Booyah

Significant health care reform--BOOYAH!

Politics is (are?) a weird thing. I grew up in a Republican household, although for much of my childhood, I had no idea. My parents never talked about politics. They always voted--that was a Christian's duty--but they never seemed to indicate that it mattered much, or maybe they just never thought there was anything to discuss.

This parental political vacuum left me free to make sense of the world with what I had on hand: a religously infused value system, an "eldest daughter" obsession with being good and doing right, a voracious reading habit, and, by and large, a genuine love of learning anything involving words rather than numbers. So, unguided, with none of the maps usually provided by family dictates and labels, I put all this together and, profoundly influenced by John F. Kennedy's Profiles of Courage (plus the fact that he was cute-as-all-get-out in the photos), concluded that I was a Democrat. After years in church services and Sunday School classes and family devotions and Bible classes, I could recite whole passages of the Old Testament prophetic condemnations of the rich and powerful who failed to ensure justice for the poor, as well as Jesus' teachings, such as "when I was hungry, you fed me; when I was thirsty, you gave me water." And, as I read and read and read in American history, it just seemed that the party that championed unions and social security and civil rights and the minimum wage and Medicaid was the party of the right and good.

I was stunned to discover, then, that most of my family disagreed, shocked to realize that my parents (small business owners) regarded unions as evil, genuinely horrified to learn that my mother had voted for Barry Goldwater. Barry Goldwater. I mean, geez.

Now of course as I grew older and read more and saw more, things grew more complicated. I grew up in suburban Chicago, in the shadow of Richard Daley. Daley's machine--not exactly a force for right and good. And my gorgeous JFK: turns out he was a Cold Warmonger who desperately crawfished on civil rights throughout his short life and of course launched us into Vietnam.

Still, despite all that, despite my family's objections, I could never see any other way to embody my religious beliefs in political terms, other than to be a Democrat.

And then in my sophomore year of college, I took a course on the social and cultural history of the U.S., and it changed my life. It introduced me to social and cultural history, for one thing, and that's what I've been doing ever since. But more to the point of this posting: in the lecture on LBJ, Nixon, and Medicaid, the prof said, "Now let me be clear and let me be honest here. I strongly believe that a civilized society is one that ensures that all its citizens have access to decent health care." I had never thought about health care before. When I got sick, Mom took care of me. But this lecture, and that particular statement--they tore open the universe.

That was 30 years ago. I've been a staunch advocate of universal health care ever since. We're not there yet. But damn. We're a helluva lot closer. BOOYAH!