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.