In the infamous Salem Witch Trials, all the victims were executed by hanging except for the only man killed, Giles Corey. He was pressed to death - heavy stone after stone was piled on his chest until he died from an inability to breathe. His death always especially horrified me. Such a slow, deliberate, tortuous way to die; it seemed particularly malicious.
In 1988, I moved to the Chicago area with my husband and four year old son. We had been living in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, New South Wales. My husband was born in Australia, and we'd lived there since we left Israel five years before. My parents lived in the suburbs of Chicago, and they were getting older. I wanted my son to know his grandparents. And there was something else, something I found hard to articulate very precisely, but the bottom line was this: I was homesick. I missed the Midwest autumns, I missed American food and holidays and music, and the way Americans would ask you the most amazingly personal questions within minutes of meeting you. There were a lot of things I loved about Australia - the working conditions, the national health care, the gorgeous beaches. It's a beautiful, amazing place.
But I wanted to come home. So we did, we sold our house and car and all our belongings and my husband spent two years going to school at night to get his US accounting qualifications and CPA certification, while working as a bookkeeper during the days. My son had special needs, significant learning disabilities, and I was kept busy dealing with that. After getting his CPA, my husband got an offer to buy into a small CPA firm, along with another employee, and they became business partners. Look at that - Instant American dream, just add hard work and education.
The partnership ended badly some years later, with the ex-partner embezzling money from us and our business being shattered. My husband, working 100+ hour weeks, built it up painstakingly, working multiple jobs, as we struggled to stay afloat. We had to purchase our own health insurance, of course, like most small business owners, and being solo meant that we qualified for no "group". And then I needed some medical tests. And our premiums kept rising. And our coverage got worse. And despite paying $1200-1500 a month in premiums, we ended up with tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills that we could not afford. George Bush became president and the economy around Chicago declined. Some clients went bankrupt. Others simply did not pay and we couldn't afford to sue them. Despite doing all we could to avoid it, we had to declare bankruptcy. It devastated my husband, who had never been in debt in his life.
That was about 7 years ago. Since that time, we have struggled constantly to survive financially. A bankruptcy does not end your financial problems - it marks you with a scarlet "B" when it comes to your credit rating. They do not care if you declared bankruptcy because you gambled away Grandma's pension check or because you were screwed by health insurance companies. I got multiple jobs. My husband continues to work 15 to 18 hours a day, seven days a week, though last year he finally gave up his business as his principle means of employment - due, again, to our utter inability to cope with the health insurance costs.
We had a car repossessed. We've had utilities turned off. We've gotten multiple foreclosure notices over the past few years (yes, we have one of those subprime mortgages. Two years ago, we had to replace the sewers and with no savings, had to refinance to do it. Maybe we should have walked away - but who would rent to us with our credit rating?) though we've always managed to avoid losing our home. My husband and I have been in pain for years from untreated dental problems. We both need new glasses. Our ancient cars are barely functioning, and every single bump in life's road is a crisis because there is simply no way to pay for it. The car needs a simple repair? Which utility bill won't get paid, then?
My daughter got mononucleosis last year. It affected her liver enzymes and she required weekly tests to monitor this. We ran up several thousand dollars more in medical debt. Because our income is high - it's over six figures, albeit barely - we qualify for no state or county medical or dental services. Every single time I hear the furnace come on, I breathe a sigh of relief. I do not know what we will do if it goes out. When you have no savings, and no credit, when you are one brake job or dental crisis away from financial disaster, every morning you wake up feeling - crushed.
Which brings me back to Giles Corey and the reason I really wrote this. I used to be a pretty active activist. I ran a group called Illinois Progressives United. I was a delegate for John Kerry. I published articles. I spoke at many events and protests. I gradually dropped out of most of these things because I had to take on more and more hours of paid work to try and meet our ever growing bills. But it was more than that. I found my energy waning, my ability to focus fading away. Every day, I woke up anticipating disaster, terrified that my husband would get laid off, lose a client, that something might break or we'd get sick, that - well, God knows what. I started every day less and less able to catch my breath, feeling like there were literal weights on my chest, actual hands squeezing my throat. I felt like I was being killed - slowly.
I know there is an element of self pity in this and I regret it but it's there - we played by the rules, damn it - why are we losing? But I'm enough of a red-diaper baby to know better. We are losing, like almost all Americans are losing, because this game was never meant to be won by people like us. And no band-aids on our slashed throats are going to make it all better, either - much as I would love some, any, relief. God bless John Edwards for saying it: There ARE two Americas. More and more of us every day live in the one where, despite dancing as fast as we can, we still wake up every day gasping for breath. That's the kind of pain, the kind of humiliation and despair, that this system produces. I am not interested in bipartisanship. I am not interested in reconciling with the people who are killing me, killing other working Americans, just as surely as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory owners killed their workers - and in some cases, just as literally. The people who oppose national health insurance, who oppose a living wage - these people are my enemy. We are not "all Americans". They live in the other America, or they serve those who do. Either way, we have no common currency.
I still believe we can change things. It's happened in other places, in other times, and there is no reason it can't get better here, too. I'm hanging on and fighting as best I can to do more than survive - surviving is not enough - so that my kids will never have to despair over a medical bill - or being unable to get needed health care. That keeps me going. That's one truth, but here's another one: I wish we had never come back to America. We've loved being with family and friends and loved so many things here - but in the balance, it wasn't worth it. And that breaks my heart. America is full of broken hearts today, I know. What other place promised so much, only to crush those who work and fought to try to make those promises come true? I know this land is not George Bush's land, I know it is the land of Woody Guthrie and Paul Robeson and Mother Jones. It's our land. It's worth fighting for.
"The only thing we done was wrong/was stay in the wilderness too long/keep your eyes on the prize, hold on./The only thing we done was right/was the day we started to fight/keep your eyes on the prize, hold on...."