A recent Facebook post from one of my friends shocked me out of my blogging stupor. Here is what he wrote:“President Obama told all of our kids that they need to stay in school. He also told us that every mother needed to go back to school. Now I see an ad that says ‘Obama asks dads to return to school.’ At some point, we are going to be the most over educated poor country that only knows theory and reference material. My Grandfather and your Grandfathers should return from the grave and kick all of our asses.”

Aside from the fact that he is blaming President Obama for an ad posted by a for-profit organization, I was floored by this whole way of thinking.  My friend is a regular Joe. We went to high school together here in the suburbs of Indianapolis. He’s a service technician for a large corporation and what I would consider to be a mainstream Republican. His post worries me: has the GOP so successfully vilified Barack Obama that he cannot even advocate activities widely accepted to be positive without being crucified for it? Yikes!

Facebook being a “social” site, I refrained from posting ALL my objections to my friend’s update. I limited my response to the following: “since so many other countries can do manual labor for so much cheaper (which we American consumers demand so we can buy more stuff at Wal-Mart), don’t you think we need education so we can do something? Believe it or not, many of us “liberal elitists” would really love more of our fellow Americans to be educated right along with us so we won’t have so many people to (according to some folks) “look down our noses at!” Not to mention, if all these people go to college, I’ll get to keep my teaching job!”

I was pleased to see that everyone who responded after me, pretty much agreed that his post was nothing short of ridiculous. I did not feel the need to pursue it any further in that arena. But I was still disturbed. So much so, I found myself tossing and turning in bed last night, coming up with more answers to his gripes. I’m not willing to lose him as a friend over a silly political rant, so I decided to voice them here instead.

First, I understand formal education is not for everyone. My husband is one of them. He dropped out of high school at 16, and I really don’t care. He’s brilliant, and I adore him. He has been fortunate to be able to build a successful career without a college degree, but it has been difficult. He has often bemoaned his youthful decision because it certainly made his life tougher than it might have been.  Do I think EVERYONE should attend college? Nope. Not a chance. But more people should get the chance. More people should consider it. The president’s encouragement can’t hurt.

I’m also surprised that a mainstream Republican could seriously think education is a bad idea. A college education helps a person secure for financing to start a small business; it helps them succeed and stay in business. A mechanic may be able to learn his trade without going to college, but starting his own garage will be much easier if he can show a loan officer a business degree. Handling finances, managing employees, marketing services and staying in business will be easier if he has at least had some classes.

Besides, Americans are not really in any danger of being over-educated. I certainly encounter enough stupid people on a daily basis not to be worried. If you think the U.S. is getting too smart for its own good, just check out some of these sites. They should put you at ease:

http://www.darwinawards.com/

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2009/1113092mugs1.html?link=rssfeed

www.peopleofwalmart.com

With all their talk about Obama being a “socialist,” “communist,” and/or “fascist,” conservatives ought to be encouraging everyone to become as educated as possible. If they really believe the president is trying to become a dictator, they should recognize the importance of having a highly educated population. After all, one of the first things socialist, communist and fascist dictators do is to exile or kill all the academics and intellectuals. (See Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot.)

Finally, there was my friend’s off-putting comment about our grandfathers returning from the grave to “kick our asses” for getting educations. Well, personally, my grandfathers would probably have supported any kind of education initiative. My maternal grandfather was so bitter about having had to leave school at 13 to help his family through the Depression, he practically forced his own children to go to college. My paternal grandfather was a college graduate himself and a teacher. Both members of the “greatest generation,” my grandpas understood the value of education.

So we return to my initial concern: the GOP is so completely brainwashing its constituents, even the president’s most positive, innocent and helpful initiatives become grist for the hate mill. Now even education is bad just because an advertisement said President Obama said it was a good idea. Argh.

A student with whom I worked in our University Writing Center e-mailed me yesterday. She is battling non-Hodgkins lymphoma. They thought she was in remission after a lengthy treatment this past winter. Unfortunately, the cancer came back. She is in the process of preparing for another lengthy set of chemo and radiation treatments.

Yesterday, her health insurance company notified her that it is dropping her.

Opponents of health care reform, led by that genius Sarah Palin, are running around like Chicken Littles, screaming about “death panels” that will sentence our old people to death. Folks, I hate to tell you this, but the death panels are already here! And they don’t care how old you are; they care only if you are hurting their bottom line.

I hear Republicans whining about how high our taxes will be if we go through with health care reform. We’ll lose jobs in the health insurance industry when companies cannot compete with the public option. Why should we have to pay for other people’s bad decisions?

But we are already paying large amounts of money, even if we have health insurance! I pay crazy premiums for insurance that covers only a small amount of the cost when we get really sick. And I’m already paying for those people who make “bad decisions.” What happens to medical costs when homeless people or those who are deliberately unemployed and uninsured go into an ER 50 times a year? They aren’t paying. The hospitals roll the loss into the fees they charge the insurance companies and their paying patients. WE pay!

Besides, that’s a very small percentage of the people we’re talking about helping. What bad choice did my student make? Her parents are upper middle-class residents of Geist. She is working and going to school. She didn’t get cancer because of something she did. But her insurance is dropping her because she’s costing too much. Which is the very reason she had insurance in the first place. You think she can get individual insurance while she’s in the middle of chemo? PRE-EXISTING CONDITION! So now her parents have two choices: watch her die or go bankrupt paying as much as they can out of pocket until they run out of money. And then we come back to my first point: they’ll declare bankruptcy, the hospital will eat the loss and roll into YOUR charges the next time you get sick.

As for job losses in the health insurance industry, believe me, it is scary. My husband works for one of the largest health insurance companies in the nation. But if a public option means his CEO takes home only $1 billion instead of $6 billion, I can be okay with that. And if my husband’s company has to lay him off because it can no longer charge the exorbitant premiums it currently charges, I can be okay with that too. We’ll adjust. And I will love not having to pay those high premiums for lousy coverage any more!
I’m very tired of the health care debate. It’s exhausting. I’d really decided I wouldn’t write about it anymore, but then I got this e-mail.

My 23-year-old student has been sentenced to death. By her health insurance company.

Enough said.

I sent this to Senator Evan Bayh this morning.

Dear Senator Bayh:

I was scheduled to visit your office today, but to be honest, I wimped out. All those people who are shouting and screaming and spray-painting swastikas frighten me.  You won’t catch me at any public events either. Personally, I like to think before I speak, unlike all these right-wing folks who prefer to repeat gossip or Fox News sound bites. Health care is a very complicated issue, and I would want to speak intelligently about it. I’m sorry it’s too daunting a task for me, especially under the threat of being screamed at as I try to talk.

So instead, I’m writing to tell you that I, along with many of my friends and your constituents, support health care reform. I’ve been a Christian all my life, but I didn’t start voting for Democrats until I began working for an insurance company. There I saw that the people who ran the company spent about 1% of their time thinking about helping the people they insured, and about 99% of their time thinking of ways to get more money out of the people they insured.  The cavalier attitude, the games being played with people’s health and lives appalled me.  It seemed so very un-Christian, not to mention unkind. Jesus not only warned us against the accumulation of wealth, but most of his healing miracles were performed for the poor.  Today we have the opportunity to perform a miracle.  I will not believe our great nation is too selfish or too cowardly to help millions of our poor, uninsured or underinsured countrymen.

I know “the squeaky wheel gets the grease”; however, these loud, angry people who are effectively shutting down thoughtful debate about this issue should not get all the attention. Just because they are very loud and very “squeaky” does not make them more right. Nor does it make them more numerous than those of us who support health care reform.  It’s obviously much easier to shout than to engage in real discussion, so they can show up with no fear to carry out their simple strategy and make themselves heard.

I hope you are far braver than I am. Please support the president’s plan to reform our health care system. It is the humane thing to do.

Sincerely,

Jennifer Mahoney

Plainfield, Indiana

It’s Shark Week on Discovery Channel, but that’s not what’s giving me nightmares.

It’s the scary people showing up at senators’ and representatives’ town hall meetings to holler and scream and generally disrupt the discussion.

These people are cattle being led around by the nose by Fox News. They simply repeat talking points fed to them by Rupert Murdoch and company. They have not come to any of their conclusions about health care through any kind of thoughtful consideration of their own. They simply shout as loudly as they can to drown out the opposing viewpoints to which they are incapable of responding because they not only don’t hear them, but because they don’t understand them. Ignorance on parade, being trotted out by Fox and Friends to support the network’s own bias.

As much as these people frighten and repel me, I do feel some pity for them. They don’t even realize that they are being used as pawns of large health insurance companies. I have personally witnessed some of the tactics one large health insurance company is using to mobilize opposition to President Obama’s health care plans. These companies will do anything to maintain their multi-billion dollar profits, including organizing confused, paranoid, ignorant people to protest against much-needed change. Of course, the insurance companies don’t want anyone to know they are writing the playbook, so they have “grassroots” organizations such as Americans for Prosperity and Freedomworks.org publish it. Many of these people who are disrupting the town halls can barely put together a coherent sentence; some of them look like they could use a shower and decent meal. And they are essentially doing free lobbying for companies that can buy and sell the entire nation a couple times over. That’s just sick.

Of course these people are entitled to their opinions, and they have a right to free speech, but so does everyone else at these meetings. Shouting at people who are trying to talk at a public meeting is very much like gagging them altogether. How can we engage in any kind of effective civic discourse if one side refuses to listen or even let the other side speak? Democracy works best when we can hear everyone’s ideas, even if we don’t always accept them.
But democracy also means the majority rules. Sorry, conservatives, you lost the elections. Badly. And one of the reasons for those losses was that you scared away the folks in the middle with crazy stunts like this. Do you really think you are winning friends with this behavior? Believe me, you are further alienating most of the rest of your countrymen. In the past week, I have heard no less than three staunchly conservative friends talking about how horrified they are by this barely disguised racist extremism. Not only are you losing the moderates, you are even scaring away dyed-in-the-wool conservatives.

Now, I usually try to steer clear of comparisons to Nazi Germany. I think such metaphors are overused and often trivialize the horrors of that regime. But as a literature student, I have read Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Sereny’s Into that Darkness, Elon’s The Pity of It All, and dozens of other works documenting the rise of the Nazis. And the first time I saw one of these town hall meetings, it reminded me of the Brown Shirts of the 1920’s and 30’s who would go to other political parties’ rallies and disrupt them. It also reminded me of the Nazis when they first won seats in the Weimar Parliament and spent their days disrupting debates with shouting and calls for points of order (Reiche, Eric G. The Development of the SA in Nürnberg, 1922–1934. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.; Rempel, Gerhard, Western New England College, 2000).

A democracy cannot function this way. But perhaps more importantly, a political party cannot function this way. Not permanently anyway. I guess Hitler’s strategy worked. If these conservative crackpots want to destroy their own party as well as the government created by our forefathers, lead us into a bloody civil war, only to be turned out in the end anyway, I guess this ploy is the right way to go. Or they could behave as Thomas Paine, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and others taught us to with their examples. Use your right to free speech to speak your mind eloquently and support your arguments logically. We might actually listen to you.

Alright, all you folks out there screaming “NO! NO! NO!” to the Obama administration’s healthcare plan, you’re entitled to your opinion. You don’t like his plan? Fine. Let’s hear yours.

Seriously. I’m listening.

Leave it as it is? That’s working for you, is it? How nice for you! Evidently, you’re just super-lucky and have never been very sick. Congratulations. Or maybe you and your family have amazing health insurance from some little company I’ve never heard of because I’ve worked for or had insurance with the four largest health insurance companies in the country, and let me tell ya, they didn’t work for me. I get to pay a lot of money for health insurance, and then when we get sick, they pay a little bit of the bill.

So those people who are very sick, those people who don’t have health insurance or those people who have crummy health insurance just have to suffer? Very nice. How Christian. How family-values. How Republican.

I’ll be very honest with you - Obama’s plan is not my ideal. It worries me, as does all change. Change is scary, but in this case, SOMETHING has to change. The status quo is not working, and when I hear people say, “Leave it alone. It’s fine,” I think, “Don’t be such a chicken. Let’s make a change. If it doesn’t work, we’ll change it again, but you’re a fool if you think America can’t improve.”

People say, “It’s going to cost too much.” Do you know how much the uninsured already cost us? Homeless people who walk into ER’s every other day? Uninsured people or underinsured people who never make payments?  Or consider the case of a friend of mine. As a hemophiliac, he contracted HIV/AIDS from a blood transfusion when that great Republican hero, Ronald Reagan, refused to act to protect the blood supply from the “gay disease.” (In his wisdom, Reagan chose the stick-my-fingers-in-my-ears-and-hum-loudly approach instead.) My friend was a teenager. His mother, like most mothers I know, could not bear to watch her son die, but his meds were astronomically expensive. Even if she’d been wealthy, she would’ve run out of money on them. So to keep her son alive, she took minimum-wage jobs and lived in poverty on purpose so she could qualify for Medicare. All you folks who think her son should’ve just been allowed to die, would you have done any differently? (Say “yes” and you’ll either be lying or admitting to being the worst parent ever, but feel free.) So we taxpayers paid for most of my friend’s medical bills, and you know what? As a Christian, not to mention his friend, that is okay with me.

Anyway, do you know how many BILLIONS of dollars the health insurance companies make every year? Why do we have to give these paper-pushing middlemen that money? Why couldn’t we just eliminate them and give the money directly to doctors, nurses, lab technicians, researchers and other people who actually DO something? The CEO of United Health Group made $1.6 billion dollars in 2006. That’s one CEO at one insurance company, and that’s disgusting.

The other big point the opposition brings up is somehow the Canadians’ fault. Evidently, Canadians have to wait in long lines for doctors and beg for treatment from their legislators. Of course, I have friends from Canada who have told me that is not true, but what do they know? So all the Republicans point to Canada and say, “Look how awful they have it up there!” Guess what? Canada’s not the only country in the world with universal healthcare. There are other models, better models. Sweden has government-funded health care, and it appears to be working very well. (Have you ever seen a Swedish person? They’re beautiful AND healthy!) Their system is universal, but very decentralized compared to Canada’s. Surely, if the Swedes can put together a universal healthcare system that works, we bright and industrious Americans can too!

The current American system is essentially Social Darwinism. I find it ironic that so many conservatives support it. They hate Darwin’s evolutionary theory; they hate it in school, but in healthcare, they’re all about “survival of the fittest.” If you don’t have the money, die. If you don’t have insurance, watch your kids die. Republicans will, however, fight to let you buy a semi-automatic to off yourself with if you don’t want to suffer a prolonged death. If you don’t have insurance and get pregnant, though, they still want you to have the baby. Good luck with that.

So we’re back where we started. Our healthcare system doesn’t work. It may have worked fifty years ago when people worked for one company all their lives, insurance was simpler, and medicine was more primitive. Nowadays, people change jobs all the time, insurance companies have come up with ingenious ways to make billions of dollars without really covering anything, and we have miraculous cures most patients can’t afford. President Obama wants to do SOMETHING.

You don’t like his plan? Fine. What’s YOUR idea?

Please. We’re all listening.