"...the human voice is different from other sounds. It can be heard over noises that bury everything else. Even when it is not shouting. Even if it's just a whisper. Even the lowest whisper can be heard - over armies – when it's telling the truth." Edmund Zuwanie from The Interpreter
I met Kathy in 1965 while we were both attending high school in Fort Worth, Texas. She was my first ‘teenage love,’ and we became inseparable during the five-month period that we dated. When my family moved to a small town in Oklahoma ― several hundred miles from where Kathy lived ― I was devastated. She was my best friend: the only person I trusted enough to share the intimate details of my life.
Eventually we stopped writing letters, and I lost touch with her. After several years, she became a bittersweet memory, and though I thought of her often, we never spoke again until three years ago, when we accidentally discovered each other through an Internet site developed by our old high school. By that time, I was a widower with three adult children, and she was a widow with four adult children. I had migrated to California, but she had never left Texas.
We learned that both of our lives had been tumultuous, and because we had experienced many tragic changes, it took several months to reestablish our identities and rekindle the friendship we had previously known. Kathy was kind and gentle, and she thought time had made me more understanding, so we worked through our initial awkwardness easily.
But everything was not rosy. Kathy was struggling. She had been left deeply in debt because of medical expenses that had been incurred during her late husband’s long-term struggle with cancer. I was facing an uphill battle against chronic illness caused by a botched surgery that had damaged my stomach and esophagus. I was also suffering from cancer. Both illnesses had left me financially devastated.
Last week, a medical emergency sent me scrambling to the hospital, and during that time, I missed several of Kathy’s calls. Because I could not return her messages and because she did not know what had happened, she panicked and left requests on my voicemail that sounded increasingly more desperate with each passing day. She feared the worst for my health.
When I was finally able to contact her, she was relieved to hear my voice, thankful that my illness hadn’t taken a fatal turn. We talked about the latest news concerning our children (and my grandchildren), and we shared a few laughs. But her mood changed imperceptibly when I asked if she was okay. She reassured me she was fine, but she sounded a little too light hearted; and as close friends often do, I read between the lines and pressed for the truth. After several minutes of stalling, she finally admitted that things were far from okay.
Kathy is a real-estate agent, and the housing crisis has hit her business hard. Even though she was the top selling agent for her firm last year, the profit margin on her home sales has dropped dramatically. Faced with the insurmountable obstacle of paying for her husband’s medical bills and hit by a sudden increase in her operating costs and unable to pay the mortgage on her property, she found herself penniless and in a race against time to survive.
To counter the loss of revenue, she closed off all but two of the rooms in her home (hoping to reduce her utility costs). She sold her car and has eaten so little over the past five weeks that she now feels constantly hungry and is losing weight.
She cried for a long time, and I listened ― feeling totally helpless, but understanding the hopelessness she was experiencing. It was easy to see, she was desperately close to becoming homeless.
She was afraid she would become a burden to her children. She was less concerned about eating than she was about not being able to feed her dog. She was terrified of losing her home, and what if she became sick? The list of fears was lengthy, but her concerns were understandable. Her anxieties were the same type of worries that millions of people across America face on any given night.
After we hung up, I thought about Kathy for a long time and wept.
I know what it is like to live on the precipice: it is terrifying. And I know enough about Kathy to know she didn’t live carelessly. The reason for her problems wasn’t because she had made poor life decisions ― she has always been a responsible person ― her woes were the result of fate and because other people had made mistakes.
She held a steady job for most of her adult life; she was a good mother who raised and nurtured a family; she carried the burden of her husband’s illness until his death (while earning the living and caring for her children and caring for an ailing mother). She attended church regularly, she visited her sick friends, and when she had the money, she gave to the poor and needy.
No one with a heart can say that Kathy deserves to be condemned for the life she lived.
Unless you use conservative logic.
Ask any Republican or Tea Party member and they will tell you: Kathy is not a good person. In fact, she’s a lousy, opportunistic, gold-digger. They believe Kathy deserves to suffer because:
- she did not plan properly for the future
- she’s really just looking for a handout
- she is living in sin (like the people who lived in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina)
- she’s a Muslim, Nazi, or a homosexual
- or whatever!
Realistically, Kathy is suffering because life dealt her an unfortunate hand, and because our nation’s leaders became so corrupt, they failed to protect the people who elected them.
Twelve years ago, she would have been admired for her courage and for having acted responsibly. But that was before the Evangelicals decided that Jesus didn’t really mean what He said about caring for the poor and needy; it was before George W. Bush and the Republicans sold our future and our children’s future to enrich the oil and the military industries; and it was before Wall Street plundered our retirement funds and absconded our tax dollars to bail out unscrupulous bankers...before the Republicans drove the world economy over the cliff.
But their malfeasance doesn’t matter. They believe they are not to blame. It is Kathy and people like her who are at fault.
Our political environment has become so corrupt and toxic, the truth no longer matters. Under the guidance of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, the right-wingers purchased the top tiers of the media industry, and now the conservatives are controlling the messages that define our daily lives. The results are tragic. Few people know the truth about any issue. Good people, like Kathy, have become enemies of the state; Christians have become hate mongers; stupid is the future of education; and corporate America has wrestled justice away from the Justice Department.
George Orwell couldn’t have written a scarier scenario.
I am sixty-two years old, and this is the first time in my life I am afraid that truth ― on any level ― will not survive the hard swing to the right if the Republicans regain control of Congress.
"What we are seeing these days is so much misleading. They say one outlandish thing after another about the President, and that gives license to others to say even worse things." South Carolina Republican Rep. Bob Inglis – The Daily News
"...the human voice is different from other sounds. It can be heard over noises that bury everything else. Even when it is not shouting. Even if it's just a whisper. Even the lowest whisper can be heard - over armies – when it's telling the truth." Edmund Zuwanie from The Interpreter