There were some members of the loyal opposition in attendance. Five people. One of them was a woman with a burgundy hat with tea bags dangling on the brim. An interesting take on fashion for an elderly woman to promote, which went well with her repeated comments that health care should not be for all. Nothing like promoting social harmony.
One other woman who arrived a tad late in her big truck decided that her screech of ""We do not consent" should be screamed nonstop while the pro-health care reform group was listening to an elderly woman in a neck brace explain how her insurance company denied her husband the necessary prescribed drugs her doctor recommended. The crowd got into the spirit of the affair by chanting "We need mental health care, now." The screecher held her own, but in the end "mental health care now" won out.
Sunday the nation finds out which side wins out on this health care debate. The anger and resentment each side of the political spectrum feels for one another has reached the near boiling point. The tone of politics today reminds me of the old Viet Nam days. Action in the streets throughout the land, and a refusal to search for a middle ground.
So many people today have only read about those days in dusty history books, and have no first hand knowledge of how split the nation was. It took Nixon resigning and the inglorious end of our involvement in Viet Nam to move past that time's political stalemate. The residual hard feelings both sides felt in the aftermath have never fully disappeared. Not that this should surprise anyone living in America, because if you travel to many parts of the South the old Civil War wounds are still beating against the North's petrochemical induced "waves of grain."
This is just another way of saying we did not just wake up with this terrible headache today about health care in a divided land that no amount of aspirin or anti-depressants can tame. There is a fascinating documentary I own, called David Halberstam's Fifties. The film is based on Halberstam's book of the same title, and in six provocative segments traces the modern American story lines from World War II through 1950s.
Volume one, The Fear & The Dream, starts us off filled with hopes of prosperity mixed with fears of Communism and the threat of nuclear war. Volume two, Selling The American Dream focuses on how Americans were sold through television the whole concept of affluence, and how politics changed through this new medium as Richard Nixon takes the stage. Volume three, Let's Play House, examines the outside facade of happy home life with the realities of lost traditional values and the unrest that percolated underneath the social veneer. This chapter spends a good deal of time on major two literary works of the period, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and Peyton Place. Volume four, A Burning Desire showcases America's sexual urges through the The Kinsey Report, the birth of Playboy Magazine, Marilyn Monroe in the limelight and Margaret Sanger's efforts to bring the birth control pill to market. Volume five, The Beat, hits the road with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and meets Elvis Presley to create a culture of youth. Volume six, The Rage Within & The Road To the Sixties, looks at the marked difference for White America and Black America in the post war and spotlights Bill Russell and Willie Mays. The documentary concludes with the space race spawned by Sputnik, JFK, the McDonald brothers, the automobile and our build up in a little Southeast Asian country, Viet Nam.
This documentary is must see TV for people interested in learning why we are so split today. It won't cure a splitting headache, but certainly answers a lot of questions as to why we have one. Of course, in the spirit of keeping Americans in their perpetual state of amnesia, this title is out of print. It was made in 1997, the year the DVD was born, but was never put out on that platform. Maybe you can prod the fine folks at A&E to either license it off or put it out on the little shiny disc.
I have to call another legislator to vote yes this weekend. Ouch.
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