real work. I wonder how many out of work managers and supervisors aren’t even considering jobs doing real work, because they have MBAs.

This, and the Waste Connections heroes, remind me of the guy who collected the trash at our house when I was growing up. Our house, then, was outside the Tulsa city limits, and we were still allowed to burn trash in 55-gallon drums. But those drums had to be emptied too, of the cans and things that don’t burn.

The guy who came to do this once a week was a private businessman – people paid him directly, not a company or the city. He had a big truck with a little three-wheel motorcycle on a lift on the back. The motorcycle was fitted with a 55-gallon drum. The motorcycle was necessary because most of the drives where we lived were long and twisty, going around the trees no one had wanted to cut down.

He’d pull to the end of a drive, get the motorcycle off the big truck and zip around to the backs of the houses, emptying the dregs of our 55-gallon drum into the one on his cycle, then zip back and empty his drum into the big truck. It was hard work, and hot, and dirty. He was a nice man who sometimes let kids ride on his three-wheeler.

Him and Mama talked once a month when he came to the house to collect. He usually talked about his son. His son worked with him when he wasn’t in school. Then his son was in college, studying something (I think mathematics) and education, so he could teach. Then his son was out of college and looking for a job. Then his son was teaching but not making enough money to support his new family. Then his son was taking over the trash business, because there was more money in it.

That reminded me of something told me a long time ago at Brazosport College, when I inquired about several degrees one of the deans had in a field other than the one in which he was working. He laughed and said, “You should never let your education limit you.”

There, I think I made a point. I think the point is, if you have an MBA and you’re an out-of-work manager, you don’t have to wait until a managing job comes along – you could join the ranks of the workers you used to supervise. You could build things, or move things, or fix things.

Just don’t get your hopes too high – we don’t all have what it takes to be really great garbage collectors.




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Freedom from lobbyists
By Garrison Keillor | July 8, 2009

http://www.salon.com/opinion/keillor/2009/07/08/healthcare/index.html

What's good for the drug companies may not be so good for the hapless pedestrian

It was a good Fourth of July where I was – no Republicans or Democrats, just a crowd of sunburned people sitting on the grass, and a brass band played amid the smell of hot dogs, and Clarence and Ralph, two World War II vets, described their European tour of 1944-45 from Normandy through the Hurtgen Forest, and it was duly noted that the Revolution was not going well in the summer of 1776 when Jefferson, Adams, Franklin and Hancock put their names to the Declaration of Independence, an act of treason and great bravado, and then the crowd stood and sang "The Star-Spangled Banner" and discovered that, in the key of G, it is a fine piece of music and very singable. And people know the words.

It's interesting about the national anthem: First of all, nobody really wants to sing it, and if there's a soloist we won't, but if someone asks us to sing it and gives us a note and a downbeat we jump to our feet and sing and once we're into it, we love it. It is powerful and moving and when we hold the note on "free" and the sopranos wail, it's opera.

This simple less-is-more approach is the genius of conservatism – get out of their way and the people will provide – and it holds true in many areas of life, such as education, the arts, broiling hamburgers (a committee around the grill is always going to overcook the food), and not so much in others, such as national defense, bank regulation and healthcare.

In the past two weeks, I've attended two benefit concerts to raise money for musicians to pay their medical bills, and that is just ridiculous. Why should anyone, least of all a valuable contributing member of society, have to pass the hat to pay the doctor? But there I was, watching one of America's few true-blue cowboy singers hoist himself on crutches onto the stage to sing "The Old Chisholm Trail" as we put our twenties in the pot to pay for his pelvis, broken when a horse threw him. A cowboy singer can only afford the $10,000 deductible health plan, so that means that he must sell Old Paint or become a charity case.

Meanwhile, a friend visiting London forgets to look to the right while crossing the street and gets whacked by a taxi and is scooped up and taken to the hospital with a broken leg where – wait for it – nobody ever asks him for an insurance card, they just go about doing what needs to be done. A civilized people, whatever you may think of the beer, that they treat a fallen American the same as if he were one of them.

Health insurance is the business that Congress is taking up this summer with the help of hundreds of high-paid lobbyists, many of them former congressmen or congressional staffers, all of them arguing for schemes that will be good for the pharmaceutical industry and the insurance companies and not necessarily good for the cowboy or the careless pedestrian. Reports the size of Sears catalogs will be circulated, and smart men and women smelling of citrus and sandalwood will argue persuasively and extensively for all points of view.

Our representatives will face pages and pages of statistics, acres of numerals, and even as they wander in the great fog of data and expertise, they will be at least as confused as the rest of us. Somehow out of this dance hall and sausage mill will come legislation that must stand the light of day, a miracle if it should happen, and then we shall see if the common good was served or if we have been sold down the river into the hands of cheats and scoundrels.

I shall not be spending my summer in Washington being lectured to on healthcare issues by self-important people. I plan to write a novel instead, a genre of literature that is deeply and sincerely authoritarian. I get to decide who is in it, and I plan to include a blizzard and some ghosts and a goose dinner. I work at home, whenever I feel like it, and then once a week I write a column in which I may, if I wish, castigate public servants for their lack of heroism. I tell you, this is a great country for the indolent and the callow.

© 2009 by Garrison Keillor. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc.


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Jane & David Shepherd
206-463-5868 (David) - 9246 Aldea Ave, Northridge CA 91325 - 323-841-5286 (Jane)
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