The Public Option

You cannot have effective and substantive health reform in this country without the inclusion of a public option. It’s the only way that people, who are your average consumers, can have affordable, meaningful, and accountable alternatives available to them in the marketplace. A public option would force insurers to respect consumers, moderate costs, and compete more honestly in the marketplace.

Public insurance is clearly more efficient. Medicare has proven that! It is able to cost less and cover more, as can be seen in every other industrialized nation. And it’s pro-choice, if you will. It doesn’t yet get rid of the mess that is health insurance in the private sector, but it allows folks the select a preference. Besides, it lowers administrative costs and operates outside the need for profit. It forces private insurers to respond in kind or price themselves out of demand. If there’s anything that needs to be done at this time by the government, it is to throw its weight around to ensure quality healthcare for all of its citizens!

Many folks have historically conveniently claimed that the government is spendthrift, burdensome, inefficient, wasteful, and—get this—can’t compete with the private sector. Now, they’re running scared with the idea that a public option will destroy the corporate insurance system—screaming buzzwords like socialism and Afro-Leninism to capitalize on xenophobic ignoramuses. Enough is enough! What business are we about anyway? Are we to care more about corporate interests than we are about what will best serve the masses of people, especially those who can’t navigate the private insurance system for lack of funds or arbitrary qualifications? Right now, business has not proved that it can serve the people better than the people represented by government. And they’re afraid of that challenge!

The public option is not meant to replace or get rid of private insurers; it’s not insisting on a single-payer plan, like it or not. What it does do is provide a crucial counter position to private insurance plans that are becoming increasingly consolidated and eliminating real choice. The bottom line is that if we are seeking to provide affordable quality care to consumers, a public health plan is essential.
We have not yet even talked about the unemployed, who, obviously, cannot rely on an employer largely to assist in the acquisition of health insurance. A public option would not be tied to an employer, and those who find themselves at the bottom of the economic ladder would be able to get the help they need to stand and become more marketable. It seems we would rather embrace a broken system that is clearly failing millions upon millions of people as well as the uninsured, than develop an option that makes affordable, accessible, and quality health care a reality for us all.

What other way is there to curb costs and crooks than to have a federally overseen and controlled health care system? Basically, I believe not to have a public option is immoral and a travesty of justice. The probity, or moral fiber, of a nation is measured by how the poorest are treated. If we are interested in making the United States a stronger nation, we need to ensure that all of its citizens have affordable, unimpeded access to quality health care. Health care is one of our basic existential needs, and as such people should have the right to medical care so that they can continue to be or become regular contributors to the body politic and the entire sociocultural milieu. I have an especial concern for those who are poor and those who have been perennially locked out of the structures, processes, and policies of our democratic republic. They are the ones who are screaming for a public option, and their voices are not really being heard. As a matter of fact, their lives depend upon it, both figuratively and literally! A public option is the only meaningful, ethical, and hospitable way to reform the health system today.
 
Ahungered and impoverished are the least of these
Let our love for them abound;
And on Jericho’s Road aid the needy. . .
Lift each person off the ground.

As long as there is poverty,
No one can be secure
As long as some are unhealthy,
Nobody can be pure.

As long as my brother’s hungry
And my sis has shoeless feet,
No one can eat comfortably
Or walk the streets complete.

As long as some are ignorant,
Those with knowledge grow wry;
As long as our hearts are distant,
Souls side by side shall die.

As long as people hunger, as long as people thirst,
And ignorance and illness and warfare do their worst;
As long as there’s injustice in any of God’s lands—
We are our neighbor’s keeper, and dare not wash our hands!

Mariachi Music Not Real? Ai Yi Yi Yi!

During the month of September, folks in the state of Jalisco, particularly, and in Mexico, generally, the music known as Mariachi is celebrated. Its origin, just like the meaning of its name, has been hotly debated over the years, but contemporary mariachi music stems from nineteenth century amalgamations of indigenous folk traditions with articulations from both Spain and Africa. Initially, flutes, drums, and conch-shell horns figured prominently in the musical ensembles in Mexico; eventually, they gave way to importations from Spain of violins, guitars, harps, woodwinds, and brass horns. Some of these European instruments were reconfigured by the criollo and mestizo players. More recently, a deeper toned guitar known as the guitarró n helped form the bass sounds of ensembles, and a five-string guitar called the vihuela and trumpets, another foreign introduction, added depth and richness to the music.

Early in the twentieth century, mariachi started to flourish, especially beginning in the 1930s. With ensembles becoming commercial entities, other dimensions of the tradition started to expand and garner focus, such as the move from workers’ clothing to more expensive, embroidered dress ware and from the footwork known as zapateado to more intricate heel-pounding and shuffling machinations. As a result of increasing commercialization, mariachi music, in a sense, moved away from its folksy, religious, and spiritual roots to reach a wider audience. The songs now lift up the entire gamut of human existence: loving (of course!), political issues, honor and nobility, the reality of death, and rites of passage. And everyone knows “La Cucaracha” to some degree!

I am not a connoisseur of music. I do not read music fluently, and I dabble with but really do not play any instrument. However, I have a fine musical ear, have definite tastes for listening to any kind of music for just about three minutes, and have a clear understanding how music can often tell the story of a particular cultural heritage and traditions. Consequently, though not a music critic, I am keenly aware of the value of peoples’ musical repertoire.

On a few occasions, I have been serenaded by a mariachi band and very easily recognized the power and persuasiveness of its rhythms. There always seems to be a graciousness, a kindness, and a level of hubris, i.e., passion and cultural pride, that accompany the songsters and instrumentalists as they mingle among the listeners. Never has it entered my mind that what I was hearing was not “real” music or that the genre was not worthy of being studied in postsecondary schools.

To make such claims is similar to the denigration of Ebonics, rap, art songs, Spanish that is not Castilian, and the history of underrepresented groups in our body politic. It is a travesty of justice, grossly ignorant, and symbolic of the type of overt cultural discrimination still lingering in the twenty-first century. The rejection of mariachi as a legitimate musical form worthy of study should not be tolerated, and folks need to get together to make sure it is fully received into curricula.

Race in the Obama Era

Last year, we celebrated the forty-fifth anniversary of the famous March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. On that day, Martin Luther King, Jr., gave one of the greatest speeches in the history of this nation, “I Have a Dream.” In that address in front of the Lincoln Memorial, King elaborated on an aspect of his vision: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” The cataracts of time have allowed people to misconstrue King’s statement as imagining a color-blind society in some future reality. King enjoyed his cultural heritage too much to endorse such a vacuous and myopic idea. What King was saying was not that people would not see race, ethnicity, or cultural background anymore, but, rather, would not prejudge or oppress them as inferior human beings based on these characteristics of appearance and heritage. At the point of his death by an assassin’s bullet, King was acutely aware of the long road ahead yet to realize his dream.

Certainly, there can be no objectively reasonable gainsaying the fact that race, racial prejudice, and racism pervaded the caucuses, primaries, conventions, and general election in 2008, and the short period since the election could not possibly have eliminated these elements. The challenges to President Barack Obama’s nationality, the liberty with which conservative media stars have freely characterized him with racial invective, and the reactions to some of his Cabinet appointees, nominees to the bench, and hires to assist him in foreign and domestic policies are not simply forays from those who disagree with his politics, but, rather, personal attacks that have xenophobia as one of their components.

Obama sought to deflect some of the race baiting and hatred by renouncing support or association with individuals such as Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and Trinity United Church of Christ pastor emeritus Jeremiah Wright. Continued deliberate alignment with these and other blacks would have scandalized Obama’s attempt to appear moderate and painted him as the stereotypical angry black man. The very fact that Obama was compelled to respond to the racialization of his campaign drives home the point that the United States of America is far from the color-blind society that many claim his very ascendancy to the presidency supposedly proves.

When an esteemed Harvard University professor is humiliated and arrested right outside of his home after displaying legitimate evidence that he indeed lived there, how can we proclaim that we have arrived at a place where race is no longer a relevant social construct, however scientifically flawed it is? Thank God it was a Harvard professor and not a member of the black or Latino hoi polloi, so to speak, who would still be incarcerated for disturbing the peace, interference with official acts, attempted assault on a police officer—you name it! Manning Marable, another esteemed Ivy League professor of African descent, is accurate when he states that African Americans still suffer from “massive unemployment, massive incarceration, and massive disenfranchisement.” Public intellectual and Princeton scholar Cornel West, who can reissue his bestseller of the early 1990s, Race Matters, in the first decade of the twenty-first century and strongly argue why Democracy Matters, continues to report lamentably that he can stand on a corner in New York City and be repeatedly ignored by taxicab drivers. When the first leading African American environmentalist can be railroaded to resign as an adviser to Pres. Obama because his anger understandably got the best of him during the George W. Bush reign, the gravity of the claim that racism is a figment of our pigment’s imagination cannot be overlooked.

Amid the reality of an Obama Administration, we can remark that this nation, which started off with the canard that all men are created equal, has significantly improved in race relations and has removed enough of the shackles of race prejudice to elect a biracial person to the highest office. In a sense, the long night of racism has been imbued with the sunlight of cultural pluralism. This dawning of a new day, however, is still a cautionary tale, for there are a number of genuine impediments to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for many in this country, especially for people of color. The debate over whether or not to have a public or governmental option in the health care system is, indeed, a case in point.

Who, today, needs a public option? Is it not primarily those who have no health insurance and inadequate access to health care? Moreover, who are disparately numbered among the unemployed, emergency room patients, the uninsured, and patrons of free health and urgent care centers? These are the persons for whom a public option, a reduction of health care and prescription drug costs, and increased access to quality medical care would be lifesaving policies, literally! Whereas we may not be able to point the finger at one individual or a group of persons whom we can call racist without reservation, we can precisely pinpoint the perpetuation of institutionalized racism in the structures, processes, and policymaking of our resplendent democratic republic.

In 1953, when Howard Thurman became the first black dean of the chapel at a predominately white postsecondary educational institution, Boston University, the dean of the B.U. School of Theology and the president of the university received innumerable complaints from the white parents of prospective and current undergraduate students there who believed their children were being endangered by some libidinous and swarthy demonic savage. Despite these ridiculous, but serious, claims, the dean and the president prevailed. By his death in 1981, Thurman was regarded as one of the top ten preachers in the twentieth century! Here we are over a half-century later, and parents and conservatives alike protest the appearance of the nation’s president at a school to encourage students to develop good study habits so that they could persist to graduation, make something out of their lives, and give back to their communities and to the country. Does race play a part, however subtle, in the remonstrances against his visit? You bet it does!

We do not have to look far from where we are right now to ascertain that racism is alive and well today. Our greater metropolitan area remains divided along racial lines. Not only is there a chasm between what is known as east and west Waterloo, but also is there perhaps an even greater tale of division between the two cities. Somehow—and we claim we don’t know how—this divide is perpetuated year after year: as new students arrive on the UNI campus, as games between high schools are played, as civic leaders compete over commercial development, as faculty, staff, administrators, principals, teachers, and merit employees are hired, as curricula virtually stagnate, as cultural innovations and downtown renovations stubbornly ignore the contributions and achievements of people of color, and walls of segregation remain strongly intact. Yes, we’ve come a long way in our racial understanding, but we have a long way yet to go in our reach for a society free of racial discrimination.

Fleecy locks and dark complexion

Cannot forfeit nature’s claim:

Skin may differ, but affection

Dwells in black and white the same.

Were I so tall as to reach the pole,

Or to grasp the ocean at a span,

I must be measured by my soul—

The mind is the standard of the man.

Yes, I am happy that Iowa was a springboard for the successful run of Obama for the Democratic Party’s nomination and the general election. I am not ashamed to divulge my having a special sense of racial and ethnic pride when I say President Obama. But without sounding too immodest, I am not so stupid as to believe that his inauguration ushered in a post-racial, color-blind utopia and I just need to get over being so ensconced in the civil rights movement of yesterday and Martin Luther King, Jr., that I am unable to see that we have arrived at the fulfillment of King’s dream. The fact of the matter is that our society is not a dystopia, an imaginary place where people are dehumanized and fearful, but it is certainly still a real place where people are debased, impeded, suppressed, miseducated, overlooked, and misdirected in a way that is not arbitrary, accidental, or unknown, solely on the basis of their race and ethnicity. Although the deliberateness of the structures, processes, and policies cannot always be fingered at specific individuals, the results can be easily identified as well as how to fix them. The question is not whether we have the knowledge or the wherewithal, but, rather, whether we have the will. Clearly, enough of our leaders at all levels of government and location, folks in the public and private sectors, have not had the will.

As Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poemed:

Honor to those whose words or deeds

Thus help us in our daily needs,

And by their overflow,

Raise us from what is low!

On talk radio one night recently, I caught a conversation about Obama’s so-called Afro-Leninism, and how he wants to put every major industry and service under the federal government. Despite my immediate reflex disaffection towards such demagoguery, I found myself very disturbed by the use of the descriptor “Afro.” What the host and the caller said about their perception of socialism, which was patently skewed and erroneous, seemed to have nothing to do with the president’s race. Or did it? When the chatter moved to talk about recognizing when Obama’s about to lie or deceive the audience, because his nose gets wider, broader, and thicker, well, then I had my answer. Thousands upon thousands of people listen to this drivel frequently—and not with the disgust I felt for that brief moment in my car, but with derision, agreement, and disrespect. With such folderol in the media, on Capitol Hill, and in the social institutions all around us, race in the Obama era is a classic case of that saying, “the more things change, the more things stay the same.”

Judge Rightly!

The fact that Judge Sonia Sotomayor is a Latina inevitably circumscribes much of her life experiences and her perceptions, including the legal system. As a person of color in the United States of America, with its history of racism and its ongoing racially discriminatory practices, Sotomayor would be naïve and intellectually shallow not to perceive the influence of this racialization on people and to consider it often in the reflective process. Likewise, with the patriarchal and male-chauvinistic orientation of much of Western society, including the U.S., Sotomayor would be crazy not to have a gendered view of the nation and the world. Race, sex, and gender matter in this country, and it is incumbent upon women of color to take into account these categorizations as they live and move and have their being, so to speak.

Consequently, the hullabaloo made over Sotomayor’s comments about the importance of race and gender—even in judicial decision-making—is preposterous. No one should have to deny one’s experiences and the shaping of one’s essential being, intellectual, emotional, and otherwise, in order to make allegedly objective arguments, rulings, interpretations, and so forth. Besides, we humans are all subjective beings with a bevy of presuppositions, affinities, orientations, etc., and we must try very hard to ascertain what they are and be forthright about them. However, we cannot simply ignore or alter them merely to assimilate to an imaginary “way” that looks eerily like traditional white-male-dominated societal constructs. Needless to say, I was viscerally delighted to discover Sotomayor’s comments about how interrelating and interacting with these man-made characterizations of personhood not only influenced her life significantly, but also helped her to become a wiser and more unique individual. The cacophony over these remarks were simply sounding brass and tinkling cymbals, to coin a phrase. Her words are standard reflections from people who have been unduly and unfairly prejudged and stereotyped.

Labeling Sotomayor’s judicial disposition is challenging, to say the least. Her arguments and opinions demonstrate a pragmatism and a deference to precedence that give the appearance of being a conservative. The majority of her dissenting opinions have conveyed a disposition to be an iconoclast, infracaninophile (supporter of the underdog), and indignant liberal (or civil libertarian). Anyone would be hard pressed to characterize her as a judicial activist. She could be described as someone who might resemble Justice Antonin Scalia in much of her agreement with the majority decisions, yet who is as unpredictable as the person she would be replacing, namely Justice David Souter. Although she may not be the sharpest tack on the judicial board, so to speak, her Princeton undergraduate and Yale Law School education holds her in good stead.

Because of the enigmatic nature of Sotomayor’s judicial record and some of her public addresses, I believed she would definitely be confirmed in due course with some alacrity. Now, it will be nice to see President Barack Obama’s first U.S. Supreme Court nominee succeed and to applaud the rise of the first Latina to that hallowed spot. I am a little chagrinned, though, that it might take a while before we see on the highest bench the likes of Justice Thurgood Marshall, who unashamedly used his life experiences, cultural background, and understanding of the limits of the judicial system arguably to forge a better society for us all!

Universal Health Care

The puzzle of what to do with skyrocketing healthcare costs, inadequate access to health care, and poor quality medical diagnosis and treatment is not as perplexing as people are alleging. Clearly, we have to curtail costs, which are basically a product of greed, profiteering, and deregulation; we have to make access to quality care unencumbered and seamless for all citizens; and we have to develop teams of medical experts to improve accuracy of diagnoses and concomitant paths to cure or management of disease. These are not a complex set of actions; rather, they comprise fundamental social ethics between and among human beings and the institutions they develop. What is at stake in how we proceed boils down to a simple axiological position, in the form of a question: What type of country do you want the United States of America to be?

I want an America that ensures all citizens have their existential needs met and provides opportunities for them to participate fully in the structures, processes, policymaking, and services of our society. I want an America that bolsters life chances through a comprehensive wellness system that is preventative in its focus and free of charge. I want an America that values the potential of each individual and that manifests this ethic by helping everyone positively to contribute to the body politic. Free access to quality health care from birth is merely one aspect of this overall national endorsement of the person: the short-term expenditure for this new moral posture will have exponential benefits for all inhabitants of this country and will, in turn, redound to increased stability and security of this country in the world arena. I want an America that affirms the importance of each human being and eliminates impediments to citizen-actualization.

My perspective is based on a philosophical axiom I have held since high school: the probity, or moral fiber, of a nation is measured by how it addresses and redresses the plight of the poor. In the United States of America, it is patently clear: we have been grossly unethical with respect to the indigent! The richest country in the world virtually ignores its poor and frequently stereotypes them as reprobates who are solely responsible for their circumstances. But the fact of the matter is we are all interdependent beings, persons-in-community, if you will, and no one lives entirely in a vacuum so much so that he/she singularly, or singlehandedly, creates one's own predicament. We are all, in a sense, contributors to individuals’ adverse situations, including the individuals themselves—speaking of the impoverished—and this culpability mandates our substantive involvement in the effective rectification of their plight.

The costs of medical care, health insurance, and prescription drugs have been allowed to soar while people’s real income has been shrinking. Expecting people to pay for such inflationary increases is absurd, especially when a primary motive for escalating costs is to maintain or expand profit (and to increase the take-home pay of medical professionals). Whereas I am not in favor of escalating the national debt in the process of providing quality health care for every citizen, I do believe there are other aspects of our governmental expenditures, such as excessive support of the military, which can vastly be reduced in favor of instituting a universal health care system.

This universal health care system I am proposing may seem radical or revolutionary. Perhaps, it appears so because the type of America we still idolize and exalt is one that extols rugged individualism, claims we live in a meritocracy, pretends we all have the same life chances, and approbates competition in an unregulated market. A break from this way of thinking is anathema and formidable for many and, thus, we hear only calls for reform and gradual changes, or the mantra of maintaining the status quo, while the conditions of the poor and disadvantaged worsen and an increasing number are mercilessly incapacitated or even die from lack of access to basic medical care.

I understand that change most often occurs very slowly in our country for a variety of reasons, and true structural changes take even longer. However, I choose not to kowtow to institutional gradualism—at least not in my advocacy. In my opinion, every citizen should be guaranteed quality health care that does not rely on a job or an income or contrived competition between the public and private sectors. I believe medical services for all Americans should be free. As aforementioned, this charity will make us a more vital, stronger, more stable, and more participatory and wholesome society than we have ever been! Now, let us as citizens indefatigably work together honestly and sincerely to get rid of wasteful spending, reorder our priorities, and realize this new America.