Something Hurts Around Here

Our President ™ w says that the economy is looking up, is growing and that his so-called tax relief plans have been successful. Our nation is on it’s way out of the recession and into some sunlit hinterland of eternal happiness; a conservative nirvana, thanks to the ministrations of Compassionate Conservativism ™ and popular war.

Pondering this information as I sit down late on a Tuesday evening... I have recently had an appendectomy and the resultant abdominal distress has me up viewing the late-night banality of Jay Leno. His genial jibes and the hoots of the audience would bore me to the point of sleep if it were not for the Arianna Huffington book in my hands.

Reading of people across the nation bound by poverty, I wonder if Bush has any concept of real life at all when he resounds with glee about our nation’s health. Health. I feel a wave of guilt pour over me for my sorrow at the soreness of my surgical wound. I should feel that as a blessing rather than the opposite- at least I have the good fortune to have insurance to be able to receive the health care necessary to solve my problems. I have a television on which to view Leno, no matter how lame he is, and a recliner on which to rest while doing so. I was able to afford a copy of said book.

“Fanatics and Fools” proves to me that I backed the correct candidate during the Democratic Primaries. It is a shame that he was not the man selected to represent the party due to McAuliffe’s purposely truncated primary season. Reading through Ms. Huffington’s prescription for the ideals a candidate should possess, I think of John Edwards- alpha male, appealing to voters, heroic, decisive and possessed of the ever elusive BIG vision.

The author seems to see these qualities in John Kerry. I must confess I have seen traces of them but little evidence that he in any way is blessed with the kind of superb confidence and authority Edwards exhibited, albeit too late to matter. She writes of “Portraits of Struggle,” short bios of everyday Americans who aren’t making it in Bush’s America, in fact people he doesn’t even recognize exist. I read these stories and think of one close to home.

My wife Carla and I are very concerned about her sister whom lives in another state. She works for Wal-Mart, on a night shift, for what some would think decent pay for a woman with only a GED. Has four children, husband left them and wants desperately to go to college and break away from the life in which she feels trapped.

Health care is a major concern- one of her children is diabetic and suffers from complications. She reluctantly went on welfare after the deadbeat father ran- no child support of course. She has asked Wal-Mart for a transfer to another shift- any other shift- at the same pay rate so she can better her condition. Of course, they know when they have a person locked in a chokehold. They will transfer her, they say, but they will have to cut her pay to do so.

With four young children, two below public school age, she has no means to escape from the trap which has snared her family. Conservatives would chide her for receiving a handout and not pulling herself up by the proverbial bootstraps. To them she is part of the problem. And that is true- she and her children are part of the problem- just not by any means the same problem about which the Bush voters talk. Her story personifies the message of “Two Americas” to me in a way not even John Edwards can. She is living it.

By the way- my sister-in-law thinks Bush is the greatest. Can’t get enough of him. A shame no other candidate is around who can convince her otherwise.

MBT