Senator Edward Kennedy (1932-2009)

On August 25th, 2009, Edward Kennedy passed away. Today, in my home state of Massachusetts, we paid our final tribute to a civil rights champion, a public servant like no other.

Senator Kennedy, thank you for all that you've done. As far as health care is concerned, "the dream shall never die."

The Silent, The Sick, The Uninsured

At first, I chose to say nothing about the health care plan in the works on Capitol Hill. I figured I had better not stray outside my area of expertise, especially if I didn't have anything concrete to say on the issue. And as far as the bill's possible effect on me, I'm a student, not to mention still under the age that a parent or caretaker can cover me under his or her plan. I thought I had nothing to lose or gain.

Until, I saw this article.

In the August 24th & 31st issue of Newsweek, Johnathan Alter wrote a column titled "Health Care as a Civil Right" about the political rhetoric of the health care debates. He noted the prominence of the so-called Screamers, who have paraded through media headlines and broadcasts for weeks as they attack their Senators and Representatives at town halls. Fueled by catchy slogans and false rumors about death squads and mandatory government-interference in their health decisions, these mobs have largely dominated the health care debate - in part because supporters of the health-care plan, whether elected or appointed or grassroots, have failed to provide an equal and opposite vocal response.

As Alter puts it: "[I]t's the Party of Sort-of-Maybe-Yes versus the Party of Hell No!" He speculates that health care supporters have "forgotten the stakes - they've forgotten that this is the most important civil-rights bill in a generation."*

Passage would end the shameful era in our nation's history when we discriminated against people for no other reason than that they were sick. A decade from now we will look back in wonder that we once lived in a country where half of all personal bankruptcies were caused by illness, where Americans lacked the basic security of knowing that if they lost their jobs they wouldn't have to sell the house to pay for the medical treatments to keep them alive...

Have we somehow forgotten how important this is - or have we just forgotten how to fight for it? Are we really going to sit on our hands and let an ill-informed, insistent mob of squeaky wheels prevent those who really need health care coverage from getting it?

Those of us who are Democrats were without recourse for eight years. Those of us who believe that forming our Constitution's "more perfect union" requires equality of opportunity have been without recourse for much longer. And for as long as we have been a nation, people have been dying because they can't afford to live, have been losing out because they can only afford to live - all because their fate is left in the hands of those who are just out to "get mine."

If you support health care, if you care whether the uninsured live or die, if you recognize that that could be you one day, then get loud.

Health care is a civil right.

Fight for it.

*Emphasis mine

Related Links:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/realitycheck/

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/opinion/16obama.html?_r=1

Blog of the Month

My good friend Jose Olivarez - who is already one of most prolific young poets I know - has an excellent blog over at http://quetothepasa.wordpress.com/ where he shares his writings, his thoughts on education, and his reflections on creativity. (Two of my favorites can be found here and here.)

Right now, he's in the middle of one of his 30 days / 30 poems challenges. So far this month's work has been excellent. Make sure to check it out!

http://quetothepasa.wordpress.com/

"Let's Give 'Em Something to Talk About..."

Over the past couple of weeks, there have been a lot of national discussions about race, race relations, identity, politics, and anything else this blog could conceivably cover. Quite honestly, I didn't feel a strong urge to write about any of them - in part because I have watched recent conversations degenerate into "he said"-"she said" and pointing fingers in all the wrong places for all the wrong reasons.

Instead, I present you with the type of conversation that I think is an excellent antidote to the above - as usual, Ta-Nehisi Coates knows what he's talking about.

http://ta-nehisicoates.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/07/the_limits_of_our_dialouge_on_race_and_beyond.php

Of Wise Latinas

I've been waiting to talk about Sonia Sotomayor until I had something to say. Yesterday, on Day 2 of her confirmation hearings, I found something worth talking about.


To the Republican Senators:

How dare you.

If I understand your concerns correctly, sirs, you worry that Judge Sotomayor's impartiality may be unduly affected by the perspective of her race and gender, citing her stated belief that “a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life."

Senator Lindsey Graham especially has made a great deal of his belief that had he voiced a sentiment similar in form and content (i.e., that a wise white male with the richness of his experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a Latina who hasn't lived that life) his political career would be over, by which I believe he means that he would have been perceived as racist. By this logic, he perceives Judge Sotomayor's statement as a racist one.

I won't touch the accusations of racism, implied or otherwise. Honestly, I see where both sides are coming from. Instead, I want to look the following exchange between Senator Graham and Judge Sotomayor - all emphases, mine:

SEN. GRAHAM: ...Let's talk about the wise Latino (sic) comment yet again...

...the one thing that I've tried to impress upon you, through jokes and being serious, is the consequences of these words in the world in which we live in. You know, we're talking about putting you on the Supreme Court and judging your fellow citizens. And one of the things that I need to be assured of is that you understand the world as it pretty much really is.

This is key. Note that here Senator Graham asserts (1) that there is an objective reality, and (2) that we, as rational, human individuals, are capable of understanding that objective reality.

And later:

SEN. GRAHAM: All right. "I would hope that a wise Latina woman, with the richness of her experience, would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male."

And the only reason I keep talking about this is that I'm in politics, and you got to watch what you say, because, one, you don't want to offend people you're trying to represent -- but do you understand, ma'am, that if I had said anything like that, and my reasoning was that I'm trying to inspire somebody, they would have had my head? Do you understand that?

JUDGE SOTOMAYOR: I do understand how those words could be taken that way, particularly if read in isolation.

SEN. GRAHAM: Well, I don't know how else you could take it. If Lyndsey Graham said that I will make a better senator than X because of -- my experience as a Caucasian male makes me better able to represent the people of South Carolina, and my opponent was a minority, it would make national news, and it should.

Having said that, I am not going to judge you by that one statement. I just hope you'll appreciate the world in which we live in, that you can say those things meaning to inspire somebody and still have a chance to get on the Supreme Court. Others could not remotely come close to that statement and survive. Whether that's right or wrong, I think that's a fact.

Does that make sense to you?

JUDGE SOTOMAYOR: It does. And I would hope that we come in America to the place where we can look at a statement that could be misunderstood and consider it in the context of the person's life and the work they have done...

Graham repeatedly points to political restraints that would prevent him from talking about his judgement as better because of his race and gender. But he talks about these things not as a speculative hypothetical, but as fact - fact in an objective reality that he (and presumably every human being) understands, that Sotomayer must understand. And if Sotomayer does not concede this, does not understand the world as Graham's hypothetical objective everyman does, then her viewpoint is invalid. It cannot possibly be based in any kind of reality because only one reality exists.

And if you, or I, or Sonia Sotomayor has a different perspective than the hypothetical objective, then we are not living in the real world.

There's just one BIG problem with that: The objective can't see or adjust for context.

Suppose that in the objective reality, public safety is the number one priority of the government. And the government has decreed that citizens will be randomly searched. Can objective reality account for the fact that the mind of a security person is not a machine and cannot be totally random? And even if the government used a machine to facilitate totally random selection, could objective reality account for the undoubtedly different perspectives of searcher and searchee; the former mindful of possible violence or danger, the latter innocent but detained without explicit consent to the objective morality that requires his detention.

Look, I'm a History and Literature major. More importantly, I was raised by parents who taught me to question the merit and meaning of everything from classic Disney movies to Thanksgiving. Even before I enrolled in college, objective reality didn't exist for me. I don't buy it. The person I am, the life I have lived makes me see the world differently - not better or worse, just differently. Who are you to tell me I am wrong?

Who are you, Senators, to tell her she is wrong? To tell people the world over "Nope, sorry - just one way of seeing things here! Don't trust your own eyes! Why would you? I'm the objective, and I say everything's fine..."

Another Republican, Senator Jon Kyl commented on Sotomayor's past speeches on race, identity, and their effects on legal perspective:

SEN. KYL: ...The question, though, is whether you leave them with the impression that it's good to make different decisions because of their ethnicity or gender. And it strikes me that you could've easily said here, now, of course, blind Lady Justice doesn't permit us to base decisions in cases on our ethnicity or gender. We should strive very hard to set those aside when we can.

Justice has never been blind, ladies and gentlemen - but maybe she has been unjustly blindfolded.

EDIT (7/18/09):
A relevant (and well-argued) column from Frank Rich over at the New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/opinion/19rich.html?ref=opinion

I'm not sure that I agree with his implication that this changing of the tide is inevitable, but otherwise - right on the money.

Edit (7/31/09):
My olders and betters say what I was trying to say. Melissa Harris-Lacewell over at The Nation:

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/452587/sotomayor_and_the_politics_of_public_humiliation