Last month it was hard to turn on the TV without seeing Dick Cheney and his equally odious daughter reminding us to be afraid. Rush Limbaugh is afraid; he fears that white males are the new underclass. Glenn Beck fears our downward spiral towards fascism. Republican Senators are fearful of a public option for healthcare because it will lead to socialism. Every news show is filled with Republicans who are consumed by fear and trying to make us afraid.
I admit it. I’m afraid. But it’s not what they were hoping for...
At first blush, my family looks like a poster for Republicanism. I have a master’s degree, but I chose to stay home with our two daughters. My husband is a high level executive and most weekends you can find him on the golf course. We live in a nice town with good schools. We even have a white picket fence.
So I wonder... If the Republicans can’t persuade us, just who is it they are reaching?
Our story is a common, utterly ordinary story. There have been no tragedies, but even I feel on the brink of disaster. We have been touched by the economic downturn, just enough to worry me. I worry about job loss, which ultimately means loss of insurance. And that panics me. I worry about how our savings for college and retirement have dwindled. I worry about my kids’ education. I worry...
So let’s talk fear. And loathing.
I fear my husband may lose his job because, although the small company he works for is weathering the downturn quite well, the large conglomerate that owns it isn’t. They instituted a10% reduction in work hours and pay for the summer. Of course, there hasn’t been any reduction in his sales goals, so he does the same amount of work for less reward. But he’s employed, so for that we are extremely thankful. Our fear is that this pay cut becomes permanent. Our bigger fear is that the next step is layoffs. And that means we lose health insurance...
I loathe Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and so many of these Senators that criticize everything Obama is trying to do without ever offering a plan of their own. Except tax cuts, they always offer tax cuts... They are critical of the stimulus plan because it places too big of a burden on our children and grandchildren. While it’s nice to see Republicans finally caring about children, their concern is a bit misplaced. They had no problem spending trillions on an unnecessary war but won’t spend it on putting people to work. This isn’t them thinking they have a better approach then the Democrats; it’s them thinking "we’ve got ours, so screw you."
And what better example of "we’ve got ours" could there be than health insurance. While Senators enjoy that socialist style of healthcare, they are working overtime to make sure we never get it. On Monday, Andrea Mitchell asked Sen John Cornyn (R-TX) how the Republicans were going to pass their bill if 72% of Americans want a public option. He responded that it is a flawed poll and people do not want government coming between them and their doctor, coming into the examination room with them and making the decisions. I get that its hyperbole, but seriously, this is the argument? The government is coming into the exam room? Andrea Mitchell’s response to that drivel was to ask about Iran. No pushback of any kind. I’m guessing neither Ms. Mitchell nor Mr. Cornyn have ever had to work through an insurance company.
Let me tell you about the way insurance works, Mr. Cornyn. My eldest daughter stopped producing growth hormone and needed to take HGH replacement. A process that should have taken four to six weeks took over four months because the insurance company came "into the examination room between us and the doctor." The insurance company decided whether or not my daughter needed the standard battery of tests and treatment, not the doctor. There is already a bureaucracy; there is already someone between me and the doctor.
So while you Republicans fear socialism, I fear capitalism. I fear a system where profit comes before health. I fear a company that has the power to delay a test my doctor ordered to see if I have MS. I fear a company that has the right to deny surgery to repair a ten-year-olds broken nose because, despite all the evidence to the contrary, they determined the surgery was cosmetic.
I worry endlessly about my younger daughter. She has had some borderline results on testing for Cystic Fibrosis and I wonder if I should push for a firm diagnosis. I worry that because she doesn’t have the diagnosis, the insurance company can deny some tests and medications. Yet I worry that if our current healthcare system doesn’t change, my insistence on a diagnosis will make it difficult for her to get a job after college. No small business owner could afford to add her to the insurance plan. I worked for an HMO years ago and we insured mostly small businesses. We didn’t drop a company if an employee got cancer, but we doubled or sometimes tripled the rates upon renewal. Companies couldn’t afford the rate increase so everyone lost their insurance if one employee got sick.
Our insurance premium is over $400 a month; this year our co-pay doubled and the deductible for tests increased; we pay out-of-pocket $315 a month for our daughters’ medications. And the salary of Blue Cross Blue Shield Massachusetts’ CEO increased by 26% to $3.5M despite its net income falling 49%. And this is what the Republicans are fighting so desperately to preserve. I fear that they are winning this battle...
I fear that as a stay-at-home mom I am not giving my daughters an idea of what women are capable of accomplishing and what obstacles they must overcome to get there. I worry about that because Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Pat Buchanon, Michael Steele and a host of others believe that the only way that a woman or minority could possibly make it in the world is to hold the white males down. (Because we all know that Bush made it into Yale based strictly on his superior intellect and mind-blowing accomplishments.)
Whether by design or happenstance, my daughters see female doctors and dentists. They’ve had male teachers in elementary school and male nurses – careers that men never considered when I was growing up. And yet both of my girls (as kindergarteners) said they wanted to grow up to be "dads" because men get to do more stuff. So while these white males plus one fear a world where white males cannot take his rightful place, I fear that my daughters will encounter a world where they still have to fight for a seat at the table.
I fear the ever increasingly vitriolic culture wars, where a difference of opinion is not fought with words, but with bullets. I understand people’s opposition to abortion, I get it. What I do not understand in any way is, if they find the idea of abortion so abhorrent, why do they oppose condom distribution and sex education in high schools? Shouldn’t we be doing everything possible to prevent teen pregnancies? No, instead they demand abstinence. This isn’t just opposition to abortion – this is about telling us how to live our lives. (Can someone explain to me how the party of Bristol Palin, John Ensign, Newt Gingrich, Larry Craig, David Vitter, Rush Limbaugh, and John McCain become the voice of morality?) And again, if they are so concerned about pre-life, what about once the baby is born? Why aren’t any of these people protesting cuts to SCHIP or Early Intervention?
I fear that NCLB is destroying our schools. I fear that my kids are being left behind. Both of my daughters have various forms of learning disabilities that we are unable to diagnosis. They were adopted from Russia and possibly (probably) affected by alcohol, my youngest much more severely. Both are ADHD, the youngest also has severe anxiety, language disabilities, processing disorders, executive function disorder – but a damn good memory. The elder has virtually no short term memory. Doing homework is an interesting time at our house...
My youngest will be sent to a different elementary school in fourth grade. They distribute the special education classes at the elementary schools so that no one school's MCAs scores are affected by having a disproportionate number of sp-ed students. It has taken her three years to raise her hand in class or walk in the hallway by herself. She has made one friend – and in another year they are going to send her to a school where she won’t know a single teacher or student or hallway. They will sacrifice her well-being for the sake of overall test scores to keep their high NCLB ratings. I fear that schools are sacrificing creativity for drills. I fear my kids won’t make it.
I fear that I will become complacent.
Then I remember what I am fighting for. Our kids.
Seven years ago, we were going to Moscow to complete Kgirl2's adoption. Three days before we were supposed to leave I got a call that she was in the hospital. No one knew what was wrong with her, but she was vomiting and had diarrhea and she was losing a lot of weight. We were told not to come and take some time to consider if we should continue with the adoption. We went anyway, bringing Kgirl1 with us. The conditions in the hospital were horrific, but we were able to bring her home and nurse her back to health.
A couple of weeks after returning back home, Kgirl2 again became very ill. Her big sister, not quite four years old, laid down next to her and began stroking her cheek and said "I know it's hard being sick, little one. But this time you have a mother and father who love you and will take care of you. And a big sister who will always be here to help you..." And tears streamed down my face as I listened to this daughter of mine.
Fast forward seven years... A few weeks ago Kgirl2 was having another medicine-induced breakdown. She was in her room slamming doors and screaming "I wish I was dead!" She hurled books and stuffed animals and anything else that she could lift. She screamed that she wished I was dead. I thought she was going to get her wish because, clearly, one of us was not going to survive the night. I shut her door and sat at the top of the stairs and wept. Then I dried my tears and walked downstairs and saw that the dishes had been done. The toys were put away. The floors had been swept. As I surveyed the scene in disbelief, Kgirl1 slid up to me, broom in hand, and whispered "I thought you should have at least one kid who behaved today." And I wept.
You see, Misters Cheney, O'Reilly, Beck, Limbaugh and all of you other fear mongering, hate-filled blights on our society, this is our future. Kids like this. All the deregulated children's TV, pumping her full of commercials exclaiming happiness is one shiny new toy away; all the hateful rhetoric that you guys espouse, it hasn't changed her. And there are millions more like her. Kids that are loving and thoughtful. They know we truly are all created equal – they think it’s normal to have a black man as our president and a Latino woman on our Supreme Court. They will one day wonder why we ever even worried about gay people marrying.
And it's for these kids that we will continue to fight against your ways.