Author Archives: Peter Sanford Kahrmann

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About Peter Sanford Kahrmann

Writer, disability rights advocate, civil rights advocate.

Wakeup, Ross Douthat – Reality is Calling

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If anyone ever has the gall to accuse New York Times columnist Ross Douthat of eloquent use of the English language or an iota of humility, please let me know ‘cause I’d like to set’m straight.  I’m not sure what the Times is paying Mr. Douthat but I suspect he’d get better pay and feel more at home in the seedy enclave of Fox News.

In his column today he suggests President Barack Obama should have turned down the Nobel Peace Prize because, the somewhat delusional Mr. Douhat writes, it was “an opportunity to cut himself free, in a stroke, from the baggage that’s weighed his presidency down — the implausible expectations, the utopian dreams, the messianic hoo-ha.” Hoo-ha, now there’s a word that dazzles the imagination. I bet the Bard would’ve jumped at the chance to use it. Macbeth to the witches: “Whassup with all that hoo ha?” 

And while I am at it, I wonder what implausible expectations Delusional Douthat is referring to? The end of torture? Healthcare for all? Accountability in the executive branch? Making sure we don’t, say,  start any wars based on information we know is, well, in a word, bullshit?

Delusional Douthat doesn’t stop there. He says the president wasn’t brave enough to say no to the prize. Let me clue you in on a rather obvious, though not to you, truth,  DD. It takes a level of courage deep and powerful  for a black American to run for my country’s highest office. I suspect if you’ve ever been in the same room with that kind of courage, it wasn’t yours.

Folks like DD would actually be funny were it not so sad and truly tragic that some good people are taken in by them. Delusional Douthat actually says Mr. Obama missed a chance to “draw a clean line between himself and all the overzealous Obamaphiles, at home and abroad, who poured their post-Christian, post-Marxist yearnings into the vessel of his 2008 campaign.” Total trash from the pen of DD.

There is an insidious and dangerous phrase in Delusional Douthat’s column today. A phrase reflects the despicable arrogance inflicted on the world by the Bush-Cheney administration that caused enormous damage to my country and my country’s relationships with other countries. Listen closely.  DD writes, “Here was a chance to establish himself, definitively, as an American president — too self-confident to accept an unearned accolade, and too instinctively democratic to go along with European humbug.” European humbug? You are talking about our allies nitwit, countries whose people and communities are just as valuable as ours.

Listen closely, DD, it is, in part, Mr. Obama’s remarkable efforts to undo the damage caused by this arrogance that led the committee to award him the Nobel Peace Prize in the first place.

Wakeup, Mr. Douthat – reality is calling.

Congratulations Mr. President

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President Barack Obama is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and there are minds among us so twisted and or self-absorbed that they see this as a negative thing. Pardon me? The leader of your country is awarded the most prestigious peace prize in the world and this is a problem?

Some claim it may impede the country’s ability to reach its goals. Are you shitting me? If a Nobel Peace Prize makes things more difficult for my country, we are in worse shape than I thought. And God forbid anyone gives credence to Mikhail Gorbachev’s and Nelson Mandela’s praise of the Nobel Committee’s decision. Hell, what would those two know? (Answer? A lot more than most.)

That Obama, a president I genuinely love and the first president in my lifetime that I’d genuinely like to meet, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, makes perfect sense. Moreover, it is a stark and blisteringly accurate reminder of how much damage and destruction the Bush-Cheney Cowardice Cartel did to my country’s relationship to the world and its relationship to the very principles it was founded on.

Bush and Cheney were typical bullies. Both were cowards. Deferment Dick and Wimpy W did anything but step up to the plate when their country’s military needed them. Once in power they went around challenging everyone to a fight. You’re either for us or against us, you cretins! they bellowed, like the two spoiled brats they are, their fists clenched tight with a bravery that exists only when you know anyone but you has to do the fighting.

My country is arguably the most powerful country in the world. So just imagine what it was like for those in the world community when the leaders of the most powerful country in the world abandon their nation’s principles and swagger around like a drunk at a frat party looking for a fight. Imagine the relief in the world community and, by the way, in the large majority of the American Community, when an American leader emerges who is rich in strength, integrity, courage and, a trait that continues to baffle both sides of the aisle in Washington, honesty.

Congratulations, Mr. President. Your Nobel Peace Prize is richly deserved.

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