Health Care Muse

Just thinking on health care reform...

I believe it is going to result the same way that compulsory education has. The public option may very well result with the poorest people on those rosters. Whereas the relatively affluent will elect to pay for premium insurance plans with better features, just as more affluent people now spend money to send their children to better schools. Some people will work harder or save more, so that their families are not relegated to neighborhood clinics where people might experience substandard care from less than professional providers. The market will continue to reward private insurance companies who pay for the the best service providers and give superior customer service.

People will continue making decisions about where to live based on the quality of schools, but also on the quality of the public health infrastructure. Ten years after universal health care is in place, this disparity will become evident. Nevertheless, reforming the reform will prove difficult because public health care employees will have unionized, as public school teacher did, and the electorate will have become use to another tax on their incomes or property.

Bring US Home!

It is time for President Obama to show us the type of deliberate change that we need on the war issue. I am hopeful that the president can muster the will to declare the original mission in Afghanistan "accomplished," and to begin withdrawing all but a strategical force, adequate for defending itself and maintaining enough order for rebuilding around Kabul.

Who is to say that we have not dealt the Afghan leadership -- the one that harbored Osama bin Laden -- a decisive blow? Were we not able to mete out retribution for September 11, punish the Taliban government, and signal to the world that crossing swords with the United States could mean their ruin? The answer is yes. Now, Mr. President, leave in place a well resourced strike force, a massive intelligence network, and bring our troops home from Dick Cheney's war. Please.

Half The Story Has Never Been Told

I am reading A History of Ireland by Mike Cronin. I looked for a good history on the Irish people because of the vague, yet interesting, facts I often here associated with their plight. [That was how I came to be interested in the Black Panther Party too.] There is something about truth and nobility. No matter how hidden, sullied or disparaged, it still resonates. Cronin's work chronicles the story of a European people whose history reflects that of the African in America and abroad --colonization, genocide, and yes slavery. Irish people, like many people of color where grist for the mills of modern capitalism, and not so long ago! People sometimes acknowledge that "some whites" were indentured servants during the colonial period, but rarely is that subject even explored, let alone presented in depth and for mass consumption. The truth, as it turns out, is that this period of white servitude was longer and more wide spread that people want to acknowledge. A more accurate characterization of it is slavery -- specifically at the hands of the British. As a school teacher, and proud black historian, I remember teaching African American history to my students with passion; always hoping that, as Na'im Akbar exhorted once, that they would see it as a triumph and not a shame. Nevertheless, I saw how the stigma of being descendants of a class of slaves was a difficult and weighty obstacle to overcome for them. I told myself that a better approach going forward would be to teach how slavery is more inherently a system of economics than a rite of passage for African people upon our encounters with Europeans and Arabs. My how I could have been aided by the history of the Irish that Cronin writes. Sure, know your history, but black people, should know about the history of other people too. We might free ourselves of the idea of perpetual victimization... we might learn something more about humanity and the tendencies of all men... and we might do as Bob Marley encouraged and emancipate more of ourselves from 'mental slavery'.

Afghanistan

Here comes Omar beating his wives
Here comes Osama threatening our lives
There goes the Taliban hiding their man
Now here comes Bush with a war plan
He's raining 'daisies' all over Afghanistan
Now the mistake they made...
Was how long they stayed!

-DP

Jewels, Gems and Other Assorted Valuables

My new favorite book is Eduardo Galeano's Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone (2009, Nation Books). In Mirrors, Galeano exhumes the mass graves of the previously unknown who have salted this earth. Using the art of brevity, the authors holds up a mirror that shows us reflections of humanity's ghosts, the images of international vampires. He reveals the toil of angels.

Innumerable paragraphs stand alone as literary gems and chronicle the ethereal nature of mankind as both an inspiration and a toxicity. None escape Galeano's scrutiny. Not as races, nations, tribes, nor as individuals. Mirrors astounds with stories of Africans, Mayans, Anglicans, Indians and others. More compelling, however, are tales of arrogance, hubris, irony, nobility, happenstance, hate and love. Indeed Mirrors may be an anecdote for the banal education that inoculates the youth of nations. A stimulant for legions of uninspired school children who rarely find any wonder in the antiseptic antholgies, standard in public education.

Eduardo Geleano gives proof that all nations have blood stained banners. And while imperfect, individual liberty and considerate stewardship over the earth are the only cleansers.