Two powerful op-ed pieces in today’s New York Times help me to clarify my disquiet with the Obama presidency.

The first by Amy Wilentz, explains the origins of the concept of the “Zombie.” The life of the slave in Haiti was so brutal and unbearable that the slaves often preferred suicide, which was imagined as a return to Africa (lan guinée), a phrase that in Creole even today means heaven. Against this threat, the masters devised and played on the idea of the Zombie, a species of living dead, who would never be able to return to Africa and instead would perform slave labor forever.

The second piece by Ben Mattlin opposes the Massachusetts assisted suicide law, to be voted on next week. Mattlin was born with spinal muscular atrophy. He has never stood, or walked, or had much use of his hands. Roughly half the infants born with this condition die by the age of two, but Mattlin is nearly fifty and, as he writes, “a husband, father, journalist and author.” Living his whole life so close to death he recounts the many times well-meaning doctors and relatives wanted to “spare” him, and the state. No one chooses suicide in a vacuum he notes.

The two stories make the same point: the priority of the human spirit over the body. Mattlin writes so beautifully that it is hard to imagine the wracked body from which his words emanate. It is in good part to affirm the beauty of the human spirit– in other words, of freedom– that most Americans, and citizens of other countries, gladly spend so much money on keeping the very ill, and the very old, alive. Wilentz’s story teaches the same lesson from the opposite point of view. Without a spirit, without freedom, the body is worthless. If we give up our understanding of the priority of the spirit over the body we tend to become zombies ourselves.

On Wednesday October 10th, in a conversation with the editorial board of the Columbus Dispatch, Mitt Romney said “We don’t have people that become ill, who die in their apartment because they don’t have insurance.”

Sit with that quote a minute and think.

Really? Beyond knowing in your gut that we do, in fact, have people who die in their apartments, homes, backyards, on the streets, in shelters, at soup kitchens, and in all sorts of places, in part, because they don’t have access to adequate health care, Mitt Romney is missing other parts of the nightmare that is, for 50 million Americans, the reality of not having health insurance.

Eighteen years ago, a year after my mother’s death, almost to the day, I was diagnosed with cancer, Hodgkin’s Disease. When my mother passed, she had lymphoma. Five years prior to my diagnosis, my Dad died, after a long battle with Melanoma. It metastasized to his brain.

All that cancer so close to home was my wake up call. I knew something was wrong, and I knew it couldn’t just be genetics. Maybe the lymphoma was connected to Hodgkin’s, but what had Melanoma to do with my cancer or with my mother’s? And, what about my maternal aunt, who had breast cancer? What did those other cancers have to do with my Dad or me? And all these folks had cancer in mid to later in life. I was diagnosed at a fairly young age.

Suddenly, everyone else I knew seemed to be getting cancer, too. Neighbors. Children. Friends.

Maybe it all had to do with the poisoning of our environment. Toxics and radiation? This concern weighed heavily with me, nagging in the back of my mind as I went through the grueling ‘healing’ process of a cancer patient.

A few years later, I became pregnant. What joy! All I wanted to was to become a mother. I had waited for so long.

But, I wondered, what right did I have to become a mother at all? I felt guilty trying to become pregnant. What might I pass on to my little one, and how could I protect her from all the environmental hazards in our polluted world? What dangers coursed in my veins?

I knew that my ability to protect my baby daughter was limited. Sure, I did some substantial cleanses post Chemo, ate as well as I possibly could during the pregnancy (as well as before and after), used non-toxic products on my body and in my home, but no matter how much I did and do as an individual, given the boundariless nature of pollution–my maternal blood would still carry toxins right through the placenta and into her growing fetal body, and my breast milk would transmit pollutants as well after the birth, and after birth, well, it’s a polluted world we live in, and none of us can fully keep the pollution out. Sandra Steingraber documents all this in painful detail in her book, Having Faith. Or watch her film, Living Downstream and listen to Sandra as she holds up a cup of human breast milk and explains the high number of toxins in that precious liquid.

In the last year, attempts have been made in the US House of Representatives and the state of Arizona to defund Planned Parenthood. “Personhood bills” have been introduced in the same time frame in Virginia, Oklahoma, Mississippi and Colorado seeking to ban both birth control and abortion. Bills were also recently introduced in Georgia and Tennessee to criminalize miscarriage, potentially making it a capital offense. And who can forget Virginia’s effort to force medically unnecessary vaginal ultrasounds on females with the temerity to seek medical care?

The ACA may be the most important piece of civil rights legislation effecting women since we gained the right to vote in 1920.

Sadly, the value of the ACA to women remains America’s best kept secret.

Many liberals are describing the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold “Obamacare” as a resounding victory for the president and likely to contribute to his chances for re-election. I don’t see it that way.

Supporters of the Affordable Care Act rally outside the Supreme Court following the ruling to uphold "Obamacare" on June 28, 2012. Credit: Mackie Lopez/SEIU.

Though I am happy about this development and feel we should celebrate these small steps in the right direction, I see this victory as severely limited by a deep flaw within the health reform plan: it requires people to buy health insurance but has no effective way to keep the insurance companies from endless increases in what they charge the public (and then blaming those charges on the fact that they have to cover people who are sick).

For those of you who have not heard the details yet, the Supreme Court ruled today that most of the “Obamacare” plan was constitutional in a 5-4 vote. The majority opinion – penned by ultra-conservative Chief Justice John Roberts – presents a rationale for why the “individual mandate” (the part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that requires everyone to buy health care and imposes a penalty payment on those who do not, so that they too can contribute to the well-being of everyone who does need health care) is consistent with Roberts’s interpretation of the Constitution. The court also ruled that some states can opt out of parts of the plan.

I’m glad that parts of the plan that were pressingly needed – including its elimination of the right of insurance companies to deny coverage on the basis that the applicant has a “pre-existing condition” and its part allowing coverage in a family plan of children up to the age of twenty-six – have been validated, though they are unlikely to be implemented before 2014. But a truly resounding health care victory would be one that ensures health care for all, without handing more power to private insurance companies.

Flickr/ThinkPanama

“I had to decide whether to be good or bad this morning!” My four-year-old son recently shared this bit of self-realization with our congregation during a children’s sermon. Our pastor was talking about the importance of decisions and how some are more important than others. While reviewing what families do when they start each day, she said “I don’t think God worries about toast or cereal.” It was a good message, tuned just right to the rambunctious horde, as evident by my son’s comprehension. But it occurred to me that most of our moral lives are comprised of numerous small decisions, which add up to something significant.

The topic of food offers a useful case for considering the ultimate morality of our daily decisions, the responsibility we bear for them, relative to those of powerful actors who determine most of the recipes, ingredients, menus, prices and other aspects of what is available for us to consume.

Crossposted from the Rio Arriba Community Health Council Blog.

To the average American working outside of health administration, the anti-Medicare crusade waged during the primary by the always entertaining but rarely sensible crop of Republican presidential wannabes made absolutely no sense. Why would any competent candidate want to campaign against a program beloved by one of America’s most reliable voting blocks?

Why not just amputate your own head?

Apparently, the wing of the Party that uses money and media to manipulate election results has rediscovered the time-worn political maxim (at least, until the general election) that you don’t win elections by loudly proclaiming your intent to rob voters’ of retirement security. Mr. Romney dropped the subject the instant he became the latest Hair Apparent.

But don’t worry. Be happy.

If Republicans and their corporate funders retake the White House and Senate, they’ll load their helicopters and assault rifles once again for Medi-Bear.

I returned to my City College of New York (CCNY) alma mater on the evening of March 29 to be inspired by a truly gifted and socially committed journalist. The Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The NY Times, Nicholas D. Kristof, began his talk by asking the audience whether there were more males or females in the world. I, along with most, responded incorrectly; despite a natural numerical advantage in female births, there are more males alive today. Why? Because gender discrimination drives greater mortality among girls, including abortions and infanticide of females, as well as instances of abuse and the exploitation of women. This 2012 Samuel Rudin Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture at CCNY was entitled “Half the Sky: Changing the World by Empowering Women.”

Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, his wife and colleague.

At the end of the evening, when it was my turn to get his autograph for my newly purchased copy of Half the Sky, I told him that I write & blog for Tikkun, and that I had nominated him for Tikkun’s human rights award last year, and expect to do so again, if this prize is still in the offing. He smiled broadly. (Are you reading this, Michael?)

In a recent column, Kristof follows up on his exposé of Backpage.com, an online marketing vehicle which allegedly deals in the enslavement and trafficking of underage girls for the sex trade. This company is owned by Village Voice Media (yes, the owner of The Village Voice, no longer the crusading progressive voice that it once was) and among its investors is no less than Goldman Sachs (putting graphic new meaning to the notion of a “rapacious” Wall St. firm); the latter moved rapidly to divest itself in response to his initial column (to be fair, Goldman claims to have had no say in, nor knowledge of, VVM’s operations).

But Kristof’s most impressive work has been in Asia and Africa. When asked by a journalism student of any ethical dilemmas between his dual roles as a reporter and as an advocate, he recounted what happened when he and his wife

When radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh called Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute” who ought to post sex videos on-line, he not only revealed his own crass, crude ignorance, but he committed acts of verbal abuse. His comments were a kind of violence against women.

Violence is a violation. It is a hurtful demonstration of a basic lack of respect. Those of us who are concerned about intimate violence, violence in personal relationships, tell our sisters and brothers to walk away from a partner the moment they call you out of your name. Verbal abuse is often prelude to physical abuse. If a person will call you a “slut”, s/he will hit you, and if a person will hit you, s/he will kill you. Such relationships are not only toxic, they are tragic.

In his book “Violence”, philosopher Slavoj ZiZek describes subjective and objective violence. Subjective violence is “violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent” (1). Objective violence is that which is symbolic and systemic. Symbolic violence is the violence embedded in language, and systemic violence– a.k.a. structural violence – is the various violations of human dignity that are embedded in our political-economy.

According to Zizek, subjective violence “is experienced as such against the background of the ‘normal’ peaceful state of things. However, objective violence is precisely the violence inherent in this ‘normal’ peaceful state of things” (2). Rush Limbaugh’s comments calling Sandra Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute” were “irrational explosions of subjective violence” that become all too rational when they are seen to spring from the ground of objective symbolic violence that allows it.

© 2011 Eiren Caffall all rights reserved

A few days ago the image of a green ribbon came across my facebook news feed.

The text went like this:

The pink ribbons have always bugged me…the idea of putting the energy and effort of well-meaning citizens behind “the search for a cure for cancer” just irritates me, because let’s face it, we know what causes cancer, and therefore we can do better than cure it, we can prevent it! Maybe not 100%, but we can take it back to the modest rates that previous generations of human beings enjoyed…If you really want to make a difference in the war against cancer, forget about those ridiculous pink ribbons. Use the power of your wallet and your ballot to insist that the government step up and do its job in regulating the industrial agriculture sector.

It makes sense that people are focusing on ribbons in the wake of all the controversy about the Komen Foundation and Planned Parenthood. The quote was linked back to the original post on Common Dreams, and reading it through I find a lot to agree with here.

I’m like any good environmentalist, and I will go to the barricades to support folks who want to fight the causes of pollution and find the crazy subtle links between the toxic chemicals we’re hourly pouring into our ecosystem and the unintended consequences of disease, species collapse, mutation and global climate change that result from our little uncontrolled environmental experiments.

I want people to have their awareness of environmental collapse raised, I surely do. No denying the importance of that green ribbon.

But then, that ribbon could mean a whole lot of things. According to Wikipedia, a green ribbon can signify traumatic brain injury awareness, organ transplantation awareness, kidney cancer awareness.

Like the author of that Common Dreams post, ribbons bug me sometimes, too. I wonder, like Susan Niebur, a blogger who we lost last week to breast cancer, about the impact of “awareness” when we need cash for more research and more activism.

And I wonder about all the things that effect my life. How can I pick just one cause, and find the ribbon I’m supposed to wear to support it?