The end is just the beginning

Over the past week or so your feed has most likely been flooded every hour with at least one thought or update from me on the recently passed Health Care Reform bill. I want to some up those thoughts into one note so every one knows why this issue is so important to me and what I think it says about the direction our country is heading in.

In early November of last year, we watched in triumph (for my HFA friends), or in dismay (for the majority of my Auburn friends), as our nation made history and elected its first African-American president and also gave our Democratic Party a sweeping Congressional victory that gave us epic majorities in both chambers. Indeed, it seemed change we could believe in was just on the horizon, and the nightmare of the past eight years could finally begin to be corrected.

More than a year later however, the political reality has come crashing down around us and it seems the unifying election mood that gave our president a 10,000,000 vote victory has returned to the polarized state of affairs we were in at the height of the George W. Bush train-wreck.

To what do we owe the collapse of that unifying spirit? Is it, as some would say, the inability of this president to fix the economy? Or to bring the troops home as promised, even after winning a Nobel prize for PEACE? Perhaps. I hear the argument that he has accomplished “nothing” nearly every day. Is this why there is so much anger out there?

I believe there is something deeper, more fundamental, that lies at the core of this renewed polarization of our country. For this, we must look at the Tea Party Movement that has sprung up in the past year. Republicans point to this and call it a grass-roots anti-government movement that is rising up against the “tyrannical” despot in the White House whose agenda means to lead this country down the path of “SOCIALISM!!” The Tea Party however, has revealed itself to everyone who does not support their message as a movement based on erroneous lies and extreme racial undertones. Every Tea Party rally is dominated by middle-aged to elderly Caucasians who have a common enemy in the White House: A black man. If this were not true, the Tea Party would focus on the actual substance of Obama’s plans and not Obama the man. Sign after sign compares him to Hitler, or Stalin, or some combination thereof (never mind the fact that these two leaders had completely opposite ideologies and fought a war against each other to hash this out). Even more offensive however, are the signs likening our president to a Voodoo witch doctor, or a monkey, or a terrorist. Not including Obama, the Tea Party also engages in some of the most offensive hate rhetoric of the Hispanic race (of which I am a proud member) that I have ever heard on a national scale. The blatant race-bating in these acts is obvious. And most shocking are the protesters with guns at their side and cross-hairs on their posters.

If anyone had any doubts about what the Tea Party Movement really stands for, we were all given a first-hand look this past weekend as law-makers made their way to the Capitol to debate the Health Care bill. Tea Party protesters repeatedly shouted “Nigger!” and chants of “Kill the bill, then the Nigger!” at black representatives. Rep. James Clyburn was even SPAT on by a number of protesters. James Clyburn, who fought and gained his rights over forty years ago in the civil rights movement, who has seen the worst of what racial hate can produce, was made to relive that hate on Saturday by the Tea Party. Rep. Barney Frank, an openly gay man, was repeatedly called “Faggot” and yelled at in lisps by the same protesters. Incidents such as these are not extreme examples; they are snap-shots of a movement who engages in such activity across this nation. They are snap-shots of a few extreme members of the white community who simply cannot accept that we put a black man in office and that he is trying to lead.

While the incidents outside the Capitol were shocking, what went on inside the building was even more shocking, but for a much more positive reason. For the first time in over a century of failed efforts, Congress finally passed a bill to reform our disastrous health care system. What happened this weekend was an historic moment in the history of this nation, and its ramifications will be felt for decades to come. Finally, insurance companies will no longer be able to drop a patient from care when they need it most because they come down with a serious illness. No longer will they be able to deny a patient because they are already sick, or have a pre-existing condition that could make them sick in the future. No longer will they be able to arbitrarily raise their premiums unless they can truly justify why to their customers. And what should be seen as a crucial victory for college students like us across this nation, we will no longer be booted from our parents‘ insurance plans at the ages of 20, 21, or 22. So long as we are in school or living at home, we will be able to stay on those plans until we are 26.

These reforms became law yesterday when President Obama signed the bill. I would welcome any argument as to how these measures, which are the pillars of the bill, constitute a “government take-over of health care”, or “socialism”, or “Marxism.” The cruel fact is that the fringe elements in this country (i.e. the Tea Party movement and the ultra-conservative members of Congress) have been allowed to take control of this argument, and pardon my French, FREAK THE LIVING SHIT OUT OF THIS COUNTRY. It is what they are best at. Tell people the government is taking over and people will riot in the streets. “The government will come between you and your doctor, ration care, kill grandma if it wants,” they say. The idiocy of such claims is obvious, yet these fears still run deep in this country as I write this.

Today, it is time to take back the debate, and to set the record straight. Nothing about this plan constitutes a government takeover. No one will be coming between you and your doctor. It’s a minor epiphany for some to realize, I know, but our health care system has never truly been “free” as those on the right like to preach. There has ALWAYS been someone between us and our doctors. It’s called an insurance agent, who determines to the cent how much care we are allowed. And the cruel truth of that system is that he does not care how healthy we get, or how much that doctor makes. The insurance agent only cares about how much money he can bring home to his share-holders who pay his salary. The American health care system to this date has been the story of a few profiting on the life or death of the many. It is sick. It is immoral. It is inhumane. Yesterday, we took the first step toward ending this gross system.

Call me a liberal ideologue if you will. Call me a socialist. Call me whatever you will. If being these terms means that I care, then so be it. I embrace it. I write this not as a political hailing of our president and the Democratic Party. I write this because I CARE. Because for over a year, the stories of the thousands who have been murdered by our health care system have haunted me. This is not political. This is LIFE OR DEATH. The Congress and the president have delivered a life-line to 32 million people who did not have one before, and to the rest of us who could have lost ours at any moment to the hands of greed and the selfish monster of Capitalism gone unchecked.

It is time that this nation begins to view health care not as a commodity to gamble and purchase. It’s time we view it as a RIGHT. How can the greatest, wealthiest nation in the world have sat by while its citizens perished at the hands of a system that we had all the power to transform and make right?

Today, we take the first step. If the Tea Party calls for a national push to repeal this bill, then I believe it is time for the Progressive movement in this nation to finally mobilize and take to the streets in response. Let the conservative politicians speak of a “populist revolution.” If they dare try to take away what we have just gained, we will show them what a true revolution looks like. A revolution of the working class, the down-trodden, the people who have been the toilet water in which the wealthy have expelled their feces on since Reagan. If the Tea Party thinks they can take control of this country they are surely mistaken. It is time for we as liberals, as intellectuals, as compassionate souls, to take to the streets and meet them every step of the way. The stakes are high, but in the history of this nation one movement has triumphed time and again. African-Americans, the elderly, women, gays, Hispanics. All of these groups have seen what the Progressive movement in this country has done. We have worked tirelessly for the freedom and equality of ALL. We shall NEVER let the other side tell us that we stand for anything short of absolute freedom under the law.

This past weekend, the Progressive movement has once again championed new freedoms. This time for all of us. This week we have gained the freedom to be healthy.

Let no man dare take that from us.