When the election was over, I thought, phew, the worst has passed. We have finally someone of a sane mind in the White House, someone who can inspire us to do good.
It seems that the election season has returned. I am seeing all the ugliness that I saw during the election all over again. Though I like to forget, I still remember being shaken on many occasions, one of them in particular.
I went to an address looking for a person on the list of registered voters. A woman in a small SUV drove up as I walked onto her driveway. I identified myself as a volunteer for Obama, and her demeanor changed. Her facial expression turned diabolical and full of fury. She shouted at me, "I HATE THAT MAN!" I wondered then how anyone would be so hateful of someone that they personally don't know. I started to walk away without saying much, I was just shaken, having lost another little piece of faith in the humanity. She jumped back in the car, looking intently at me out of the rolled down window, all while giving gas as she was looking. Vroom. Vroom. I feared for life and left as quickly as I could.
I looked at my list. I was not about to have someone like that shake me so badly, so I went to the next address on the list. And who I do see driving up to that address? The hate-filled woman with her young child in the back of the car. I saw an Obama sign in the yard, and I was glad to have that sign as the woman and I converged on the driveway of this particular address. A man was working on a boat, and I asked may I talk to so-and-so. He said that was his wife who is a big Obama supporter. I asked him if he too was a supporter. He said he didn't know.
Now the woman, with a big smile on her face, chimed in. She said cheerfully that her mother was a Catholic and that as a Catholic her mother would never vote for Obama. As for her, she said she didn't know. Then she added that the co-owner of the house, on whose driveway we had all congregated, was her sister-in-law and that her sister-in-law lets her live in the house across the street for free. She looked at me as if to say, and with as much hatred and menace as before reserved just for me, "you'd better not tell her what I just said to you."
This two-faced woman really shook me up. I was shaken more by how she was so casually lying through her teeth, with a kind of platitude even as if it were the most normal thing to do, than by the fact that I had thought my life was in danger just minutes earlier. How can humans behave this way?
What I am seeing during these town hall meetings reminds of these incidents that I encoutered during the election. There was so much ugliness. There was so much hatred. The same ugliness is coming back.
Those who oppose health care reform at these town hall meetings are not opposing health care reform. Many of them are fighting it as if they were still fighting the election.
All of the issues of the election are coming back with all the same incendiary rhetoric, hearsay, untruths. They oppose health care because Obama's administration is pushing for it. It could be a bill to give them free socks for life, they would oppose it. They oppose the cap and trade and all green initiatives because the Obama administration sponsors them. It is as if they want the whole country to fail because they refuse to believe that Barack Obama is our 44th president and the majority of this nation voted for him.
There is no doubt that the nation's health care needs a reform. The system can't go on. Those who have insurance are afraid to go because of the sky-rocketing co-pays and out-of-pocket costs. Those who do not have insurance, just hope that they do not get sick. This is a country where the citizens seem to get into financial trouble whether or not they have health insurance. If that is not crazy, I don't know what is. What is paid for and what is not is decided completely by the insurance companies whose sole purpose of existence is to make money. They are the "death panels" and the opponents of health care reform want to keep the operation the way they are now?
The simple fact is that the cost of health care is bankrupting the whole nation and its citizens, and this important issue is the one that Obama-haters latch on. They are hijacking an all-important issue that will sink or save the nation. It seems not just crazy to me, but also completely against self-interest if these so-called opponents were to even think clearly.
I want civility back. I want civil public discourse so that we may all fix what is wrong. No doubt about it.
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