Monthly Archives: October 2009

Fighting for Our Lives: The Public Option

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The healthcare reform battle is a battle between life and death. This is not an understatement. I repeat, this is not an understatement.

The deadly enemy of the public option in the healthcare reform debate is big business. More precisely, the big insurance companies. Even more precisely, greed. It is as simple as that. While lobbyists for the big insurance companies are going all out to the muddy the waters and influence, if not actually write, the current batch of healthcare reform proposals, the whole struggle is, as MSNBC’s Keith Oberman accurately put it recently, our instinct and right to fend off the inevitable grasp of death.

The healthcare reform debate is about life and death, yours and mine. It’s about the life and death of your loved ones, your parents, your children, your grandchildren, friends, colleagues, neighbors. This is what this fight is all about. You and I are fighting for our lives and for the lives of our loved ones. The voices that decry the presence of a public option wholeheartedly (it may be the only thing they put their heart into) support the fact that the design of the current health care system is absent commitments to two key things: health and care.

If you, for even a moment, think insurance companies care about  your health, think again. If you still think it, you are probably in need of a form of healthcare your insurance company will likely not pay for. No doubt there are some individuals who work for insurance companies who do care, but the policies and protocols of these hideous giants don’t give a damn. The underlying philosophy of the current healthcare system is this: you’ve got the chance at a long life if you can afford it.

Make note of the fact that the large majority of those opposing the presence of a public option are not exactly hurting on the financial front and thus have no problem having their healthcare needs met.

Make note of the following truth too, more than 60 percent of doctors surveyed support the presence of a public option. 

And so, we are fighting for our lives. Call or write your representatives in congress and tell them one thing: If you do not vote for the public option I will tell everyone I know not to vote for you when you come up for re-election. Sadly, most, but by no means all members of congress, are more concerned about keeping their job than you keeping your health. So put them in fear of losing their jobs and they might just start fighting for your right to have healthcare.

Quality healthcare is a right, not a privilege.

Bound for Cape Cod

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Called the Cape of Keel by early Norse explorers, Cape Code is a peninsula that juts out from the easternmost edge of Massachusetts.  Punctuated throughout by lighthouses, those magical sentinels that have saved lives and sent many imaginations to wonderful places, it is no wonder writers and artists gravitate to the Cape. Provincetown, or P-Town as its called (an unfortunate name in my view because it occurred to my mind that there may be a UTI epidemic there) is, I am told, an enclave of creativity and, well, fun.

Like most Americans, if not most people, Cape Cod brings the Kennedy Compound to mind. But for me it also brings playwright Eugene O’Neill to mind and, last, and first, my father. My father loved Cape Cod. In fact, he had just arrived in Cape Cod in the summer of 1969 when illness struck and killed him in less than a week. So, I suppose, in some way I will be finishing the vacation he started.

My father and I and, for that matter, all my family, loved the beach, the ocean. When I was a boy one set of grandparents lived in Rumson New Jersey and the other set lived in Ocean Grove New Jersey. Both locations are on or near the ocean. Few things are as extraordinary as the beach, in all seasons. In the mid-seventies I lived in Seagate, a peninsula off the tip of Brooklyn. My apartment was right on the beach. Doesn’t get any better, except when I went out the front door one morning and found a dead sand shark at the foot of the steps. Even dead sharks scare the hell out of me.

And so I am looking forward to this time on the Cape. Time to walk the beach, get some writing and reading in, do a bit of reflecting, reacquaint myself with Horseshoe crabs (I love those dudes) and, of course, hope I don’t run across any sharks, dead or alive.

It’s All Civil Rights

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Anytime anyone is being denied equal treatment under the law they are experiencing discrimination and their civil rights are being violated.

According to statelawyers.com “discrimination occurs when the civil rights of an individual are denied or interfered with because of their membership in a particular group or class.” Setting aside my personal distaste for the context in which the word class is being used here,  the key component of the quote is “all people”. Not just people who live with disabilities, or people who are gay or lesbian or black or Latino – all people.

The fact some do not see gay and lesbian civil rights, or disability civil rights, as civil rights issues does not make them evil. It’s simply testimony to the learning curve or, perhaps better put, awareness curve they need to travel. Many years ago I saw a documentary in which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was attacked by a white man in his fifties. Dr. King was unhurt, the man was quickly subdued and, I would presume, arrested. The audience was angry. Dr. King asked them what they would believe if they had been told every day for fifty years of life that blacks were bad.

Many of our brothers and sisters have been raised to experience people who live with disabilities as being less than others. Many have been led to believe that  people who are gay and lesbian are somehow out-of-kilter on the moral front. The fact that these beliefs are welded into the minds of too many does not give them credence or accuracy. Instead, those that live out and spread these beliefs further poison our culture’s ability to experience each other as equals, which is what we are.

The denial of equality is the denial of civil rights. It’s all civil rights

A Remarkable Peace

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I have lived with a brain injury for 25 years now. I am learning it all the time and it is moving all the time. Not physically moving as in location, but moving as in impact, influence. A brain injury, or, to unveil the truth with greater accuracy, brain damage, is never a fixed thing. Its daily role in life can be influenced by many things: fatigue, hunger, weather, sound, noise and so on. Its role changes with the passage of years too. As the body’s physiology changes, so does the impact of the injury.

In my view none of this is insurmountable, if you practice the art of acceptance.

Many if not most would agree that acceptance is the hardest of tasks. But, it is also, in so many ways, the most rewarding. Acceptance gets you off the starting line because once you’ve accepted the reality you’re in, you have freed yourself to manage it. Acceptance brings freedom and returns you to you. You get to realize you have a relationship with what you are experiencing; you get to realize that the light and value and ineffable wonder that really is you  is in no way diminished. You get to realize you are not defined by the life experiences that orbit around you,  experiences that include medical and emotional conditions, addictions, personal histories,  fears and worries along with financial stressors and memories. In other words, the all of what you experience. When you realize this you get to discover or re-discover  that you are the light of you, the nexus of you.  And when you accept  live the moment you are in, you are released into a sense of freedom, and with this freedom comes a remarkable peace.

Today fatigue is on me. I very much want  to read, but when I pick up a book that I have been loving, my brain injury gives me three or four lines before it says, Not now. And so it is not now. And that is okay. Were I to struggle with this truth, I would miss the beauty of this day, the magic of the clouds in the sky, and the clear fresh cleansing smell of fall drifting through my home. A smell that brings with it the joyous fragrance of a remarkable peace. I’d also miss the pleasure of writing to you.

Feeney Era – Not Over Yet

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Timothy J. Feeney’s role as director of a neuro behavioral project for the New York State Department of Health does not end until December 31, 2009, not September 30, 2009 as reported earlier in this blog. While it is troubling to learn that a man who continues to misrepresent his credentials to others will continue to influence the lives of many brain injury survivors and companies providing services to them, it is somewhat comforting to know his time will run out at year’s end.

Mr. Feeney, as regular readers know, continues to say he has both a masters degree and a doctorate when, in fact, he has neither. The “degrees” he does have were issued by Greenwich University, a diploma mill that closed its doors in 2003.