189: The Fight for Healthcare for All
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Hosts Meg Riley and Michael Tino discuss healthcare reform with Rev. Robin Tanner, Dr. Carol Paris, and activist Samson Hampton. They share some important information on the current fight for healthcare for all, what it means to write your own healthcare story, and how to get involved in making a single-payer option happen in the U.S. This is an episode you don’t want to miss. As Samson Hampton says, we are people, not statistics. And our senators need to fight for us and not the insurance companies.
Want to get involved? Organizations mentioned include:
Portlight.org
Healthoverprofit.org
Adapt.org
The VUU streams live on Thursdays at 11 am ET. We talk social justice, Unitarian Universalism, religion, spirituality, and whatever else is topical and interesting!
Hosts: Meg Riley, Michael Tino, and Aisha Hauser; production support provided by Jessica Star Rockers. The VUU is brought to you by the Church of the Larger Fellowship
Note: This audio has been slightly edited for a better listening experience. View the live original recording on YouTube.
Getting Tough
So, the president responded to news of North Korean missile testing by tweeting that they will be “met with fire and fury and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before,” which is not necessarily the most prudent response to a volatile dictator who is aiming nuclear weapons in your direction. I would put it in the category of “not a great plan.” It is, however, entirely unsurprising. It’s the only thing DJT knows how to do—get tough. Whatever the circumstances, domination and punishment are the only tools in his toolbox. Read more →
The Losing Team
Another election has come and gone. Some people, presumably, are delighted, while others are filled with gloom. OK, it was mostly gloom on my Facebook page. Maybe you worked really hard on behalf of a candidate you truly believed in, and that candidate didn’t win. Maybe the one who did win is the worst kind of corrupt imbecile, totally in debt to the moneyed interests. Maybe you feel like the country is going to hell in a hand basket, and we are all at the mercy of people who think that Ebola is washing our shores on a wave of Black people and climate change is a hoax invented by scientists who want to further their careers.
It could be that we are doomed, and if your plans for this week should happen to include an adult beverage or a childhood comfort food, well I wouldn’t blame you.
But eventually we always come round to the question of what now. Now that the election is over and we get a break from the ads. Now we know just how vehemently we might disagree with our neighbors or family members. Now that the whole cycle of hope and possibility and things not ever living up to their potential starts over again. Now what?
The same thing as always. Sorry, but I don’t have a better answer. Now we make dinner and pet the cat and read the kids a story and decide what to wear to work tomorrow. Now we look for a job that will pay the bills or an apartment that won’t break the bank or a date who won’t turn out to be a complete waste of time. Now we call our friends to comfort them or be comforted. Now we wait to hear back from the doctor or we wait to hear whether there will be an indictment from Ferguson. We visit the rest home, we take the children to soccer or to dance, we cry or look at videos of cats.
Maybe we remember other elections that swept us up in a tide of hope or despair, and we remember how after those elections we kept on doing what we do. I’m in no way saying that elections don’t matter, or that it’s not worth being deeply engaged in the political process. The government sets policy, and those policies affect really important things like who gets deported, who gets health care, whether people can manage to live on minimum wage, what efforts are made to combat climate change, what kinds of transportation we have access to, whether there is funding for research, what is supported and not supported in our schools, and on and on and on.
Politics matters. Having a voice matters. Speaking up for your hopes matters. But it doesn’t necessarily matter in the way that we would like. Paying attention and voting and making calls and writing letters and campaigning door to door doesn’t always result in the person or policy we support winning. And, sadly, even if they do win it rarely means that everything is rosy and the world is organized the way we would organize it.
Whether we get what we want is not what defines our efforts. We are called to care, and to love and to work for justice. Whether or not things go our way at any given moment. I used to serve a church in the same neighborhood as Wrigley Field in Chicago. Although I am not, myself, a baseball fan, I learned a lot from my Cub-loving congregants. The Cubs lose. Everyone knows that. Historically, currently, the Cubs are just not what you would call a winning team. Which doesn’t stop the fans from rooting for their beloved Cubbies, year in and year out.
You love what you love, and you go out and yell on its behalf, following the statistics or the players or whatever markers of success or defeat you might have. You show up and cheer. When your team wins you get a parade. But when your team loses you have the opportunity to gather with your friends and mourn the losses and plot how next year will be better.
Or maybe two years from now, when elections roll around in 2016.
What Isn’t Said
You know what I find most fascinating about this week’s presidential debate? What they didn’t talk about. There was a lengthy back and forth about energy policy and who would drill where and who would get the most oil out of US public lands, but no mention whatsoever about climate change. There was some discussion of clean energy technologies in terms of jobs and economics, but never in terms of the urgent issue of climate.
How is it that what is perhaps that largest issue of our time and for generations to come, an issue that affects all beings of this planet, an issue that we could actually do something about if we had the collective will, never manages to even make it to the floor? I think the answer is pretty clear. It isn’t a winning topic. People don’t want to know that the earth is changing, and that we will have to change to deal with that rapidly altering world. Either they deny the reality so that they don’t have to deal with it, or they plug their ears and go “La la la la la” so as to avoid the topic.
When in doubt, our natural inclination is to step around the topics that we don’t want to deal with. For a certain period of time we can manage to pretend not to notice Dad’s drinking, the cracks forming in the roof, Aunt Ellen’s diminishing mental capacity. Of course, as with climate change, dealing early and effectively with major problems diminishes the damage. But that requires the courage to step forward and take away the car keys or call the long-term care facility or give up things that we want now in order to pay to fix the roof in the not-so-distant future. And those things are hard.
So we just let it slide for another day. Perhaps it is too much to expect our politicians to exhibit moral courage when they know the voters won’t reward it. Perhaps it is the role of leaders to, you know, lead—to use the bully pulpit to remind people of what needs to be done and to offer a plan on how to do it. I don’t know.
What I do know is this: the best chance that any of us will have rests in a nation of truth-tellers. I don’t have a problem with fantasy. Fantasy is good. Each of us should carry a dream of what exactly we would like our lives and our world to look like. But you can’t just dwell in the fantasy world. Reality will, inevitably bite you in the end. Far better to start with a clear-eyed look at the world as it is, dangers, flaws and all, and figure out what next step might tilt the real world in the direction of the dream.
Maybe one person turning to their neighbor to ask why the emperor isn’t wearing clothes won’t be enough to stop the parade. But if enough of us dare to speak enough of the time, telling the truth of our lives and the truth of our world, then there might just be hope for us after all.
The Connection of Church and State
I am a big fan of the separation of church and state. I do not believe that it is appropriate for the government to privilege any religion, or impose any set of religious beliefs on its citizens. I don’t think that anyone’s religious views should be allowed to determine who may or may not get married. I don’t think that anyone’s religious views should be allowed to determine laws around abortion or access to contraception. I don’t think that we need to set aside time in schools to pray, and I don’t think that “under God” should ever have been inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance. There is no reason at all to teach “creation science” in biology class, as if any science were involved in the religious stance that all the overwhelming evidence for evolution should be set aside because the Bible says something different. It is not the place of a free, democratic government to impose the religion of some set of people on other people who may not share those views.
On the other hand, I’m absolutely in favor of people making political choices based on their religious views. How would you not? If your religion matters to your life at all, surely it has to inform your decisions about what laws and which individuals will work for the things that matter to you. If you follow the one who said “ For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me….Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me,” then surely you will vote for the candidate who seems the most likely to provide for the poor, care for the ill and have compassion for the immigrant and those in prison.
If you call yourself religious, it is your job not only to hold a core set of values that you understand to be at the heart of your religion, but also to go out and practice and advocate for those values in the world.
As a Unitarian Universalist, I would say that freedom is a central value among my religious peeps. But it’s not at the very center. At the core, the value we hold most dear is ever and always love. That’s why you see UUs in bright yellow t-shirts that read “Standing on the Side of Love” at rallies in favor of marriage equality and compassion for immigrant families. Love is where it’s at for us. When I vote, it’s on the basis of the practical application of the principle of love. Love for our neighbors, love for citizens of the wider world, love for the planet which we share with so many non-human beings. I am Voting on the Side of Love.
What values are at the very heart of your religious life? Where do you see those values taking shape in the political sphere? How will you vote for the heart of your religion?
Content Director’s Note: This post is a part of our Election Month at Patheos feature. Patheos was designed to present the world’s most compelling conservations on life’s most important questions. Please join the Facebook following for our new News and Politics Channel — and check back throughout the month for more commentary on Election 2012. Please use hashtag #PatheosElection on Twitter.
Responsibility
One of the major themes of this election cycle has been one of individualism vs. “collectivism.” The argument of those on the individualist side seems to be that people need to take responsibility for themselves. If we do too much to shelter people from the harsher realities of life, then, it seems, people will lose initiative to take care of themselves and will become dependent on the system to support them.
I can see the point of this argument. We have all known people who seemed to feel like the world owed them a favor, who didn’t seem to want to step up to the plate and take responsibility.
But here’s the thing: I don’t think you really understand what it means to be responsible until you start taking some responsibility for more than your own little life. Certainly, the whole idea of what it meant to be responsible changed drastically the moment I became a parent. Suddenly, working and paying my household bills seemed like a trivial task compared with the need to make sure that nutritious meals turned up on time, that baths and clean clothes and bedtime all happened at the appropriate moments, that enriching opportunities for learning and growth appeared—without any pressure or agenda. And all those tasks are minor compared with the responsibility of providing just the right blend of openness and limits, of connection and independence, of work and play and rest. And we won’t even go into what it takes to maintain a loving composure in the face of two-year-old temper tantrums or the eye-rolling snideness of a teen.
Being responsible for a child is a massive undertaking. But it’s only the beginning. Those of us who are truly responsible know that we have responsibilities to our neighbors. We clean up after our dogs, and shovel our sidewalks when it snows. And if you’re going to participate in a democracy then you have a responsibility to make your vote count, to be informed, to weigh in on those matters that concern you, whether it be a traffic light in front of your local school or a giant oil pipeline running across your country. When tragedy hits across the world in the form of a hurricane or a tsunami and we reach out to help, we might realize that our responsibilities don’t end with the borders of our own particular country.
In fact, our responsibilities reach out across time as well as space. Do we not have some obligation to hand off to our children and our neighbors’ children an earth that is still hospitable and green, not to mention an education system that prepares the next generation for a future we can’t quite imagine?
Yes, I’m all in favor of personal responsibility. But I think we haven’t begun to touch our responsibilities until we’ve committed ourselves as broadly and deeply as possible to the health and well-being of all those whom our lives touch.
Paying Tribute
In her best-selling Hunger Games trilogy, Suzanne Collins imagines a world of the future—a dystopian reality in which North American society has been replaced with a world where workers toil for the good of a small elite, threatened with the use of force, and given hope only by the small chance of winning a deadly game.
What makes the world of The Hunger Games so eerie is that we can see remnants of our present-day reality in it—enough remnants that it scares us to think that maybe, just maybe, we are headed down a path towards totalitarianism.
And while The Hunger Games is a work of fiction and of fantasy, we would do well to understand the signs in our current society that make Suzanne Collins’ disturbing imagination all-too-real.
In The Hunger Games, teenagers, called “tributes,” from each of the oppressed districts are forced to fight to the death in a reality television show broadcast throughout the nation. Their gruesome deaths are entertainment for the elite people in the Capitol, and the entire nation is forced to tune in and watch their children die.
That certainly isn’t reality, is it?
The reality is that our nation exists in what Chris Hedges, author of Death of the Liberal Class, calls a state of “permanent war.” Hedges writes, “since the end of World War 1, the United States has devoted staggering resources and money to battling real and imagined enemies. It turned the engines of the state over to a massive war and security apparatus.” We are kept in a constant state of fear that mutes dissent in the name of patriotism and fuels a war machine that benefits a privileged elite.
Our wars require not only a steady stream of money—taken from our paychecks and pockets and diverted from health care, our social safety net, education, and infrastructure—but also a steady stream of young, able-bodied people willing to die for our country. All too often, they do.
I am not suggesting that the death of US troops is entertainment for the elite, as is the death of young people is in The Hunger Games. But their death serves to reinforce a status quo that there are people whose interests are served by our nation being at war. The death of brave young soldiers helps us silence objections to unjust wars being fought in our name, it helps us dismiss Occupy movement as “fringe elements,” and it helps us rationalize police brutality towards non-violent protesters.
Lest we appear unpatriotic, those of us morally offended offended by the deaths of US soldiers stay eerily silent about what is fueling those wars.
We cannot afford to remain silent about the fact that corporations are profiting from this state of permanent war, and those same corporations have wrested control of our political and economic systems.
As we approach our annual celebration of Memorial Day, we will pause to mourn the lives lost in service to our nation. It is right and good to do this. Once we are done with our moment of silence, however, we owe it to our soldiers to raise our voices.
We must insist on a society where people matter more than corporations. Where the lives of young people are not used as disposable input into a system of profit-making and wealth creation.
We must insist on a society where political power is checked and shared—and not allowed to run amok through Super PACs and corporate donations. Where the wealthy and the poor have equal access and equal voice, where money is not speech, and where corporations are not people.
We must insist on an economy based in love and compassion, rather than fear and greed. We must insist on an economy based in mutuality rather than coercion. We must insist on a nation that treats the “least of these” in the human family as if they were the divine in our midst.
We must raise our moral voices loudly, my friends. We might not find ourselves in the Hunger Games if we do not, but to create the future we want to see we cannot remain silent.
