On my travels, I was with old friends from years ago – Republican friends, all physicians. We had a wonderful time travelling through the Black Hills of South Dakota. Politics just didn’t come up. I suspect that friendship transcends politics sometimes. In many ways, I would’ve liked to hear what they thought about the last eight months, but I didn’t bring it up either. I think there was a covenant not to talk about things that might divide us – and I was as interested in keeping that covenant as they were.
One friend’s wife did comment, "the Civil Rights Movement backfired and created people with a sense of entitlement." Even that didn’t bother me. She sent four kids to public schools in a place where that was hard to do. She worked for Habitat for years. She did her part. She can say whatever she wants to say. She earned the right.
But where we traveled in South Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska are very white places, very Republican places:
And the people we encountered along the way were elder-hostel types or locals. The few conversations we were in or heard were depressing. The McCain/Palin stickers were still on the cars, and most of the public tv’s were tuned to Fox News unless I changed them. I guess it wasn’t too different from the state of affairs here in the South.
When I look at the graphs on the right, what I see is a remarkable early recovery from a financial meltdown that I wasn’t sure we would recover from. And my reading of the proposed Health Care Reform is that it’s what we need. The Health Care Industry is killing us, and needs to be brought under control. Meanwhile, much of the country is without Medical coverage. When I got home, our cleaning lady was sick. She needs some lab work before treating her for what’s wrong, and she can’t get the lab work from the free clinic for a month, s
o I sent her off to a private lab on my nickle. I don’t mind, but it’s not the way things ought to work.
A lot has happened in our family in the past year. Some good and some really bad. After dinner the other night I decided to go for a bike ride and discovered I had a flat tire so I just took a walk instead. I have been feeling a little depressed
I don’t know what happened to my computer but it just sent my comment before I could finish it. Anyway what I was trying to write was I met a nice lady on my walk and we started talking about things going on in the country and politics came into it. She said she was an independent and that she didn’t vote for Obama but she did vote for Gore in 2000. She also said she was scared about where the country was headed and I didn’t quite know what point she was getting at until she said that Obama’s cabinet was stocked with bad people and she didn’t want health care touched and socialism rammed down our throats. She then told me she watches Beck, Hannity and she listens to Rush too. She seemed like an intelligent, kind person totally rational but I couldn’t get over how she decided Fox news was the news to watch. I live in the blue state of New Jersey and most of us voted for President Obama. The rights message seems to be taking a serious hold on good people. My talk with this nice lady didn’t make me feel any less depressed. I don’t know how we can help people like her understand that the insurance industry is loving the messages that Foxnews and others are lying about to protect their profit. I did ask her if she would want Social Security and Medicare removed and she said no. I told her that they were gov’t programs and I don’t know if what I said got through to her.