"are broken."
It's a line from "Hugo," Scorsese's fairy tale-like homage to film pioneer Georges Méliès, one of this year's Oscar nominated films.
[It's Oscar season, and we as dutiful Lalaland consumers generally try to see them all. We've seen all but a couple of the titles mentioned in major categories. "Hugo" was one we were missing. Interestingly, as the quote my title suggests, it is something of a moral tale.
People who lose their purpose are broken.
The way it shows up in the film started me to thinking about the idea differently than I might have seeing it stand on the page alone. If one does the kind of organization work I have done for my career, or if you participate in personal development work, or read any number of self-help guru's, finding out about your purpose is a kind of self-actualization holy grail.
The first thing my grad students read for the course I teach is an article about core values and core purpose.
Too often it seems to me that the articulation of a purpose becomes about a want or desire, rather than as a reason for being, which is what the context of "Hugo" sets for the line. How many earnest human potentialees chanted purposes that had to do with possessions or status? It's that evidence of being among the chosen thing that I wrote about in one of my entries on religion. In "Hugo" the metaphor is the machine where every part has a purpose--a reason to exist.
The equivalent corporate distortion in numerous mission/vision creating exercises is the spinning out of a statement that is a best aspirational, but at worst a self-con that eschews the actual demonstrated behavior in favor of a tell em what they want to hear marketing pitch. The article my students read talks about the need to "discover" what the values and purpose are.
Reading back over what I have just written, I'm wondering whether I haven't just reorganized the deck chairs in the conversation about determinism and free will.
I get that "declaration" has power. That one could find purpose by committing to purpose. And on the other side, I can see clearly that if I do not discover purpose that is true to who I am... who I think I am... who... ??? Maybe I don't see so clearly after all.
Still, it seems to me that a value around authenticity and truth to self is sorely needed. That not having a purpose somehow bigger than who you are means something is broken. We are getting to watch so many multiple examples of brokenness in our public "leaders" that when one shows up who is authentic and real like Gabby Giffords, we seem to know it instantly.
Shame it also seems that we have to stamp these instances out as quickly as we can.
Monday, January 30, 2012
Saturday, January 28, 2012
We Have Met the Enemy...
And he are us.
I was never a huge Pogo fan, but I do kinda miss him. Walt Kelly's weird wisdom was a bit more universal than Dilbert.
I suspect it is a natural risk of blogging (maybe of being human) but I worry a little about repeating myself. I'm pretty sure I have mentioned the "we all get in our own way" aspect of this idea at least once. If I didn't cite Jerry Harvey's "How Come When I Get Stabbed in the Back My Fingerprints are Always on the Knife?" I should have. Jerry is a mensch, a Texas mensch, but a mensch.
I've also had the bit about the "organ recital" and that's about where I am going today, but different.
The alternative title for this could have been "Not for Sissies."
Over the last few weeks I have had a series of minor but annoying and somewhat painful battles with my body. I won't bore your with the details. It would be TMI anyway. But here's the thing. Pretty much like most people, I spent a lot of my life taking my body for granted. I wasn't an athlete so I didn't attend to its fitness or development. If it did what I needed it to do, fine. If it couldn't (as in bench press x hundred pounds or run a marathon), so be it.
I've never been really well coordinated. I was the kid who got relegated to right field. But I was not without my physical skills. I was a pretty decent instinctive wing shot, which I discovered duck hunting and in that weird 80s aberration, paintball. I've become a reasonably competent caster when fly fishing. I could do a hard day of physical work when I needed to.
But it is true that I pretty much ignored my body. Even when arthritis struck in my late twenties and impacted my fingers, for the most part I simply compensated and moved on. Now I suppose you could argue that if I had paid more attention then, that I'd have less to complain about now. Possible.
I've been pretty lucky. My teeth needed a lot of help in my late teens and twenties because they had been sorely neglected earlier due the family circumstances. There's the arthritis. I had a go around with diverticulitis in my early forties that only bothers me every half dozen years or so. A couple of hernia repairs, the prostate cancer, and some skin things that needed handling. It doesn't feel like all that much and more in the realm of normal wear and tear than anything else. The most recent medical thing was getting cataract surgery and in the process having my vision restored to what it was twenty-five years ago with no more astigmatism. That feels like a miracle.
What's got my attention now are the small annoyances. The pains that pop up with no obvious cause that persist enough to see the doc or make a visit to the chiropractor. The colds that seem to take forever to go away. [I've ducked this last for a while since I no longer commute to the office Petri dish where one gets exposed to the germ pool that includes young children via their parents.] The getting up three and four times a night. The profusion of slightly alarming but, it turns out, benign skin things that show up in new and different places all the time. The feeling that things don't really want to bend the way they used to when I get up in the morning. The inability to shed that extra fifteen pounds that I seem to have acquired in the last ten years not matter how hard I try--we were working out a nominal three days a week, missing once in a while, now we are planning every morning that we don't have a conflict.
It's all a reminder that the systems are slowly failing, not badly yet, but inevitably like the juice draining out of a battery.
I had a dream recently which involved losing my mobility to the point where I needed a walker. Now a cane I think I could handle, but in the dream I seem to have given serious thought to suicide as an alternative to the walker.
I wish the systems would all run reasonably well for however long I have got and then just fail all at once. This micrometer by micrometer decline has little appeal.
So maybe my body seems like my enemy now because I wasn't its friend back in the time I could have made a difference, and maybe not. I suppose it is what it is.
None of this is meant to take anything away from those of you who have had a major physical crisis and are doing what you need to do to fight your way back. I know there are a couple reading this and I have nothing but the highest regard for the way you are taking on the challenges.
I'm just bitching. Put it to the tune of "It's Not Easy Being Green."
I was never a huge Pogo fan, but I do kinda miss him. Walt Kelly's weird wisdom was a bit more universal than Dilbert.
I suspect it is a natural risk of blogging (maybe of being human) but I worry a little about repeating myself. I'm pretty sure I have mentioned the "we all get in our own way" aspect of this idea at least once. If I didn't cite Jerry Harvey's "How Come When I Get Stabbed in the Back My Fingerprints are Always on the Knife?" I should have. Jerry is a mensch, a Texas mensch, but a mensch.
I've also had the bit about the "organ recital" and that's about where I am going today, but different.
The alternative title for this could have been "Not for Sissies."
Over the last few weeks I have had a series of minor but annoying and somewhat painful battles with my body. I won't bore your with the details. It would be TMI anyway. But here's the thing. Pretty much like most people, I spent a lot of my life taking my body for granted. I wasn't an athlete so I didn't attend to its fitness or development. If it did what I needed it to do, fine. If it couldn't (as in bench press x hundred pounds or run a marathon), so be it.
I've never been really well coordinated. I was the kid who got relegated to right field. But I was not without my physical skills. I was a pretty decent instinctive wing shot, which I discovered duck hunting and in that weird 80s aberration, paintball. I've become a reasonably competent caster when fly fishing. I could do a hard day of physical work when I needed to.
But it is true that I pretty much ignored my body. Even when arthritis struck in my late twenties and impacted my fingers, for the most part I simply compensated and moved on. Now I suppose you could argue that if I had paid more attention then, that I'd have less to complain about now. Possible.
I've been pretty lucky. My teeth needed a lot of help in my late teens and twenties because they had been sorely neglected earlier due the family circumstances. There's the arthritis. I had a go around with diverticulitis in my early forties that only bothers me every half dozen years or so. A couple of hernia repairs, the prostate cancer, and some skin things that needed handling. It doesn't feel like all that much and more in the realm of normal wear and tear than anything else. The most recent medical thing was getting cataract surgery and in the process having my vision restored to what it was twenty-five years ago with no more astigmatism. That feels like a miracle.
What's got my attention now are the small annoyances. The pains that pop up with no obvious cause that persist enough to see the doc or make a visit to the chiropractor. The colds that seem to take forever to go away. [I've ducked this last for a while since I no longer commute to the office Petri dish where one gets exposed to the germ pool that includes young children via their parents.] The getting up three and four times a night. The profusion of slightly alarming but, it turns out, benign skin things that show up in new and different places all the time. The feeling that things don't really want to bend the way they used to when I get up in the morning. The inability to shed that extra fifteen pounds that I seem to have acquired in the last ten years not matter how hard I try--we were working out a nominal three days a week, missing once in a while, now we are planning every morning that we don't have a conflict.
It's all a reminder that the systems are slowly failing, not badly yet, but inevitably like the juice draining out of a battery.
I had a dream recently which involved losing my mobility to the point where I needed a walker. Now a cane I think I could handle, but in the dream I seem to have given serious thought to suicide as an alternative to the walker.
I wish the systems would all run reasonably well for however long I have got and then just fail all at once. This micrometer by micrometer decline has little appeal.
So maybe my body seems like my enemy now because I wasn't its friend back in the time I could have made a difference, and maybe not. I suppose it is what it is.
None of this is meant to take anything away from those of you who have had a major physical crisis and are doing what you need to do to fight your way back. I know there are a couple reading this and I have nothing but the highest regard for the way you are taking on the challenges.
I'm just bitching. Put it to the tune of "It's Not Easy Being Green."
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
A Snowflake Falls in Seattle
Having handled a couple dozen New England winters as a driver, including some rather ferocious New Hampshire ones, I find Seattle's relationship to snow amusing and bemusing.
One of the reasons I came here was to escape the intensity of New England winters. This city can often go a couple of years without appreciable snowfall, though every so often we have a winter with a couple of severe back-to-back storms.
This seems to have a couple of different effects. First, we forget that we can have bad weather and so don't make much of it when it threatens unless we have had a bad storm that we handled badly within the last couple of years. [BTW--When I moved here in the early nineties the city had a grand total of 9 snowplows!] When that happens even the threat of minor snowfall throws the local news media into a tizzy one might expect due an approaching typhoon or tsunami.
There's a reason for it. We don't know how to handle snow. Even I notice that, unpracticed, my winter driving skills have diminished. I can remember thinking nothing of venturing out onto an interstate to go 20 miles to town when successive storms had left a two inch layer of frozen slush topped with 3 or 4 inches of new snowfall. I had studded snow tires, but still. I used to routinely drive a 90 mile roundtrip on a hilly and windy two lane highway to teach a night class after my day job. No sweat, even the night I did a lazy 360 about halfway home.
With the immanent loss of traction, Seattle drivers begin to panic. They start doing things like crowding through intersections and blocking them, presumably because they are afraid they won't get where they are going otherwise. Of course that ends up jamming up things for everyone else. Every storm features abandoned cars on one long hill on the interstate because of the ineptness or unpreparedness of other drivers making it impossible to make the hill, and the abandoned cars further block the route.
I left work one night a couple of years ago as flakes were just beginning to fall, to make the 2.7 mile trip to my house. I was driving my wife's VW Bug--not the best snow car ever. The streets were bare as I pulled out of the lot.
[Sidebar--Seattle is subject more than most places to microclimates where things can be very different on the other side of a hill. It is also hillier than most places that get much snow.]
The first half of my trip was up a long hill with 6 (synchronized) traffic lights along its length. That actually went fairly well until close to the top the street was locked up for 10 to 15 minutes by aforementioned panicked intersection blockers. Got by that and I figured I was home free even though the streets were now well whitened. There was one easy downhill and then another not very steep up hill and then I'd be on my street and close to home.
As I came down the hill and looked ahead I saw three buses stalled out and slightly cockeyed on the ride side of the street but there was space on the left. No problem. Just keep my speed after the slightly inconvenient stop sign and I could get around them to the left... until a transit service truck came down the hill and blocked the lane!
What followed was a lengthy tour of the neighborhood as I zigzagged through, my route being dictated by spinouts. I would not even try a street where someone was torquing their wheels into spins. As I started down one of the last ones I watched an SUV do a 180 before sliding out of my way. I could take a little side street and had one last little left uphill to the block where I lived. I proceeded at a deliberate pace as I turned left to find the 40 feet of street had adults sliding around on cardboard boxes. If I slowed or stopped I'd be walking the rest of the way. Fortunately they were smart enough to get out of the way. The trip had taken just a little less than 90 minutes. There might have been an inch of snow by then.
Almost all of the problems we have with snow tend to come from the general inability to drive in it, compounded by the inclines. We also have that other feature of inclement driving in modern times--the "bullet-proof" SUV driver, who doesn't realize that while he may be able to "go" better than other vehicles, he will have as much trouble as they do stopping, or maybe more. Not a storm happens that you don't see a number of them ditched by the side of the road.
So tomorrow is supposed to bring in a lulu. We're getting ready to hunker down. My wife will be able to make it home because the bus routes to here are pretty flat, unlike our old place where one year a couple of storms in succession isolated us at the top of the hill from any transit.
One of the reasons I came here was to escape the intensity of New England winters. This city can often go a couple of years without appreciable snowfall, though every so often we have a winter with a couple of severe back-to-back storms.
This seems to have a couple of different effects. First, we forget that we can have bad weather and so don't make much of it when it threatens unless we have had a bad storm that we handled badly within the last couple of years. [BTW--When I moved here in the early nineties the city had a grand total of 9 snowplows!] When that happens even the threat of minor snowfall throws the local news media into a tizzy one might expect due an approaching typhoon or tsunami.
There's a reason for it. We don't know how to handle snow. Even I notice that, unpracticed, my winter driving skills have diminished. I can remember thinking nothing of venturing out onto an interstate to go 20 miles to town when successive storms had left a two inch layer of frozen slush topped with 3 or 4 inches of new snowfall. I had studded snow tires, but still. I used to routinely drive a 90 mile roundtrip on a hilly and windy two lane highway to teach a night class after my day job. No sweat, even the night I did a lazy 360 about halfway home.
With the immanent loss of traction, Seattle drivers begin to panic. They start doing things like crowding through intersections and blocking them, presumably because they are afraid they won't get where they are going otherwise. Of course that ends up jamming up things for everyone else. Every storm features abandoned cars on one long hill on the interstate because of the ineptness or unpreparedness of other drivers making it impossible to make the hill, and the abandoned cars further block the route.
I left work one night a couple of years ago as flakes were just beginning to fall, to make the 2.7 mile trip to my house. I was driving my wife's VW Bug--not the best snow car ever. The streets were bare as I pulled out of the lot.
[Sidebar--Seattle is subject more than most places to microclimates where things can be very different on the other side of a hill. It is also hillier than most places that get much snow.]
The first half of my trip was up a long hill with 6 (synchronized) traffic lights along its length. That actually went fairly well until close to the top the street was locked up for 10 to 15 minutes by aforementioned panicked intersection blockers. Got by that and I figured I was home free even though the streets were now well whitened. There was one easy downhill and then another not very steep up hill and then I'd be on my street and close to home.
As I came down the hill and looked ahead I saw three buses stalled out and slightly cockeyed on the ride side of the street but there was space on the left. No problem. Just keep my speed after the slightly inconvenient stop sign and I could get around them to the left... until a transit service truck came down the hill and blocked the lane!
What followed was a lengthy tour of the neighborhood as I zigzagged through, my route being dictated by spinouts. I would not even try a street where someone was torquing their wheels into spins. As I started down one of the last ones I watched an SUV do a 180 before sliding out of my way. I could take a little side street and had one last little left uphill to the block where I lived. I proceeded at a deliberate pace as I turned left to find the 40 feet of street had adults sliding around on cardboard boxes. If I slowed or stopped I'd be walking the rest of the way. Fortunately they were smart enough to get out of the way. The trip had taken just a little less than 90 minutes. There might have been an inch of snow by then.
Almost all of the problems we have with snow tend to come from the general inability to drive in it, compounded by the inclines. We also have that other feature of inclement driving in modern times--the "bullet-proof" SUV driver, who doesn't realize that while he may be able to "go" better than other vehicles, he will have as much trouble as they do stopping, or maybe more. Not a storm happens that you don't see a number of them ditched by the side of the road.
So tomorrow is supposed to bring in a lulu. We're getting ready to hunker down. My wife will be able to make it home because the bus routes to here are pretty flat, unlike our old place where one year a couple of storms in succession isolated us at the top of the hill from any transit.
Monday, January 16, 2012
For the Old Man--Part Two
In 1955 I visited my father a couple of times in New York, where he had an apartment. He had changed jobs again. He'd lost one in the early fifties in an explosion with his boss that ended up with us moving from Long Island to Connecticut. Not sure how the next one ended. My visits in New York inevitably included a lot of time in his local bar. Never spending any time in bars myself, I'm not sure how that worked but it seems to have been his only social outlet as an adult.
From 1956 to 1958, when I was sent to live with him, I saw him once. He had moved to Cincinnati, Ohio for a job. It was said at least once that the move had something to do with being closer to where we lived with Mother in Kentucky, but I think it was just where he could get a job. The visit he made to us occurred after my mother had broken her leg driving her car into a building during a blackout which later on proved to have been caused by a brain tumor. He arrived with his roommate, whom I later learned to be his lover.
As near as I can piece together, he began the relationship shortly after moving to Ohio, and it probably was to his good fortune as he became quite ill with some obscure and supposedly incurable pulmonary disease and Don supported him for the better part of that time. After treatment in a drug trial that was successful he could not find work and was unemployed when I came to live with him in 1958. He pieced together some things like getting their rent covered by being the building superintendant and handyman for their apartment building. He had always been good with tools and his hands. He also worked as a waiter in a bar I later came to understand was a gay bar.
I have letters from that period that he wrote to my mother. Her brother, George, gave them to me during a visit in the 1980s. The letters are disturbing to read knowing the context. There is a yearning in the earlier ones to get back together with excuses about why no child support was forthcoming regarding the battles going on in his family about their father's will. [Frank ended up with pretty much everything.] Until the last one, they are addressed to "Mrs. Edgar D. W---."
In Cincinnati Edgar lived in the heart of the "Bohemian" community. Translate that to "Gay." The building we were in had at least two other gay couples in the eight apartments. Among his "best friends" were a lesbian couple who lived a block away and bred Dachshunds. The people he and Don had over for parties in our two room space were mostly gay. Many were teachers and all were very straight behaving and appearing. There were some who could see the damage being done to me who reached out and helped or encouraged me. You reading this should not make assumptions that anything inappropriate happened. More decent and caring adults never lived than a couple of these people.
Keep in mind that none of this was ever talked about to me. There was no mention of it. Not mentioned, it was supposedly unknown, but I knew.
When, after my mother's death he remarried for a very short time, it was as if the other side of him didn't exist again. I have no idea what it must have been like for him, nor what his sexuality actually was. He has to have been somewhere toward the same sex orientation end of the Kinsey scale, but at some level was bisexual. It is almost as if he wanted to have relationships with women (his mother???) but found them problematical and when there was no woman in his life it was easier with men.
He had two fairly long-term relationships with men that I knew about. The first was Don from sometime in 1956 to 1960 and then again from 1961-62. The time in the middle was for the six months or so he was with the woman who was his second wife. Sometime in the mid sixties, probably 1964, he started living with the man who he stayed with until he died in the early seventies. It was a symbiotic relationship. Edgar was severely disabled at this point and got disability payments. He provided the support and the money for booze, and his partner-lover-roommate-parasite took care of him most of the time.
Life in secret has to have been brutal. As nasty as it can get for homosexual people now, the days of the deep closet must have taken a regular toll. The alcohol must have served as both a kind of numbing self-medication and a loosener of inhibition to allow dealing with the internal mental conflicts. The social venue for most minorities in our society from the Irish and Italian immigrants of the 1800s and early 1900s was the saloon. No accident that the gay bar is the same kind of venue.
Edgar got a job in Boston in early 1959. He and Don moved in February and I followed at the end of the school year, thanks to the generosity of a (probably gay) teacher. My mother died after a long decline in May of 1960, and my sister and brother came to live with my father sometime in the fall, presumably after Don had moved out. I had left home that summer.
The marriage followed in January of 1961 and by February my father was in a VA Hospital being treated for nerve damage in his wrists and the new ex was foster parent to my siblings. I was engaged in surviving, having lost a job, so I was pretty out of touch.
He was in and out of the hospital several times in the next couple of years. He had surgery to fuse his spine. His left hand curled up uselessly. At my wedding in November 1963 he was in a wheelchair. I visited him a few times, at one point in 1962 suggesting that we get an apartment together, but what I found was not to his liking because he'd have to leave "his" bar. [BTW, many of "his" bars had not been gay bars.] Probably just as well.
In the long decline over the next eight years or so I avoided contacts as much as I could. His "roommate" left him drunk and helpless once and we had had to take Edgar in. The second time it happened we refused and his sister had to step in. The last time I saw him was in 1965 or 1966 when we had put him in a care facility after the first meltdown. He checked himself out and was back to the "roommate" after a couple of weeks. The next time I found a lawyer who did a pro bono conservatorship. The lawyer was the one who called me to tell me he was dying. I'm thinking it was 1972, but it could have been 73 or 74.
So that's a life. I certainly wouldn't exchange mine for it, as tough as mine has been at times. A therapist once suggested to me that someone in my life had to teach me about love and it was not likely my mother. I think she was right. And I think the way it came out in his life was a yearning to be loved, to have what he never could seem to get from his family or from the women in his life. Sad.
From 1956 to 1958, when I was sent to live with him, I saw him once. He had moved to Cincinnati, Ohio for a job. It was said at least once that the move had something to do with being closer to where we lived with Mother in Kentucky, but I think it was just where he could get a job. The visit he made to us occurred after my mother had broken her leg driving her car into a building during a blackout which later on proved to have been caused by a brain tumor. He arrived with his roommate, whom I later learned to be his lover.
As near as I can piece together, he began the relationship shortly after moving to Ohio, and it probably was to his good fortune as he became quite ill with some obscure and supposedly incurable pulmonary disease and Don supported him for the better part of that time. After treatment in a drug trial that was successful he could not find work and was unemployed when I came to live with him in 1958. He pieced together some things like getting their rent covered by being the building superintendant and handyman for their apartment building. He had always been good with tools and his hands. He also worked as a waiter in a bar I later came to understand was a gay bar.
I have letters from that period that he wrote to my mother. Her brother, George, gave them to me during a visit in the 1980s. The letters are disturbing to read knowing the context. There is a yearning in the earlier ones to get back together with excuses about why no child support was forthcoming regarding the battles going on in his family about their father's will. [Frank ended up with pretty much everything.] Until the last one, they are addressed to "Mrs. Edgar D. W---."
In Cincinnati Edgar lived in the heart of the "Bohemian" community. Translate that to "Gay." The building we were in had at least two other gay couples in the eight apartments. Among his "best friends" were a lesbian couple who lived a block away and bred Dachshunds. The people he and Don had over for parties in our two room space were mostly gay. Many were teachers and all were very straight behaving and appearing. There were some who could see the damage being done to me who reached out and helped or encouraged me. You reading this should not make assumptions that anything inappropriate happened. More decent and caring adults never lived than a couple of these people.
Keep in mind that none of this was ever talked about to me. There was no mention of it. Not mentioned, it was supposedly unknown, but I knew.
When, after my mother's death he remarried for a very short time, it was as if the other side of him didn't exist again. I have no idea what it must have been like for him, nor what his sexuality actually was. He has to have been somewhere toward the same sex orientation end of the Kinsey scale, but at some level was bisexual. It is almost as if he wanted to have relationships with women (his mother???) but found them problematical and when there was no woman in his life it was easier with men.
He had two fairly long-term relationships with men that I knew about. The first was Don from sometime in 1956 to 1960 and then again from 1961-62. The time in the middle was for the six months or so he was with the woman who was his second wife. Sometime in the mid sixties, probably 1964, he started living with the man who he stayed with until he died in the early seventies. It was a symbiotic relationship. Edgar was severely disabled at this point and got disability payments. He provided the support and the money for booze, and his partner-lover-roommate-parasite took care of him most of the time.
Life in secret has to have been brutal. As nasty as it can get for homosexual people now, the days of the deep closet must have taken a regular toll. The alcohol must have served as both a kind of numbing self-medication and a loosener of inhibition to allow dealing with the internal mental conflicts. The social venue for most minorities in our society from the Irish and Italian immigrants of the 1800s and early 1900s was the saloon. No accident that the gay bar is the same kind of venue.
Edgar got a job in Boston in early 1959. He and Don moved in February and I followed at the end of the school year, thanks to the generosity of a (probably gay) teacher. My mother died after a long decline in May of 1960, and my sister and brother came to live with my father sometime in the fall, presumably after Don had moved out. I had left home that summer.
The marriage followed in January of 1961 and by February my father was in a VA Hospital being treated for nerve damage in his wrists and the new ex was foster parent to my siblings. I was engaged in surviving, having lost a job, so I was pretty out of touch.
He was in and out of the hospital several times in the next couple of years. He had surgery to fuse his spine. His left hand curled up uselessly. At my wedding in November 1963 he was in a wheelchair. I visited him a few times, at one point in 1962 suggesting that we get an apartment together, but what I found was not to his liking because he'd have to leave "his" bar. [BTW, many of "his" bars had not been gay bars.] Probably just as well.
In the long decline over the next eight years or so I avoided contacts as much as I could. His "roommate" left him drunk and helpless once and we had had to take Edgar in. The second time it happened we refused and his sister had to step in. The last time I saw him was in 1965 or 1966 when we had put him in a care facility after the first meltdown. He checked himself out and was back to the "roommate" after a couple of weeks. The next time I found a lawyer who did a pro bono conservatorship. The lawyer was the one who called me to tell me he was dying. I'm thinking it was 1972, but it could have been 73 or 74.
So that's a life. I certainly wouldn't exchange mine for it, as tough as mine has been at times. A therapist once suggested to me that someone in my life had to teach me about love and it was not likely my mother. I think she was right. And I think the way it came out in his life was a yearning to be loved, to have what he never could seem to get from his family or from the women in his life. Sad.
Sunday, January 15, 2012
For the Old Man--Part One
[This will be a long one....]
I've talked, not always respectfully, about my family here, but I've been thinking about my father.
I started because I've started reading a book by Craig Shirley called "December 1941: 31 Days that Changed America and Saved the World." I haven't decided how good it is yet. In fact I'm seeing some signs that it is not all that well written, but it does succeed in making vivid the world my parents lived in about the time I was born. And as a consequence I started thinking about my father.
So this is for you, Edgar. [I can't get to calling him "Dad."] This is your story as best I know it.
Edgar Deane was born on November 17, 1915 in Arlington, Massachusetts where his father was a family doctor. He was the last of four siblings, and a fraternal twin to his sister Cynthia. I don't know much about his childhood. The family stories didn't go back that much, but here is what I do know.
Edgar apparently always had a self-control problem. An interaction with his sister in the late seventies made it pretty clear. I was asking her to join me with a therapist to help with some family things and she demurred not wanting to have to "deal with that again." There were other signs that his own family pretty much knew he was an emotional disaster area, so it's no accident that my mother often talked about him after their separation as if she had been blindsided.
Sometime around what must have been his middle school years he was laid up with a serious leg fracture. He had had an accident trying to imitate his older brother's ability to go up and down stairs on a pogo stick. And sometime around then he had a serious bout with scarlet fever. As near as I can determine it was a little after this that the family moved to Maine from Arlington. My father told the story of being asked to go to the basement and pour out all of the bottles of homemade red wine his father had been given by the fathers of babies he had delivered. Arlington at the time had a large Italian immigrant population.
Time check here. This had to have been during Prohibition. Homemade wine would have been legal, but for a man who had an attachment to his alcohol, the memory must have had some poignancy.
Edgar was sent to boarding school for high school. The way the story got told is that older brother Frank got college and Edgar got the private school for high school. I think that was a way of papering over the real story, which must have been that the family could no longer deal with Edgar's upsets and handled it by sending him away to school. He would have been in school through 1932 or 33. The one story of his time at Proctor Academy in Andover, New Hampshire was about how during one trip home to Maine, Edgar was so drunk he fell off the train. Mind you, this is still during Prohibition.
The other story that got told of that time period was about Edgar's sailboat. He was proud of having earned it by meeting his parents' requirement that he swim the mile back and forth between the point where they lived and the island opposite. This had to have been no small feat in the frigid Maine waters. He was proud of earning the boat and he loved to sail. He crewed on some large racing sloops during his Maine years and it sounds like a time that was good for him.
He had a beautiful voice. Even wrecked by his years of drinking, it was still a good voice into his forties. I have a picture of him in choir robes that looks almost angelic. During that time he apparently went to music camps during the summer. Was that another way of getting him out of the home? Don't know, but it could have been. The only information I have of his experiences during that time was a remark by his sister. Edgar had introduced me to an old friend sometime around 1959, someone he had known from his high school years. Later I mentioned the name to his sister, Cynthia, who reacted with a sneer and a remark that implied there was something wrong about the man. Unpacking that now, I think what it was about was what must have been Edgar's emergent homosexuality during those high school years.
Edgar did not go to college. In that family only the oldest son and the youngest daughter [the Princess] were given that opportunity. I don't have much information about the years between 1933 and when he met my mother (probably sometime in 1939 or 1940). Mother worked as a lab technician at Thayer General Hospital in Waterville, Maine. She met my father when he came to the hospital lab selling microscopes. I get the date because my mother talked about attending summer parties at "the Chase Smiths" which sounded like Clyde Smith was still alive. He died in mid 1940 when his wife Margaret Chase Smith succeeded him in the House of Representatives.
Here's what I can piece together. Remember we are in the depth of the Depression. Edgar apparently did a stint with the Civilian Conservation Corps. It would have certainly met the approval of his parents not only because it got him out of the home, but also because his father had been a Maine Guide and an outdoorsman who had led canoeing expeditions on the St. John River as a young man. Sometime after that Edgar must have started selling hospital equipment which is what became his career.
While his older brother got given an Ivy League education and declined the offer to be given medical school, Edgar yearned to have been given the chance to follow in his father's footsteps. Selling medical supplies and equipment was as close as he could get.
My mother was 28 or 29 when she met Edgar, four years her junior. She would have nearly reached old maid status in that era. She had been told that she would not be likely to have children for some medical reason never specified to me. She was a career woman when women generally didn't do that, but not enough of one to not leap at the chance to marry the doctor's son. Technically, she was marrying up into what was a fairly established New England family. Her mother-in-law to be was a Daughter of the American Revolution. Her future father-in-law was a graduate of Bowdoin and Johns Hopkins. His family, it seems, was passing off a problem.
They were married in the summer of 1941 as near as I can tell. It might have been 1940, but I don't think so. I could probably find the wedding picture and it might have the date. The wedding party is in the living room of my grandparent's house in Maine. My father is attended by his older brother Frank, my mother by her sister Marian. The men are in white suits, the women in white skirts and blouses. I think the austerity that was beginning during the lend-lease years must have been a factor.
As I think I have mentioned before, my conception has to have been right around December 7, 1941. My mother used to talk about the event as quite a surprise for her. They were living in Maine and it was around this time that Edgar began working at the Bath Iron Works as a loftsman doing layouts for the superstructures of destroyers and destroyer escorts. Even before the war Bath was ramping up production. After it started, they built anti-submarine ships as fast as they could.
I knew my father was in the service in World War II. Mostly I knew because of my mother's complaints about how he didn't have to serve because he was married and had a child. What I did not know was the details of the timing until my ex-wife found Edgar's enlistment record doing genealogy.
Edgar, working in a protected wartime industry, enlisted in June of 1945! It was after V-E day and about a week before my sister was born. The information went a long way to explaining my mother's resentments about it.
Here is what I figure. He was probably out drinking and got into some argument with someone who was in the service. That happened to him years after as well, when he'd get into fights because he had not gone overseas. Any able-bodied man who was still a civilian in 1945 probably felt a lot of pressure, regardless of how important his job was to the war effort. Edgar had two brothers-in-law who were in the Pacific and Atlantic theaters. My guess is that a few drinks and some challenge from someone who had served and he marched himself to an enlistment office and signed up.
There might have also been some appeal for someone who was a closeted homosexual along with memories of his boarding school (not coed in those days) and the CCC. In any case he was off to Basic as my sister arrived. My mother went first to stay with her family, and then the winter of 45-46 was spent in an un-insulated cottage on the point in Maine, which could be had for free.
The farthest my father got during the war and the months after it was Ogden, Utah, where he made sergeant and spend his time training medics. He must have been "demobbed" sometime in 1946, and began to work for a hospital supply company in New York City, the burbs of which we lived in for the next seven or eight years until my parents' separation in 1955. For all my mother's complaints, his GI benefits put us into a house.
I've talked, not always respectfully, about my family here, but I've been thinking about my father.
I started because I've started reading a book by Craig Shirley called "December 1941: 31 Days that Changed America and Saved the World." I haven't decided how good it is yet. In fact I'm seeing some signs that it is not all that well written, but it does succeed in making vivid the world my parents lived in about the time I was born. And as a consequence I started thinking about my father.
So this is for you, Edgar. [I can't get to calling him "Dad."] This is your story as best I know it.
Edgar Deane was born on November 17, 1915 in Arlington, Massachusetts where his father was a family doctor. He was the last of four siblings, and a fraternal twin to his sister Cynthia. I don't know much about his childhood. The family stories didn't go back that much, but here is what I do know.
Edgar apparently always had a self-control problem. An interaction with his sister in the late seventies made it pretty clear. I was asking her to join me with a therapist to help with some family things and she demurred not wanting to have to "deal with that again." There were other signs that his own family pretty much knew he was an emotional disaster area, so it's no accident that my mother often talked about him after their separation as if she had been blindsided.
Sometime around what must have been his middle school years he was laid up with a serious leg fracture. He had had an accident trying to imitate his older brother's ability to go up and down stairs on a pogo stick. And sometime around then he had a serious bout with scarlet fever. As near as I can determine it was a little after this that the family moved to Maine from Arlington. My father told the story of being asked to go to the basement and pour out all of the bottles of homemade red wine his father had been given by the fathers of babies he had delivered. Arlington at the time had a large Italian immigrant population.
Time check here. This had to have been during Prohibition. Homemade wine would have been legal, but for a man who had an attachment to his alcohol, the memory must have had some poignancy.
Edgar was sent to boarding school for high school. The way the story got told is that older brother Frank got college and Edgar got the private school for high school. I think that was a way of papering over the real story, which must have been that the family could no longer deal with Edgar's upsets and handled it by sending him away to school. He would have been in school through 1932 or 33. The one story of his time at Proctor Academy in Andover, New Hampshire was about how during one trip home to Maine, Edgar was so drunk he fell off the train. Mind you, this is still during Prohibition.
The other story that got told of that time period was about Edgar's sailboat. He was proud of having earned it by meeting his parents' requirement that he swim the mile back and forth between the point where they lived and the island opposite. This had to have been no small feat in the frigid Maine waters. He was proud of earning the boat and he loved to sail. He crewed on some large racing sloops during his Maine years and it sounds like a time that was good for him.
He had a beautiful voice. Even wrecked by his years of drinking, it was still a good voice into his forties. I have a picture of him in choir robes that looks almost angelic. During that time he apparently went to music camps during the summer. Was that another way of getting him out of the home? Don't know, but it could have been. The only information I have of his experiences during that time was a remark by his sister. Edgar had introduced me to an old friend sometime around 1959, someone he had known from his high school years. Later I mentioned the name to his sister, Cynthia, who reacted with a sneer and a remark that implied there was something wrong about the man. Unpacking that now, I think what it was about was what must have been Edgar's emergent homosexuality during those high school years.
Edgar did not go to college. In that family only the oldest son and the youngest daughter [the Princess] were given that opportunity. I don't have much information about the years between 1933 and when he met my mother (probably sometime in 1939 or 1940). Mother worked as a lab technician at Thayer General Hospital in Waterville, Maine. She met my father when he came to the hospital lab selling microscopes. I get the date because my mother talked about attending summer parties at "the Chase Smiths" which sounded like Clyde Smith was still alive. He died in mid 1940 when his wife Margaret Chase Smith succeeded him in the House of Representatives.
Here's what I can piece together. Remember we are in the depth of the Depression. Edgar apparently did a stint with the Civilian Conservation Corps. It would have certainly met the approval of his parents not only because it got him out of the home, but also because his father had been a Maine Guide and an outdoorsman who had led canoeing expeditions on the St. John River as a young man. Sometime after that Edgar must have started selling hospital equipment which is what became his career.
While his older brother got given an Ivy League education and declined the offer to be given medical school, Edgar yearned to have been given the chance to follow in his father's footsteps. Selling medical supplies and equipment was as close as he could get.
My mother was 28 or 29 when she met Edgar, four years her junior. She would have nearly reached old maid status in that era. She had been told that she would not be likely to have children for some medical reason never specified to me. She was a career woman when women generally didn't do that, but not enough of one to not leap at the chance to marry the doctor's son. Technically, she was marrying up into what was a fairly established New England family. Her mother-in-law to be was a Daughter of the American Revolution. Her future father-in-law was a graduate of Bowdoin and Johns Hopkins. His family, it seems, was passing off a problem.
They were married in the summer of 1941 as near as I can tell. It might have been 1940, but I don't think so. I could probably find the wedding picture and it might have the date. The wedding party is in the living room of my grandparent's house in Maine. My father is attended by his older brother Frank, my mother by her sister Marian. The men are in white suits, the women in white skirts and blouses. I think the austerity that was beginning during the lend-lease years must have been a factor.
As I think I have mentioned before, my conception has to have been right around December 7, 1941. My mother used to talk about the event as quite a surprise for her. They were living in Maine and it was around this time that Edgar began working at the Bath Iron Works as a loftsman doing layouts for the superstructures of destroyers and destroyer escorts. Even before the war Bath was ramping up production. After it started, they built anti-submarine ships as fast as they could.
I knew my father was in the service in World War II. Mostly I knew because of my mother's complaints about how he didn't have to serve because he was married and had a child. What I did not know was the details of the timing until my ex-wife found Edgar's enlistment record doing genealogy.
Edgar, working in a protected wartime industry, enlisted in June of 1945! It was after V-E day and about a week before my sister was born. The information went a long way to explaining my mother's resentments about it.
Here is what I figure. He was probably out drinking and got into some argument with someone who was in the service. That happened to him years after as well, when he'd get into fights because he had not gone overseas. Any able-bodied man who was still a civilian in 1945 probably felt a lot of pressure, regardless of how important his job was to the war effort. Edgar had two brothers-in-law who were in the Pacific and Atlantic theaters. My guess is that a few drinks and some challenge from someone who had served and he marched himself to an enlistment office and signed up.
There might have also been some appeal for someone who was a closeted homosexual along with memories of his boarding school (not coed in those days) and the CCC. In any case he was off to Basic as my sister arrived. My mother went first to stay with her family, and then the winter of 45-46 was spent in an un-insulated cottage on the point in Maine, which could be had for free.
The farthest my father got during the war and the months after it was Ogden, Utah, where he made sergeant and spend his time training medics. He must have been "demobbed" sometime in 1946, and began to work for a hospital supply company in New York City, the burbs of which we lived in for the next seven or eight years until my parents' separation in 1955. For all my mother's complaints, his GI benefits put us into a house.
Friday, January 13, 2012
Smoking
I'm about two and a half months into my currentr effort to stop smoking. I've been off of cigarettes twice in the last three years for stretches of six months.
I have avoided writing about this because I'm not feeling very successful about it and I'm not really clear about what I think and feel about it. But what this blog has been more than anything is a place to get clear, so here goes.
I have liked to smoke. I've enjoyed the tactile experience, the taste, and (I suspect) the narcotic effects. I have smoked for a long time, starting at about 14. I don't know if I really want to quit AND I really want to quit. Can you accept that I am of both minds about this?
What I have discovered is that I like not smoking. I really like that I do not smell like an ashtray. I like not burning holes in my favorite clothes. I like that my wife likes that I'm not smoking--though I'd like it more if she expressed her appreciation a little more.
What I like most is that I am not at the effect of cigarettes. I don't have to organize my day around getting to the store to get a pack. I don't feel that compulsion to step out of something like a book group meeting to have a smoke. I don't have to light up each time I am someplace where I can, like walking outside.
During the previous efforts to quit I have failed because I thought I could have "just one." I was stressed or missing them or something... who knows what exactly. I'm clear that I have to not do that. I hope I can get my head there at the right moments.
I've tried to take a look at what smoking did for me, because I think being conscious of that might help.
What I have come up with is that I used smoking as much as anything as a way to mark time, a way to sort the day into periods. Probably no accident since my first cigarettes were consumed while we hung out sitting on a concrete wall across from school on a break and at lunch. My days feel different without them, so I've been turning to other things to fill that space. Fortunately I have avoided a lot of food intake as a substitute. My weight is actually down a little from when I started this quit, though it has taken a holiday bounce up. Sugar free gum seems to help--I just need to remember to take it out when I am on the phone: sorry, if I have done that to you--and my coffee consumption is up a bit.
So far this time I am doing okay. I cheated once on a particularly stressful day and threw it out after a couple of puffs. Tasted horrible! I've fought off the thought that I really wanted a cigarette the few other times that it hit. I'm hoping I can make it stick this time.
I have avoided writing about this because I'm not feeling very successful about it and I'm not really clear about what I think and feel about it. But what this blog has been more than anything is a place to get clear, so here goes.
I have liked to smoke. I've enjoyed the tactile experience, the taste, and (I suspect) the narcotic effects. I have smoked for a long time, starting at about 14. I don't know if I really want to quit AND I really want to quit. Can you accept that I am of both minds about this?
What I have discovered is that I like not smoking. I really like that I do not smell like an ashtray. I like not burning holes in my favorite clothes. I like that my wife likes that I'm not smoking--though I'd like it more if she expressed her appreciation a little more.
What I like most is that I am not at the effect of cigarettes. I don't have to organize my day around getting to the store to get a pack. I don't feel that compulsion to step out of something like a book group meeting to have a smoke. I don't have to light up each time I am someplace where I can, like walking outside.
During the previous efforts to quit I have failed because I thought I could have "just one." I was stressed or missing them or something... who knows what exactly. I'm clear that I have to not do that. I hope I can get my head there at the right moments.
I've tried to take a look at what smoking did for me, because I think being conscious of that might help.
What I have come up with is that I used smoking as much as anything as a way to mark time, a way to sort the day into periods. Probably no accident since my first cigarettes were consumed while we hung out sitting on a concrete wall across from school on a break and at lunch. My days feel different without them, so I've been turning to other things to fill that space. Fortunately I have avoided a lot of food intake as a substitute. My weight is actually down a little from when I started this quit, though it has taken a holiday bounce up. Sugar free gum seems to help--I just need to remember to take it out when I am on the phone: sorry, if I have done that to you--and my coffee consumption is up a bit.
So far this time I am doing okay. I cheated once on a particularly stressful day and threw it out after a couple of puffs. Tasted horrible! I've fought off the thought that I really wanted a cigarette the few other times that it hit. I'm hoping I can make it stick this time.
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Rant Warning
I said I wasn't going to get into politics, and I'm not directly, but what I want to talk about is something that is in our political discourse. That's one of the things about having a blog. You can write what you want to write.
I'm about to have surgery to handle a cataract. It's my second and when it is done my vision will be about as good as it was twenty-five or thirty years ago when I just needed reading glasses some of the time. I'm looking forward to seeing movies without glasses. The surgery is one of the modern miracles and I am glad I can have it done.
What I am not glad about is the screwy system we have for healthcare in this country. I went to get the prescriptions needed to follow up the surgery (totalling some $400 plus) and was told that my insurance company required a "preauthorization" despite the fact that the doctor's office had in fact been the ones who called them in in the first place. Last week while getting my presurgical physical I was aked to fill out a questionnaire for Medicare and was told that it will have to be done every 90 days so "they" can check the consistency of the answers. I suspect it has to do with trying control fraud.
Those of one persuasion will take the latter as evidence of why it is wrong to have the government involved, but in fact the system is screwed up not because of government but because of the insurance industry. (BTW, it was the insurance industry which wrote the laws now disparaged by the wingnuts as "Obomacare.") The scream is "Socialized Medicine!" but the facts are that it is Corporatized Medicine run by the insurance industry for the benefit of the insurance industry.
You think not. Get yourself copies of the various plans available for "Medicare Advantage," read them and try to figure out what you are being asked to pay for. BTW, Medicare "recipients" do pay for it, and if they want/need the drug coverage, they pay for these supplemental plans offered by the insurance companies. Most of you reading this know this, so I'm preaching to the choir.
The "OMG Not Socilaized Medicine" crowd doesn't recognize that someone besides them already "governs" the medical system--the insurance industry. They scream about "death panels," and refuse to believe what is already patently true, that the insurance companies already decide who can get what treatments under what conditions and at what costs, and effectively already ration healthcare, Each of those companies is its own bloated bureaucracy serving its own and not the patient's interest. Consider the company in my state (which will go unnamed) which decided that it should go public and issue an IPO, the primary purpose of which was to enrich the executives. Fortunately the state insurance commissioner put a stop to it.
And the wingnuts are all panicked about government "getting its hands on my healthcare."
There are as many different bureaucratic hoops for doctors and patients and pharmacies to jump through as there are insurance companies. I switched plans last year because the one I was on required a referral from my primary physician before I saw one of my specialists EVERY SINGLE TIME. I pretty much manage my own healthcare and I have 3 specialists I see routinely at least once a year--my skin doc, my urologist, and my eye doctor. That unnecessary work was not mandated by any government agency.
Going back to the form I filled out. I understand that fraud has been a problem with medicare. My guess is that there are more openings and opportunities for it due to the complexities in the system set up to allow multiple companies in multiple jurisdictions to have their own idiosyncratic procedural requirements.
Then of course they will start up on "tort reform." Funny thing how the lawsuits that are "frivolous" are the ones where it is not you or your child who has been injured. Saw an interesting documentary recently which showed several examples of awards which had been limited by state "tort reform" laws. In one case a family had been given an award by a jury intended to cover the lifetime costs of caring for a severely injured child, who despite the injury would be likely to outlive her parents and require continuing care after they were gone. The state law sliced the award to a one-size-fits-all $500,000 or so.
[Same film showed how all those things you sign when you sign up for a phone contract or internet service include clauses that surrender your right to seek redress for damages in court, requiring you to accept binding arbitration with arbitrators whose business comes from the companies. Personally, I think I'd rather have big bad awful government involved.]
But back to the primary issue. Nobody I know who has to deal with the system regularly is happy with how it has been, how it is now, or how it is about to change--not the docs offices, not the pharmacists, and not this patient for one. When I made the decision to get off of my plan in 2010 I called each of my doctor's offices and asked for the business managers. I asked them which of the insurance providers was easiest for them to deal with. None got rave reviews, but one seemed to be better for them so that's what I chose. Alas, it seems to throw some curveballs at my pharmacist. His comment: "You only have to deal with it once a month. Try having to deal with it every day."
As long as we shape our medical system to fit the needs of corporate interests it will remain screwed up, and as long as corporate money is the major force in politics, the system will be shaped to meet corporate interests. Parties left or right will remain irrelevant. And all the screaming about "Socialism" or "Death Panels," will be music to the ears of those who want us focused on the side show while they put their hands in our pockets.
I'm about to have surgery to handle a cataract. It's my second and when it is done my vision will be about as good as it was twenty-five or thirty years ago when I just needed reading glasses some of the time. I'm looking forward to seeing movies without glasses. The surgery is one of the modern miracles and I am glad I can have it done.
What I am not glad about is the screwy system we have for healthcare in this country. I went to get the prescriptions needed to follow up the surgery (totalling some $400 plus) and was told that my insurance company required a "preauthorization" despite the fact that the doctor's office had in fact been the ones who called them in in the first place. Last week while getting my presurgical physical I was aked to fill out a questionnaire for Medicare and was told that it will have to be done every 90 days so "they" can check the consistency of the answers. I suspect it has to do with trying control fraud.
Those of one persuasion will take the latter as evidence of why it is wrong to have the government involved, but in fact the system is screwed up not because of government but because of the insurance industry. (BTW, it was the insurance industry which wrote the laws now disparaged by the wingnuts as "Obomacare.") The scream is "Socialized Medicine!" but the facts are that it is Corporatized Medicine run by the insurance industry for the benefit of the insurance industry.
You think not. Get yourself copies of the various plans available for "Medicare Advantage," read them and try to figure out what you are being asked to pay for. BTW, Medicare "recipients" do pay for it, and if they want/need the drug coverage, they pay for these supplemental plans offered by the insurance companies. Most of you reading this know this, so I'm preaching to the choir.
The "OMG Not Socilaized Medicine" crowd doesn't recognize that someone besides them already "governs" the medical system--the insurance industry. They scream about "death panels," and refuse to believe what is already patently true, that the insurance companies already decide who can get what treatments under what conditions and at what costs, and effectively already ration healthcare, Each of those companies is its own bloated bureaucracy serving its own and not the patient's interest. Consider the company in my state (which will go unnamed) which decided that it should go public and issue an IPO, the primary purpose of which was to enrich the executives. Fortunately the state insurance commissioner put a stop to it.
And the wingnuts are all panicked about government "getting its hands on my healthcare."
There are as many different bureaucratic hoops for doctors and patients and pharmacies to jump through as there are insurance companies. I switched plans last year because the one I was on required a referral from my primary physician before I saw one of my specialists EVERY SINGLE TIME. I pretty much manage my own healthcare and I have 3 specialists I see routinely at least once a year--my skin doc, my urologist, and my eye doctor. That unnecessary work was not mandated by any government agency.
Going back to the form I filled out. I understand that fraud has been a problem with medicare. My guess is that there are more openings and opportunities for it due to the complexities in the system set up to allow multiple companies in multiple jurisdictions to have their own idiosyncratic procedural requirements.
Then of course they will start up on "tort reform." Funny thing how the lawsuits that are "frivolous" are the ones where it is not you or your child who has been injured. Saw an interesting documentary recently which showed several examples of awards which had been limited by state "tort reform" laws. In one case a family had been given an award by a jury intended to cover the lifetime costs of caring for a severely injured child, who despite the injury would be likely to outlive her parents and require continuing care after they were gone. The state law sliced the award to a one-size-fits-all $500,000 or so.
[Same film showed how all those things you sign when you sign up for a phone contract or internet service include clauses that surrender your right to seek redress for damages in court, requiring you to accept binding arbitration with arbitrators whose business comes from the companies. Personally, I think I'd rather have big bad awful government involved.]
But back to the primary issue. Nobody I know who has to deal with the system regularly is happy with how it has been, how it is now, or how it is about to change--not the docs offices, not the pharmacists, and not this patient for one. When I made the decision to get off of my plan in 2010 I called each of my doctor's offices and asked for the business managers. I asked them which of the insurance providers was easiest for them to deal with. None got rave reviews, but one seemed to be better for them so that's what I chose. Alas, it seems to throw some curveballs at my pharmacist. His comment: "You only have to deal with it once a month. Try having to deal with it every day."
As long as we shape our medical system to fit the needs of corporate interests it will remain screwed up, and as long as corporate money is the major force in politics, the system will be shaped to meet corporate interests. Parties left or right will remain irrelevant. And all the screaming about "Socialism" or "Death Panels," will be music to the ears of those who want us focused on the side show while they put their hands in our pockets.
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