{"id":23475,"date":"2010-03-24T08:26:11","date_gmt":"2010-03-24T13:26:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=23475"},"modified":"2010-03-24T08:37:47","modified_gmt":"2010-03-24T13:37:47","slug":"health-care-reform-fighting-for-americas-soul","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/daily-astrology\/health-care-reform-fighting-for-americas-soul\/","title":{"rendered":"The Exquisite Realization of Health"},"content":{"rendered":"

The curious sympathy one feels when feeling with the hand the naked
\nmeat of the body,
\nThe circling rivers the breath, and breathing it in and out,
\nThe beauty of the waist, and thence of the hips, and thence downward
\ntoward the knees,
\nThe thin red jellies within you or within me, the bones and the
\nmarrow in the bones,
\nThe exquisite realization of health;
\nO I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul,<\/em> O I say now these are the soul!<\/em><\/p>\n

from “I Sing the Body Electric”<\/strong> by <\/em>Walt Whitman <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n
\n
\"<\/dt>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\n

Dear Friend\u00a0& Reader:<\/p>\n

I’m a little numb, and maybe punchy. The last time I stayed up late on a school night glued to the television watching\u00a0political history in the making\u00a0was in 1974 with the gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Watergate hearings.\u00a0the President of the United States, who\u00a0swore\u00a0on a Bible to uphold the\u00a0Constitution of the United States — had acted above the law. This was a\u00a0highly serious accusation\u00a0striking a blow against the once sacrosanct office of the President. It shook us\u00a0out of the trees of our innocence about politics, presidents and executive privilege.\u00a0Those heady days\u00a0I wanted to know what history felt like, and it was right there televised live.<\/p>\n

Almost 36 years later,\u00a0most of\u00a0Sunday afternoon\u00a0and well into the night I did exactly the same thing. Only this time watching C-SPAN\u00a0televising Congress’ vote on the Health Care Reform bill, gavel-to-gavel, from\u00a0the first\u00a0arguments and proposed amendments\u00a0in the\u00a0afternoon until shortly before midnight and its final approval.\u00a0 House\u00a0Speaker Nancy Pelosi brought down\u00a0a very\u00a0special\u00a0gavel to approve the bill. It was\u00a0 the same gavel used in\u00a01965 to approve Medicare, the\u00a0last time we got a crucial piece of the social contract\u00a0right with individual Americans. Like the Health Care Reform bill signed by President Obama,\u00a0when the original\u00a0Medicare\u00a0was\u00a0passed we had won only\u00a0half the battle.\u00a0It took amendments to the primary Medicare bill to make the system Americans rely on today.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The victory of Medicare in the mid 1960s and\u00a0Sunday night’s health care reform bill came with a price:\u00a0the last 40-plus\u00a0years of American politics, iconized by Reagan and George Bush Sr. and Junior,\u00a0has been a reaction\u00a0against Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society which spawned Medicare.\u00a0Those years were by and large\u00a0a successful\u00a0movement by business\u00a0represented\u00a0by 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.<\/p>\n

Old paradigms die hard, and\u00a0in American capitalism,\u00a0they die harder when there’s a profit to be made.\u00a0Starting\u00a0with\u00a0kidnapped Africans and indentured servants from debtors jails in\u00a0England, to today’s immigrants, the working\u00a0poor and the ever-more perilously fragile middle class,\u00a0 our current capitalism’s not-so-secret secret is that it’s still trying to recapture the days of cheap labor and maximum profit.\u00a0Those of us outside the gated communities are less than worthy of mention, expendable and certainly a heavy burden, particularly when sick.<\/p>\n

The welfare of slaves and common working people\u00a0in Walt Whitman’s poem “I Sing the Body Electric”<\/a> — written in the mid-19th century — was\u00a0coldly ignored in our nation’s mad rush to the top of the industrialized mountain.\u00a0 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\u00a0lack of concern over the health of American workers has become a stubborn\u00a0stone 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\u00a0dwindled to\u00a0either buying groceries or life-saving medicines. Eating or dying.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

You could see by the emotion on the faces of those representatives rushing to get their votes in that something was happening here.\u00a0They were doing something different in the face of\u00a040 years of bills stripping\u00a0government relief for the common person, bit by bit.\u00a0The 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\u00a0glacially cold hearts trying to impede progress of its very concept<\/em>. Moving hearts from sweatshop to people is a very steep climb.<\/p>\n

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:\u00a0 the wars, the military, the big businesses and banks don’t matter. You do.<\/p>\n

Starting with\u00a0the 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\u00a0our ideal of\u00a0universal 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:\u00a0our country’s\u00a0soul.<\/p>\n

For that reason,\u00a0the passage of the Health Care Reform bill is historic because, like Medicare,\u00a0it is changing our world view. Civil rights activist and Congressman John Lewis was right when he called the Health Care Reform\u00a0bill “the Civil Rights Act\u00a0for the 21st century,” because it is.\u00a0Bit by bit,\u00a0we’re moving towards the exquisite realization of health as our right<\/em>. 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. <\/em>And, its about fucking time.<\/p>\n

Yours and truly,<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Fe Bongolan
\nSan Francisco<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[29,1788,52,1054,1657,1658,1659,1660],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23475"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23475"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23475\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}