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THE REAL DEFICIT IN THIS COUNTRY IS NOT ECONOMIC
This entry was posted on 3/1/2010 5:56 PM and is filed under uncategorized.
A brief encounter I had on a social networking site that triggered an over-reaction in me, emotionally, because it brought back a flood of bad memories and distressing feelings I thought I had processed already in a thoroughly grown-up way and put behind me, got me to thinking about something far more crucial that lies behind the headlines you see about all this faux-populist "rage" everybody is supposed to be feeling these days.
It's about something that I think most people are missing. It's about what I see as the real deficit this country is facing right now, and it's an important one if we want to regain the kind of energy that can put us on the path to real recovery, not just economically, but in other, less measurable, ways.
They say that when you have been through a traumatic event, a simple, sometimes small thing, can trigger an outsized emotional response because it can bring back a flood of memories that can plunge you into a real-time re-living of that event. This happens to victims of post traumatic stress disorder all the time, and they don't even have to have severe cases of it when, say, they have been to war.
Ask a combat veteran you know, for instance, if he or she truly enjoys going to Fourth of July fireworks celebrations. The crowds. The noise. The fireworks themselves. Most of them can do it and, especially if they have small children, will do it, but that does not mean that they are comfortable there.
Or, say, someone who has been through a bad divorce; ask them if there is a certain song they hope never to have to hear again. Or an aftershave or perfume that can trigger a flood of memories both good and bad.
In my case, in a discussion over health care, someone commented that, it was wonderful how, "the harder you work, the better life you have."
And I said, "It's not true that the harder you work, the better life you have. I worked very hard for 15 years at a career I loved and I lost it through no fault of my own. In this country right now people are losing their jobs and getting laid off through no fault of theirs, and they can't find jobs. They're losing their health care, and they're scared."
And a conservative young man who is not one of my own "friends," but who has expressed contempt for the "liberal" point of view before in general and mine in particular said this:
"'It is not true that the harder you work the better life you have.' Oh brother, another victim. I need to hear this back story. I would have offed myself if I thought I didn't have any control over my life. Listen to some Tony Robbins Deanie.."
A snarky, snotty remark. A little thing. Not even on one of my blogposts or a political website, but on a social networking site among friends. The thing is, in that particular discussion, I had not been arguing policy with anyone. I'd simply been answering a question someone asked about veteran's benefits because I come from a military family and most people don't understand how the VA works.
And I suppose if I'd been thinking clearly I could have provided him with a back story because I'd written about it previously.
Instead, that one nasty little comment by a conservative young man out of the blue triggered in me such a flood of emotion that I was just smacked down by it; instantly transported back years to the day my literary agent had called to tell me that my publisher, who had paid $75,000 for my previous book, with foreign sales pushing it well past six figures, was now offering a meager $5,000 for my latest, and was renigging on bringing out my next contracted manuscript as a hardcover but was instead bringing it out as a paperback original.
All because Timothy McVeigh bombed the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City--it's a long story.
That phone call had set off a ten-year odyssey of Hurculean struggle as I did everything I could possibly think of to salvage my career--changing agents, changing publishers, changing genres, writing under pseudonyms, writing with partners, without partners, writing fiction and non-fiction--you name it, I did it. Having 10 previously published books did not shield me from collecting rejection after rejection while the creditors called and I filled out student loan forms in a desperate attempt to make sure my kids got to stay in school until they graduated. (They did, but both owed student loans.)
I'll never forget the day I sat down across from my accountant and told him that, for the first time in 20 years of being in the writing business, I had no income to report for that year.
That one quick snap of a few fingerstrokes on a keyboard by that young man made me feel about six inches tall, as if he were laughing at me, making fun of my heartache and pain, belittling my struggle. It made me feel defensive, it made me want to EXPLAIN about what it's like to be over-50 in this job market, to live in a town of less than 10,000 people 100 miles from the nearest shopping mall fer chrissake, with crappy health, (which was one of the reasons I had started to write in the first place, so I could work from a home office), to do the best you can and STILL, it's not good enough.
I wanted to talk to him about the nature of grief, about how when you lose a career that you love so much, it is like a death in the family; it is like a death of SELF, because you lose a part of yourself--you lose who you were when you were at your best. It wasn't just what I did, it was WHO I WAS.
It was a loss I have not been able to recover. I go to Amazon.com now and my books, some of them anyway, go for a penny now. Soon you won't be able to find them at all. If I want to write another one, as people urge me to do, chances are, I will have to invest the money to publish it myself, and take the loss if I can't market and sell it properly--a risk I'm not sure we can afford at this point in our lives.
It's relatively easy to start over when you are in your 20's. Not so much 30 years later.
I'm going into all this detail about my personal life not because I love self-confession but because I believe my story is taking place allover this country now; in factories and computer software companies and newspaper offices and small businesses that have closed up shop. I read somewhere, for instance, that local and regional television news stations are laying off their oldest anchors because they are the most expensive. So you've got 50-something news anchors being laid off from small markets after giving, say, 20 years to them. Many of them have settled in those small towns; they don't necessarily make THAT much money, comparatively.
What now?
There is very real fear out there right now, very real despair, especially if you're over 50.
And yet, in our zeal to be RIGHT in a given argument, in our desire--no matter what side of the political spectrum--we ignore that very real suffering just beneath the surface, and we go for the jugular, man. We want to draw blood.
I read that a man called into Rush Limbaugh's show. He'd broken his wrist and owed thousands in medical bills and didn't know what he was going to do without health insurance.
Rush said, "You shouldn't have broken your wrist."
Funny.
I'll pass that one along to my sister. She's a Republican. A conservative. She'll get a big kick out of that.
OR MAYBE NOT.
See, couple of years ago, on an icy morning, she stepped out her backdoor juggling a brief case and papers on her way to work, slipped and fell and broke her wrist. Had to have emergency surgery. Pins all over the place. A huge Medieval contraption on the thing looked like a torture device.
She showed her veteran's card at the emergency room and they said the VA would cover it, but then later, she got a bill for $64,000.
Well hell. She just shouldn't have broken her wrist.
Could this have something to do with the fact that my sister VOTED FOR OBAMA?
Right-wingers are laughing at the letters Democrats read at the president's health care reform summit, like the one where the woman was so desperate that she was forced to wear her dead sister's dentures because she couldn't afford the dental care to get her own teeth.
Funny.
Here's the thing.
Here's the REAL deficit we've got going in this country right now.
It's a deficit of COMPASSION. It's a deficit of COMMON HUMAN DECENCY.
The right-wing, especially, likes to claim some sort of monopoly on Christianity in this country, like they own Jesus.
But I don't think Jesus would have laughed at the woman forced to wear her dead sister's teeth.
When my sister was crying because she couldn't dress herself or go to the bathroom without help, I don't think Jesus would have mocked her and said, "Maybe you shouldn't have broken your wrist."
When people in this country lose work they love and are good at, and lose the income, and lose health care and fear losing their homes, or worry that their kids will have to quit college, I don't think Jesus would make fun of them for being "victims" and demand "the back story" while sniping that they should "listen to some Tony Robbins."
Maybe I'm too hard on the conservatives here, because I have seen it on our side, too. It's part of the rage and the snark and the snottiness. Everybody so quick to type out something hateful and nasty in order to be clever or right.
There are times I've lost my temper, times I'm sure I've said things I shouldn't have, too.
How much time would it take to type out something like this:
"Well, I'm so sorry about what happened to you. I know that right now a lot of people are hurting, but I must respectfully disagree on what role the government should play in helping to restore their livelihoods to them or keep their kids in college."
Rush?
How hard would it be to say something like,
"Man, that's a tough break on your wrist. It really is, and I'm sorry, but I just don't agree that it's the taxpayer's responsibility to provide ANY health care coverage options for the uninsured."
(I'm not saying I agree with Rush, I'm just saying you don't have to mock the man's pain.)
The thing is, I AM a tough broad, and I have a loving, supportive family. Eventually, I talked to them about the funk I was in and how stupid I felt for feeling stupid. Because they love me, they gave me more sympathy than I deserved, most likely, and they made me feel better.
But it's not me I'm worried about. There are so many people out there who are desperate, afraid, alone, and hurting. And when you lose a job or a home or your status in the community (which matters a lot more to some people than it ever did to me), or your financial well-being--you tend to withdraw.
You are raw, vulnerable. You feel like a failure even if you know, intellectually, that it's not your fault.
Those people who worked at Worldcom and Enron, for example. They knew it was not their fault that they lost their life savings when those businesses went under, but they blamed themselves for somehow not KNOWING. It's human nature. It's natural. And you just feel lousy.
And a silly little trigger on a silly little place like FaceBook or MySpace or Twitter can do a tremendous amount of damage to someone who is in that position.
You don't know, when you're sitting there at your keyboard back-and-forthing with someone.
They could be suicidal. Why would you make fun of their vulnerability? What have you to gain from it?
What have ANY OF US to gain from this constant hatefulness?
It doesn't take any more time to be kind. It doesn't take any time at all to imagine how the other person feels.
The best moment in the president's health care reform summit was when he was talking to Republican Senator John Barrasso from Wyoming, a former surgeon, who was going on about "health care savings accounts" and "catastrophic insurance." The senator kept talking about how cost-effective it was because people wouldn't get health care unless they absolutely had to because it would be too expensive. He even allowed, when prompted, as how that might work for all of congress.
Then Obama asked, "Would you feel that way if you made $40,000 a year?"
I was watching then. It's one thing to read about that, as I have done in several op-eds, but you had to be watching. The senator was literally stymied for an answer, because I daresay, that as a surgeon, it had been so many years since he had earned such a puny amount that he simply could not wrap his mind around the figure in time to give an answer.
Yes, if you earn that amount and you are raising a family with two kids, and you are paying a mortgage and car payments, and both of you are working outside the home--man, you can barely afford a doctor's visit.
Shoot, I can remember a time when our children were babies and my husband was training horses and we didn't have health insurance, the local small-town country doctor would have Kent come out and take care of his cows for him. In trade, he would encourage me to bring my kids by the office if they were sick, no charge. I'll never forget, if they needed antibiotics, he'd have his nurse raid the pharmaceutical samples closet for me so we wouldn't have to buy expensive drugs we couldn't afford.
Where has our empathy gone, as a nation?
Why can we no longer seem able to do that, to put ourselves in one another's shoes?
And while we're at it, maybe we need to be less hard on ourselves, as well. My husband reminded me of that old Eleanor Roosevelt quote, the one that goes, "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."
So yes. I am now withdrawing my consent.
But if we want to see some of the hate rhetoric toned down on the talk shows and blogs, we need to start out small, on our own social networking sites and in our own commentary. We need to be kinder, not just to ourselves, but within our own little worlds.
There is a lot of suffering out there that we don't know about, hidden behind the made-up names and emoticons and yes, even the hostility. Rage, as Psych 101 tells us, is the flip-side of fear.
But we can reach out, in our own way. Simply tone down the quick and easy quip that comes at the expense of someone else's pain. Recognize their humanity; their common soul, their own struggle.
Let them know we've been there.
And we survived.
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