My friend Amanda Painter works as a phone canvasser for Maine People’s Alliance, a progressive activist group. She has lots of stories about her fundraising phone calls, which sometimes turn into consciousness-raising experiences or something more resembling therapy. I’ve encouraged her to tell some of the stories here — since this is grassroots politics, the real thing. No punditry, just actual human beings talking about the intersection of existence with the political process. Tonight’s conversation deals with the impact of war on a family.
Donald came out of nowhere, yet somehow at this point seems perfectly at home in the context of current events; you know, those recent disturbances of our everyday routine splashed all over the news lately. The ones that almost threaten to become so commonplace we stop noticing them. But that’s not what we’re calling about at work.
We’ve returned to health care reform here on the phone canvass. I’ll admit, it’s an urgent issue, which is why we’ve been calling members about it since the spring. It’s just that, for my taste, the brief shift to election issues was too short to be sufficiently refreshing, and now we’re back. Most of the people I talk to are supportive of the public option but broke. Many are fired up and rearing to get involved. A few don’t trust the government to run health care. And then there’s the rare person like Donald.
I hadn’t gotten very far into the rap when he exclaimed that he was dealing with his own health care issues: the doctor had prescribed a certain heart medication, the insurance company wouldn’t pay for it, and he was blaming all of them for not giving a shit and putting his health in jeopardy. I tried to steer the conversation toward the insurance companies as the bigger culprit. But Donald had a big bone to pick with doctors, too.
“My number one son was in the Army; jumped out of airplanes. He said they were jumping under the radar – that means they were jumping really low. He messed up his back real bad on a jump and wanted them to fix it. But they prescribed him with Klonopin. You know what Klonopin is?”
I had heard of it and knew it had some negative side effects, but before I could remember what the story was, Donald continued.
“They call it heroin with a message. And that message is, ‘Go kill yourself’. And so he did. Started up the boat, put a German revolver in his mouth, and swallowed a bullet.”
That was more than enough to pull me up short, but Donald wasn’t finished yet.