Syndicate and Hague

It’s not the story that grabbed me. The Star Tribune’s reporting has gone down the tubes along with their disappearing staff, but they did the semi-annual “boy, young people don’t have insurance a lot of the time and that sucks!’ piece. It’s here if you want to read it.

The thing that always does it is the damned comments. I don’t even know why I read them.

The sense of entitlement, which the commenters tend to reproach the young folks for, is actually squarely placed on their own shoulders. Saying “I didn’t have it, so I don’t know what you’re whining about,” or, worse, “they need to learn to budget for medical costs” makes my head spin. First off, just because the older of us had things a little harder (I think, for the record, that we sometimes invent how hard things were, but I digress) doesn’t mean that we should wish difficulty on those who follow us.

But secondly, and more importantly, when we talk about lacking insurance and the problems that causes, we’re talking about not having something that is the difference between financial solvency and disaster. You can’t budget for a crisis. You can’t budget for cancer treatments or a heart attack or a car accident.

But let’s get even more simplistic. The whole idea that has been pushed forward of late–of these Healthcare Savings Accounts (where you don’t have insurance, but “save” money that you use and bank up if you don’t use it) is an entirely wrong-headed way to look at public health.

If you look at healthcare as an individual choice of budgeting and responsibility, you’re missing the point. If Person A and Person B each have strep throat and Person A has healthcare and Person B does not, what exactly do you expect to happen?

Person A is going to go to the doctor, get incredibly low cost medication, and get over it.

Person B may go to the doctor, but they may not. If they don’t, Person B can infect Persons C, D, E, F, and G before they decide it’s time to spend the $100 or so on a doctor’s visit. Not even taking into consideration the possibility that there might be complications or secondary problems from the initial infection, Person B just cost our healthcare system money by infecting 5 people who otherwise wouldn’t have been infected.

When I first moved back to NYC as one of those young college grads with no NY health insurance and no full-time job with benefits, I got an ear infection. Because it didn’t hurt too much–just itched and popped, I mean, I knew I had an ear infection–I decided it would probably just go away. This went on for a few weeks. Then one day at work, I moved my jaw and had the most horrible pain in my ear. It was so bad I started to cry.

I finally decided that it was financially time–I’d been putting it off because I had no money and no full-time work–and went into the doctor’s office. I had to take the afternoon off work because the pain was so bad and thankfully got into see the doctor that afternoon.

He looked in my ear and found a severe and grotesque infection in my ear. Ever since then, whenever my allergies act up or I get a cold, there’s about a 30% chance I’m going to get an ear infection. Which means a trip to my doctor. Which means antibiotics. Because the insurance that I had was one with a high deductible, you had to weigh whether or not going to the doctor was worth the $100+ dollars you would inevitably spend.

Having good insurance now, I wouldn’t give it a second thought. I’d just go in. And you know what? Had I had the insurance I have now back then, I would have gone in and saved myself and my insurance companies the money from repeated trips to the doctor for this stupid, stupid ear that gets infected at the drop of a hat.

Prevention/immediate care is the most important part of healthcare. We still just don’t get it. And we’re wasting money on strep throats that end up in the ER and infections that start out simple, but wind up complicated. Wake up. It’s in our financial and moral best interests to find a way to cover everyone.

The NY Times Books section had an article about David Sedaris this week that dwelled on those “memoir issues” that keep coming up. I’ve written about the incredible problems of passing off experience you’ve never had (surviving the Holocaust, being in a gang) as your real, lived experience.

However, when people are fact checking Sedaris’s stories, I just want to roll my eyes.

I think that it’s a no brainer that “many readers, for whatever reason, seem to hold humor writers to looser standards, almost assuming that they will embroider their anecdotes.”

But let’s be honest here, there is a big difference between a writer who claims to have been a victim of the Holocaust and any exaggeration Sedaris’s stories may or may not have.

There’s also the question of memory. Two personal stories of late come to mind on this.

Last week, Jessie and Kate came over for dinner and we were talking about a table in our kitchen that has expanded our counter space. I was telling the (highly entertaining) story of this furniture placement and I said “We were trying to figure out what to do with the table and I thought maybe it could fit there.”

Megan looked at me like I was crazy. “No,” she said, “I’m the one who said we should put it there.

We stared at each other for a moment, each sure that we’d come up with the idea and wondering how the other could remember it differently.

In the end, I think she was right. It was her idea to see if the table could fit.

But this minor, domestic footnote about something that that happened maybe two months ago points to the fluidity of memory and reality. If David Sedaris remembered things differently than they actually happened or if he changed dialogue to get to the heart of the story or if he created some sort of memoirish truth–I think all of those things are fine. Things become enhanced in memory, and writers embellish, but I’m pretty sure we can all remember if we were truthfully in a gang or a concentration camp.

As Sedaris was quoted as saying in the article, “memoir is the last place you’d expect to find the truth,” with the lead up to that statement being that “reality is a subjective, slippery concept, particularly as no two people have the same recollection of the same event.”

This takes me into the other situation of late. It involves lawyers, thankfully nothing to do with me, but it involves lawyers asking me to remember my experiences with a person. We will call this person “X.”

I am not a fan of X. For all kinds of reasons, and I remember quite vividly the scenarios I was telling the lawyer about. But as we talked, and as another person talked, there were other things I remembered as well. Nothing quite as vividly as the story I specifically set out to tell the lawyer, but stories that emerged from the muck of my brain; stories that felt true and intersected with the memories I had, but weren’t ones that I could play the scene out in my head.

It’s like when Megan and I were in New York last week and one of my friends would say “Remember when …” and some memory I had forgotten years ago came back and suddenly whole chains of memory reemerged.

But were those chains of memory accurate? Who knows. If I wrote about them, I would say they were true, but I’m not sure how much of the life story I tell people about could actually stand up to cross-examination–and you can’t be sure of yours either.

As for the lawyer, I avoid the messy sludge of memory there. Just the vivid memory.

I could go on about the lawyer thing. I severely dislike the personal destruction that often seems to be the goal of court stuff. But I also know you have to play the game you’re in and you can’t stay on the high ground if the other side is willing to go dirty.

But, ah, memory…

To those of you who have pointed out to me lately that my blog is lacking in its previous copiousness…you’re right. I have been a bad blogger, which is partly due to a hectic life, partly due to a newfound sleep schedule (seriously, wow!), and to Twitter.

Twitter has served me well during this mess of a Democratic primary and it has also served to mute the flow of blog postings because quick hits that might have wound up in my blog before now sit in 140 character form on my twitter feed. I will consider pulling the feed into the blog here, but that’s not going to happen right away. If you’d like to keep tabs on my quick and dirty comments about random things, you can find me at http://twitter.com/saralovesyou.

I’ve been feeling a little social-networked/Web 2.0′d out lately, as well as a little politicked out, which has resulted in sluggish blogging on my part.

All that said…

It is time for you to stop now, Geraldine Ferraro.

It’s actually time for all Clinton supporters to take a step back, breathe, and realize that it is over. Game. Over. Obama won, fair and square. He out-campaigned, out-finessed, and just plain old out did the Clinton campaign.

But them’s just the numbers. While I’m irritated by the Clinton campaign’s Rovian fuzzy math, I’m downright angry at Ferraro and other feminists of her generation who are not temporarily being, but showing themselves as flat out racist in the course of this election.

I actually heard a few days ago, and I will not repeat my source because I personally would be embarrassed to have anyone know I’d said such a thing, from an older woman who said that “In my opinion, Obama is just another white man.”

And here is a problem among many…the intention of that remark was that Obama is just as sexist and mistreats Clinton based on her gender as any other man with power (read: white man) has. But the implications of that remark run a much more troubling path.

I will be the first to argue that all men–men of color included–have access to ways of power/privilege in ways that women do not. This does not mean that they have it any “easier” or “better,” but that there are avenues of communication that are shared between them as men.

However, it is tragic that the same women who recognize male privilege don’t see the ways white women have access to ways of power/privilege in ways that men of color do not.

I just can’t bring myself to go over all the intricacies of this argument because I am So. Tired. of all of it. And all over these here Interwebs, there are people making headway into the very basic nature of both of my statements. Try Jack and Jill Politics or Feministing for a sample. In posts and comments you’ll see problems. You’ll also see compelling arguments.

I’m firmly situated behind Obama as a candidate, but I see his flaws. There’s a certain “chivalry” to his dealings with Clinton that have struck feminists as being condescending (pulling out her chair for her at the debate, for instance). More troubling about how he deals with women was when he called a reporter “sweetie” when she kept annoying him as TV reporters tend to do.

The women who came before me in particular had to deal with men casting them aside professionally, dismissing them, muting their interactions with endearments, and downplaying their intelligence and decision-making skills. This isn’t relegated to the past: just as we don’t live in a post-racist society, we don’t live in a post-misogyny society.

However, there is no argument for the racism of the white feminists in response to Obama. There just isn’t. He’s a compelling candidate in his own right. A candidate whose speeches inspire and whose ideas are based in a solid liberal philosophy. He’s a candidate who established a community-based campaign fueled by small donations from a broad base. He showed himself to be the better candidate. If he can organize this well in the general election, we will be handing McCain his ass on a platter. It will be beautiful.

Nonetheless. Clinton lost. Obama won. We need to move on from that, but we’ll be dwelling in the racial/gender divide for some time now. I hope it becomes productive.

*Note: I’m not super happy with this post because I’d like to dissect everything more. As I said, however, I’m so freakin tired of all this.