Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/author/craigwiesner/page/9/)
As a small business owner, and one of the millions of people who had individual health coverage instead of a group plan, one of the things I dreaded most was any letter from Blue Cross. Other than my monthly bills, any time I saw their logo on an envelope, I would break out in a sweat. Why? Because every year for over a decade, any letter I got from them was probably telling me that my rates were going up. 10%, 12%, 24% …
A dear friend of mine died. Just before Christmas 2009, she’d learned that she had lung cancer. Back before the DotCom Bust of 2000, she’d had a good job with great benefits, just like me. She lost that job, like countless others, and after a year or so, COBRA ran out. She had a pre-existing condition and even if an insurance company would take her on, the monthly costs would have been staggering.
I don’t use my cell phone very much. Whenever I visit my father, though, and he is in a pretty good mental space, I love to grab it and call someone back east to whom he hasn’t spoken for a while so that they can chat. Despite Dad’s progressive dementia, he pulls it together for those calls and truly lights up when he hears the voices of people he loves so much. This afternoon, as the phone vibrated to life, I noticed that I had a voicemail….. strange…….
My friend, the Rev. Geoff Browning is a campus minister at Stanford University and a peacemaking advocate in the Presbyterian Church’s San Jose Presbytery. He wrote this essay and has given me permission to share it with Tikkun Daily visitors. The title should give you a guess as to where Geoff is going with this one (don’t fall asleep while reading it or you’ll get three visitors……)
Health Care for All? Bah Humbug! With every passing week, the debate over health care reform is sounding more and more like something out of a Dickens novel.
This was my father’s second Christmas season living in his “board and care” home. Jocelyn, the amazing woman who runs this and several other houses had arranged for children from her church to come to the house and sing carols for the residents and their families. If you ever wondered whether such small acts of kindness make a difference, stop wondering. They do. My father has a condition known as “Lewy Body Dementia” which has Parkinsons symptoms plus intense hallucinations, sleep-walking / acting out dreams physically, and an overall decline in cognition.
As I channel-surfed from Green 960 (Air America) to Hot Talk 560 in the car this morning, I stopped on 560 long enough to listen to Rush Limbaugh ranting about the climate change “hoax” he says we’ve all been duped by and the tobacco industry’s lies way back when claiming that there was no proof that smoking caused cancer. I found it strange that Rush was connecting the two together, and wondered if he realized that the folks that lied about smoking back in the day happen to be the same folks that have been lying about global warming. Back when my mother was smoking three packs a day, doctors and scientists started to connect the dots between smoking and cancer. Tobacco companies hired their own scientists to refute the evidence. Tobacco industry executives even testified before Congress that there was no proven connection between cancer and smoking.
There weren’t very many American Jews stationed at Dachau during the war crimes trials after the camp had been liberated. Odd duty, to say the least for a Jew, guarding German officers who had tortured and killed so many Jews, escorting these Nazi officers from their cells to the courtrooms, listening to the testimony about their crimes. My father had landed in France on the day the Nazis were defeated, and traveled from there to Dachau, seeing the destroyed remains of Europe, rubble everywhere, bodies awaiting burial, the walking wounded wandering the streets. Then the nightmares of the holocaust, on the very ground where some of the worst atrocities were committed, were poured out daily in the courtrooms as the dust of death continued to blow through the air. My father knew of only one other Jewish-American soldier there at Dachau.
What if the central Afghan government suddenly found itself with 100,000 Afghan troops and police officers, freshly trained, fully equipped, and ready to help protect an equally massive surge of rebuilding and other infrastructure projects that would further employ a few hundred thousand more Afghans? Could that be the change we were hoping for? Is it possible? To quote JP from the film Angels in the Outfield, it could happen! ADDITION: Rabbi Michael Lerner has made the Tikkun/NSP position on the Afghan war very clear in the latest issue of Tikkun (click here to read his editorial on the subject).
The worship committee at First Presbyterian Church Palo Alto wanted to try something new….. They asked four folks in the congregation to get together and plan one worship service each month for three months. This would help the staff by giving them a week when they could concentrate on other ministry work and could also add a bit of new spice to the Sunday worship experience. I’m on that little team (I’m a good Jewbyterian*) and last Sunday was our first crack at planning and carrying out worship. The theme for worship was being a servant.
As we drove into the parking lot at the high school in Palo Alto Sunday evening, we were greeted by a group of about two dozen protesters, waving American and Israeli flags, and holding signs. One woman moved her sign so that I could see it clearly as I drove past her… “If you hate America so much, why don’t you just leave?” Further down the line a man pushed his sign towards my window emblazoned with the horrific symbol of Nazi Germany, the Swastika. What was the message these people were trying to send?