Daffodils and Poetry and the Roughriders of the House

April is poetry mouth.
I hurt, therefore I am.
My local library has signs posted for the high school poetry contest.
That made me feel good, that they're still open, still a haven for thought and knowledge,
still talking about poetry.

My thoughts are clouded this morning by my mother's for-profit hospital bed,
by the call button that isn't answered.
I think of the nurses who rush about, harried and anxious with impossible patient loads,
like the 30-student classroom my sister faces daily in her underfunded public school.
I pace the hall for an aide, for someone,
my mother needs to urinate
she needs her pain pill
she needs a hospital that isn't a for-profit
but most of our community hospitals are.

If you're a Republican Roughrider, you would put yourself
into a private hospital with a healthier ratio of patients to nurses.
With your House of Representatives health insurance,
you proudly state that America has the best health care system in the world.
Why would we want to change it?
You denigrate your president
and lead the charge against his efforts to change it.
You are a patriot and a roughrider.
You make disparaging remarks about
"Obama Care" as though it were an abscess on American's nose,
rather than an Affordable Health Care Plan for all Americans.
You will work to defund it and privatize Medicare and Medicaid.
You will cut EPA, NPR, PBS, DNR, public education and libraries
while keeping the Pentagon intact.
All this while cutting taxes for the elite.
A rich man will always care more about his money than his country.

Your children go to private schools and you have your own library.
You live in a gated enclave with trees to shield you from view.
You don't want to see and you don't want to be seen.
You call yourself a patriot.
You will work to rid the country of the health care plan
that forces insurance companies to pay for
preventive care without a co-pay or deductible,
lowering their margin of profit.
The smart Republican Roughriders coined a new name for it
to strike fear of rationing into the heart,
as though rationing weren’t already the law of the land.

My mother loves flowers.
The daffodils of spring have always been her favorite.
They have braved the cold on the south side of the house
and are about to open.
When they do, I will cut her a bouquet
and set them where she can see them.
She likes the Detroit Tigers but can’t watch them
because the hospital doesn’t carry that station.
Her television stays off. My mother is too smart for Judge Judy.
We took her in a transistor radio but it wouldn’t pick up the game.
We tell her about the games and we take in the sports section.
But her heart isn’t in it.

Citizens for Discontent

There are dozens of anti-government groups who have organized to oppose everything Obama does. They would oppose Michelle’s organic garden if they could figure out a way to safely do so and label it with an acronym to misrepresent her intentions.

Citizens against unfair Taxes...Citizens for Honest Government...Citizens against Organic Gardens and on and on and on. They can call themselves anything they want. But perhaps a more honest label would be Citizens For Fermentation of Discontent CFFD (sounds like a disease one should be inoculated against) or...how about Citizens for Truthshaping through Promotion of Fear. (The CTPF's.)

If anything, Obama has been a disappointment to date in the fight for health care reform, having seriously underestimated the toxicity of the Right's venom and the power the health insurance industry welds due to the unparalleled accrual of wealth attained through the clever denial of coverage people have paid for. The 40 million uninsured is one problem, but a growing and often unheard of problem is the number of under-insured. And you don’t realize you are until the bills start coming in for treatments you thought you were insured for but which through loopholes and outright fraud, insurance companies and their cubicle monkeys are finding ways to deny.

We MUST have a public option. It is the ONLY thing that will make a difference. The insurance industry is all for reform that forces all Americans to buy insurance (like auto insurance) because they see 40 million new customers they can bleed to death, and they hate the idea of a public option. Why? Because they’re afraid people will choose it and it will be cheaper and it will force down costs and lower profits. Should health care even be a for-profit industry beholden to Wall Street? Your insurance company is more worried about satisfying their stockholders than paying for patient care. Doctors overwhelmingly want insurance buffoons out of their patient files. The majority of them are satisfied with Medicare administration and payments. Yes, our government can and does do a good job. And I’m tired of the far right beating their anti-government drum under the banner of patriotism. And, no, a public option and National Health Insurance is not socialism. Do we call Social Security socialism? Do we think of our public education system as Socialism?

Our country has veered so far to the right Richard Nixon would now be considered liberal. The health care reform he tried to get though back in the seventies was far more progressive then anything now being considered in the Senate.

We’re way past due for National Health Insurance. But that's just the modest opinion of a writing gardener with a family history of arthritis. What do you think?