As someone who was diagnosed with breast cancer at 42 and whose life choices ever since have been dictated by the need to maintain continuous coverage that would accept a pre-existing condition,  I believe fervently that making the equivalent of Medicare to people of all ages is the only way to provide fairness and adequate competition to private insurers. Living in Massachusetts the last few years, I have watched in horror as health care costs climb relentless and yet people outside the state fail to realize that the compromises made to private insurers here have created an unsustainable system. Having lived abroad and worked with people from other countries for much of my adult life, I am painfully aware of how ludicrous we look to the rest of the developed world.

Most doctors and most voters support a public option. Who doesn’t? Only insurance companies and their lobbyists.

Please, in honor of Ted Kennedy’s memory, give us a bill with a true public option. Waiting till I’m old enough to qualify for Medicare to get the care I need is NOT an option. Thank you.

1968 Medicare poster

Later the same week, my emotional equilibrium was thrown abruptly in the opposite direction by news of someone I had never even met. Walking through the supermarket listening on my Public Radio Tuner to whatever station had All Things Considered with no begathon in progress, I heard them tease a story “a New York Times reporter held by the Taliban has escaped,” and literally felt my skin flush with excitement. Sure enough, the newscast confirmed that David Rohde was free after more than than 7 months in captivity. While he was in captivity, the story had been very effectively kept out of the news (thanks to all who respected the news blackout, who knows what part it played), but one of my colleagues was good friends with him and his wife Kristen, so I had been vicariously experiencing their terror through periodic updates ever since his capture.

As today is Father’s Day, I’m thinking most of the heartbreak of my old friend who has lost his son, and of the unfathomable joy of David Rohde’s father, who has his son back.

The rules are simple: Tweet your ZIPcode (preceded by #), find out who your neighbors are.

I’m #02116 (Boston Byootiful South End), also have a home in #10026 (Harlem USA, baby, as of 10:45 Eastern, I was the only Local Day Tweeter from there). Born and later educated in #02138 (the OTHER Cambridge), grew up in #06457 (Middletown, CT)

Can’t wait to see who else turns up.

Go to Twitter Search (even if you don’t have an account) to watch the fun.

Alerted by an email from the good folks at Physicians for a National Health Plan, I just called Senator Schumer to urge him to invite a single payer advocate to participate in the upcoming May 5 and May 14 Senate Finance Committee roundtable discussions on healthcare reform scheduled to take place in Washington, D.C.

Dear Senator Schumer,

A majority of Americans know that a Medicare-like program available to all and a vastly reduced role for insurance companies is the only way to control costs and provide decent care to all Americans. Allowing the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbies to control the debate* is simply shameful. Please commit to including proponents of single-payer universal health care fully in the May 5 and 14 roundtables and in ALL deliberations about health care reform.

Please act with courage and honesty on behalf of your constituents, not corporate interests.Thank you.

*Insurance companies contributed $46 million in political contributions in 2008; pharmaceuticals a mere $28 million. PNHP’s income (as reported on 2007 990)? $153,000. Not my definition of a fair fight.

Health Care Crisis
When Walgreens becomes your doctor’s office.

Uploaded on September 24, 2008
by quinn.anya

Everything was lovely, but favorite bits included PHJB bass player Walter Payton coming down front to sing I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate (I hope I can shimmy like Walter Payton when I’m that age) and the Blind Boys’ wonderful version of “Amazing Grace” to the tune of “House of the Rising Sun” (watch a video of them doing this number).

Cognitive dissonance: Preservation Hall’s program notes go weirdly, unnecessarily over the top in their self-celebration of the hall itself: “To this day, Preservation Hall has no drinks, air conditioning, or other typical accoutrements strictly welcoming people of all ages interested in having one of the last pure music experiences left on the earth.” I’m not sure that’s true even if you limit your understanding of “earth” to the French Quarter.

And I was just sad reading this phrase from the Blind Boys’ bio: “The Blind Boys’ audience – once rigidly segregated and confined to traditional Gospel venues – now reflects the group’s eclectic, global following…” while noticing that Symphony Hall had somehow managed to attract to this event an audience that looked to be about 98% white. I wonder if we could get the Blind Boys to cover Lou Reed’s “I Wanna Be Black.”

Those quibbles aside, a marvelous time was had by all.
Image: Jazz at the Preservation Hall
Uploaded to Flickr on January 7, 2005
by rickz

WBUR/NPR’s On Point is spending the whole hour with Education Secretary Arne Duncan. Education not one of my big issues, I’m not listening that hard.

But my sensitive ears perked right up when Secretary Duncan made my least favorite grammar error!

He said “my parents instilled (some valuable character trait or other, I was distracted by my anguish and forgot) in my brothers and sisters and I.“  The end is near, brothers and sisters.

It made me go back (and how easy it was, thanks to good search!) to the wonderful article in Harper’s April 2001 by David Foster Wallace called Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage (requires a Harper’s subscription to see the whole page – I say buy one it’s a good magazine, you won’t regret it, if you must have it for free google the full title). In the article he proclaims himself a “SNOOT,”  the term used in his family for what others call Grammar Nazis. In my family, we just called them our friends.

If you’ve ever been tempted to understand what drives people like us, or conversely want a funny, interesting reasonable-length thing to read so you can say you’ve read something by David Foster Wallace, check out the article.

On their mailing list the other day, I got this moving letter, published in the Cambridge Chronicle, by Richard Hess, who did much more than I did, he was arrested in the “die-in” at the Israeli consulate. The son of a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, he asks  “Why do we just watch as Palestinians are brutalized? Why are we unable to empathize?” As to why he was willing to be arrested “I refuse to be a good man doing nothing. I am screaming, ‘These people are dying!’”

As Mosaic producer Jamal Dajani reminds us in his latest blogpost, “The war has ended, but life in Gaza has not returned to normal. Thousands of people remain homeless, and many still remain hungry. Their stories have all but disappeared from US media coverage.”

A good time to remember that it’s our US military aid to Israel that made all the killing possible. We need to take some responsibility.

Getting to Pantip Plaza was slow, hot and sticky, but uncomplicated, thanks to the presence on our team of Thai speaking James. Having been ditched by our local team member Sumalee and the overextended Kathleen, 4 Crazy8s (James, Persephone, Atul and Jiki) squeezed into a taxi and headed off. Traditional Thai traffic jams gave us plenty of time to play with the Flip camera. James and Persephone interviewed amused young taxi driver  about his technology use (unedited video here).
We were overhwelmed by the amount of STUFF in the place. In the end, only Atul and I bought anything electronic – cute little solar-powered LEDs, that Atul says are the “future of lighting.”

James and Jiki (our own Js) went for bags – James got a new backpack, skillfully bargaining from 2300 to 1800 Baht, and Jiki bought a little bag with elephants on it.

On the way home, James offered me some local snacks (see the video here) to no avail. We walked over a canal  whose name I didn’t catch (Jiki, James – help me out) then to Chit Lom and took the Skytrain home. (you can see where we went on this map, which doesn’t look right to me, I think Googlemaps search may have given me some wrong results).

Our indefatigable James paused en route to explain to the camera the Erewan shrine, where, as he first said “women go to get pregnant” to us from a walkway in the sky.

We returned about 6, Jiki and I exhausted by the heat and humidity and crowds, James and Atul apparently unruffled.

CC licensed picture of the Erewan Shrine from Flickr
Uploaded on October 10, 2005
by Adrian Whelan

Here’s what we did on the day itself: along with my colleague Laurent from Paris, I camped out in our office (at 17th and Rhode Island, about half-mile north of White House) to avoid the Metro, which turned out to be very smart as the subway cars were full at the furthest out suburban stops starting at something mad like 4 am. We got up at a more normal hour, leisurely met up with 5 friends for egg sandwiches at 8:30 at a nearby breakfast place, and walked down 18th street with hundreds and then thousands of others, (check out VOA’s time lapse HD video of people swarming). We decided to stop fighting the crowds on the hill near the Washington Monument with a view of crowds and one of a jumbotron – if you look at the very bottom of picture #3 here, you’ll see the monument, we were standing inside the circle at about 3 o’clock, so just above where the shadow of the monument is in the picture). Booed Bush and Rick Warren, cheered O massively and all others with various degrees of intensity.

Following a conversation the day before in which I predicted we would have a transgender president before an openly atheist one, I was personally thrilled to hear him mention “non-believers.” After the speech, as the poem started, we started the long slow walk (took us about 90 minutes to go less than 3 miles) with the throngs, went back to Ivan’s apartment to cook some pasta and watch the lunch and parade and associated asinine commentary on various TV channels (see Jon Stewart on this) )

The crowd was so happy and peaceful (and of course so racially mixed, see John Oliver’s hysterical and yet accurate report) it was really wonderful to be there.

I managed to come down with conjunctivitis that afternoon, which put a bit of a damper on things (and mad me look like I was in a bar fight inauguration night) so I left the Wonder Ball early and spent the days since laying low and putting weird goo in my eye. But nothing dims my happiness at our new president. GOBAMA.

Resolve to stay in bed till noon more often and not feel guilty about it. (Useful to have the support of a partner who seems to have resolved to bring me breakfast in bed more often)

Resolve to eat fruit every day. (Sent partner back downstairs for grapefruit.)

Resolve to have no more than one basket of clean laundry at foot of bed. (Folded and put away both, for good measure).

Resolve to start a net outflow of paper from bedroom floor to recyclying bin. (But still have to look through those old mags – otherwise would have missed David Quammen’s excellent story in the April Harpers on contagious cancer in Tasmanian devils. (here, but you might need a subscription.)

Resolve not to keep partner waiting so often due to computer based activities. (oops gotta run.)