The Exquisite Realization of Health

The curious sympathy one feels when feeling with the hand the naked
meat of the body,
The circling rivers the breath, and breathing it in and out,
The beauty of the waist, and thence of the hips, and thence downward
toward the knees,
The thin red jellies within you or within me, the bones and the
marrow in the bones,
The exquisite realization of health;
O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul,
O I say now these are the soul!

from “I Sing the Body Electric” by Walt Whitman

Dear Friend & Reader:

I’m a little numb, and maybe punchy. The last time I stayed up late on a school night glued to the television watching political history in the making was in 1974 with the gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Watergate hearings. the President of the United States, who swore on a Bible to uphold the Constitution of the United States — had acted above the law. This was a highly serious accusation striking a blow against the once sacrosanct office of the President. It shook us out of the trees of our innocence about politics, presidents and executive privilege. Those heady days I wanted to know what history felt like, and it was right there televised live.

Almost 36 years later, most of Sunday afternoon and well into the night I did exactly the same thing. Only this time watching C-SPAN televising Congress’ vote on the Health Care Reform bill, gavel-to-gavel, from the first arguments and proposed amendments in the afternoon until shortly before midnight and its final approval.  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi brought down a very special gavel to approve the bill. It was  the same gavel used in 1965 to approve Medicare, the last time we got a crucial piece of the social contract right with individual Americans. Like the Health Care Reform bill signed by President Obama, when the original Medicare was passed we had won only half the battle. It took amendments to the primary Medicare bill to make the system Americans rely on today.

The victory of Medicare in the mid 1960s and Sunday night’s health care reform bill came with a price: the last 40-plus years of American politics, iconized by Reagan and George Bush Sr. and Junior, has been a reaction against Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society which spawned Medicare. Those years were by and large a successful movement by business represented by the Republican Party to dismantle the Great Society and ultimately the New Deal in its entirety, bit by precious bit. In those years we saw bits and pieces of our country’s soul eroded for money.

Old paradigms die hard, and in American capitalism, they die harder when there’s a profit to be made. Starting with kidnapped Africans and indentured servants from debtors jails in England, to today’s immigrants, the working poor and the ever-more perilously fragile middle class,  our current capitalism’s not-so-secret secret is that it’s still trying to recapture the days of cheap labor and maximum profit. Those of us outside the gated communities are less than worthy of mention, expendable and certainly a heavy burden, particularly when sick.

The welfare of slaves and common working people in Walt Whitman’s poem “I Sing the Body Electric” — written in the mid-19th century — was coldly ignored in our nation’s mad rush to the top of the industrialized mountain.  In fact, the forces working to push back on health care reform are trying to go back to the 19th century, and that ethos of the sweatshop has never really ceased in their minds. The lack of concern over the health of American workers has become a stubborn stone set over generations in the heart of our politics, even as the costs for medical attention and medicine itself have become punitively high. Your health is a privilege, only available if you can afford it. In the meantime choices for a growing number of uninsured Americans dwindled to either buying groceries or life-saving medicines. Eating or dying.

I have neither pity or judgment for those on the right who are screaming to fight this bill, not really knowing what they’re talking about, or on the left who believe this bill does not accomplish anything much. In fact, watching what happened in Congress during the equinox, the worry that someone on either side of the political fence would be unhappy about the passage of Health Care Reform ceased to matter.

You could see by the emotion on the faces of those representatives rushing to get their votes in that something was happening here. They were doing something different in the face of 40 years of bills stripping government relief for the common person, bit by bit. The health care reform bill passed this equinox weekend, agree with it or not, is something to celebrate for the sheer effort it has taken to begin to un-melt the glacially cold hearts trying to impede progress of its very concept. Moving hearts from sweatshop to people is a very steep climb.

I know I’m going to get blasted by saying this next, because there are those of us out there who don’t believe this, but in the end, I hope you will. It’s going to be the key to winning what we need to reclaim our humanity and decency:  the wars, the military, the big businesses and banks don’t matter. You do.

Starting with the aspirations of President Teddy Roosevelt who dreamed of public health care in the early days of the 20th century, its taken nearly a century to get to where we are today: on the road but still a ways to go to reach our ideal of universal health care. But at least now we’re on that road. And every day we chip away at it, we make it more workable, more perfect and more attainable until we do have the universal health care we deserve. Its in that battle we can find what was lost: our country’s soul.

For that reason, the passage of the Health Care Reform bill is historic because, like Medicare, it is changing our world view. Civil rights activist and Congressman John Lewis was right when he called the Health Care Reform bill “the Civil Rights Act for the 21st century,” because it is. Bit by bit, we’re moving towards the exquisite realization of health as our right. We’re moving towards the needs of the individual becoming political, or as we are fond of saying in these here parts: the personal is political. And, its about fucking time.

Yours and truly,

Fe Bongolan
San Francisco

15 thoughts on “The Exquisite Realization of Health”

  1. Many thanks Paola. Will write to you at the address you sent (I live in Rome). Don’t have a computer at home (as yet), only at work – hence the late reply. Beppe Grillo is amazing, but too alternative, not “mainstream” enough to be a real threat to the Italian political status quo. Seems that that person still has to be born (as you Italians say!). Be interesting to see how the regional elections go…
    A presto
    Liz x

  2. Liz-Huffy,
    great! I live in Milan. You can write me at paolamaya(at)virgilio.it.
    Today’s the day of connection… I went to hear to Beppe Grillo tonight here in Milan. There were quite a lot of people. He feels “clean” and honest, very angry though. A new hope for this country?

    For American and international PW readers, he is a comic actor who is working (he is drawing people together, they made a movement and they are candidates at the regional elections next week in some regions) on themes like energy, public water, sustainable developement and most of all for a parliament without deputates wth trials going or condemnations already stated. Sounds incredible, eh? We have quite many of those.
    His blog (www.beppegrillo.it) is one of the most read in the world. I checked it, and there is also the English version!

  3. Worth the wait Fe. You never disappoint and I’m proud to be one of your adoring fans. It is about the feel of and the knowledge of history isn’t it? When you know it’s happening .. . again. That mix of air and water, mental and emotional, Aquarius and Cancer for this country and some of us PWers, but expressed and represented in many other ways in many other folks. Even in other countries. . … thanks Huffy and paola for sharing our triumph over atrophy.

    It’s a pendulum, a slow one, but the swing is what keeps this country, and the world for that matter, alive. Always finding balance in the middle but still swinging to the left or the right. Tickin’ and a tockin’.
    be

  4. Fantastic piece, Love… and it is not without merit that Whitman was a nurse in the Civil War. So, when celebrating the Body Electric, he knew what he was singing about. (I always felt that Whitman was the country’s godfather, that he voiced and vouched for an America that has yet to reach its majority.)

    In the rush of data, and talking points, and Dem-baiting I had almost overlooked that this issue is about body care, the physical as well as the political.

    You and Whitman sharply brought that home. Thank you.

    M

  5. “I got a new sense of how difficult, how contentious and how tedious it is to move this nation — and how remarkable it was to have accomplished it. ”

    Jude:

    While Speaker Pelosi was walking up the Capitol steps with Barney Frank and John Lewis, protesting teabaggers called Lewis the “n” word and Frank the “f” word. I wonder if those teabaggers knew what an opposite effect those tactics would have, especially on those two Congressmen, who have seen an unfair share of discrimination in their time.

    You could see it on the House floor, how even Bart Stupak rose to the occasion, in tears because as a pro-lifer, he had to and must respect ALL life, including the life of the mother and father, and all living children.

    The Republicans were devastated, and nothing was funnier than to see Minority Leader John Boehner, who earlier asked for members of his party to behave like adults after the vote was cast–throw a temper tantrum on the floor–yelling “have you read this bill? HELL NO.”

    The provision he was screaming about was one where a portion of the revenues used to pay for Health Care Reform would come from a 10% tax on tanning studios.

  6. Huffy – Paola, that will be so great if you guys get together and make a connection. Planet Waves indeed.

  7. Len:

    When I first drafted this piece–four days before the health care vote, I pasted on that section of the Whitman poem, not knowing what a synchronistic addition it would be. I was searching for elements and clues for what the vote would represent, and in my treasure hunting, which by-the-way was aided and abetted by eric, the piece found its shape.

    This experience has nailed down for me that you can feel history when it happens. Even on that flat screen tv, the rushing of the Congresspeople to the mic, the quaver in Stupak’s voice, the fire of Tony Weiner, the triumph in Pelosi’s eyes. If ever there was a wave of Uranus-Pluto, this was it.

  8. ‘I know I’m going to get blasted by saying this next, because there are those of us out there who don’t believe this, but in the end, I hope you will. It’s going to be the key to winning what we need to reclaim our humanity and decency: the wars, the military, the big businesses and banks don’t matter. You do.’

    Yes. I do, you do, we do. We all matter. It is hard to imagine one could be blasted for believing such a thing, and yet…

    Well said Fe.

  9. I SO agree with you, Fe – a really great piece of writing. It’s an incredible moment, and as you point out, many perhaps don’t realise just how incredible and far reaching it is. I live in Italy where the most corrupt and privileged get to the top – where the country is run by a selfish and dictatorial politician. And like a sunflower I turn my face towards the sun, and rejoice at such a historic moment.
    Liz x

  10. Divine, my dear — it was a moment in which We, the People became the topic of consideration rather than the cold calculus of profit. Obama asked his party to consider their dedication to public service rather than their careers, to do what was right rather than what was politically expedient and — lo and behold — they did. May each one that bucked the old power structure be blessed. Somewhere, Ted Kennedy’s lifting one to the nation he loved and the principals he believed in.

    The jaded and the weary may miss the power of this moment in their criticism of how it was accomplished and what it produced, and I wish I could open their hearts a little wider to take it in. When Obama said, “This is what change looks like,” I got a new sense of how difficult, how contentious and how tedious it is to move this nation — and how remarkable it was to have accomplished it. It may not look like the change we thought we wanted, but it most assuredly changed everything.

  11. Fe,

    Excellent piece and I would add that as we bask in the afterglow of this accomplishment, we must not forget that they still await with jaws gaping and slavering to prevent this from being what it needs to be. We still have a long road ahead of us; we cannot “rest on our laurels” too much. Celebrate: yes….then get back to work and keep the pressure on because the moment we sit back, we will lose ground. Turning this behemoth is going to take the combined work of every decent soul out there.

  12. Fe,
    Talk about exquisite. When i grow up i want to write like you did. And the Walt selection was spot on. This piece is a public service such as so-called public servants would render in their dreams. Thank you so very much.

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