Part I: Access

So, Obamacare is upon us, like it or not.

Why we just can't just have a single payer system, the only real system that makes any kind of sense, is beyond me. Well, not beyond me, I do understand that we live in a country where free market fundamentalist millionaires make all of the decisions and where any kind of logical, efficient centralization that might benefit the working class is a dirty word that makes conservatives hiss “that’s sssssssocialism!"

There's only one problem with this criticism. Obamacare is not socialism.  It’s corporate welfare, a handout to the insurance industry that may incidentally do some good for the average working person, but it's not socialism in any way.

That being said, I personally believe that socialism is the only sensible way to run a health care system, morally and economically. You can bitch about rationing if you want, but rationing is already the name of the game: some people have it and some people don’t. You can bitch about being told what to do by a higher authority, but you don't elect the CEO of an insurance company and you do elect the members of the government. You can bitch about choice, but in a socialized system all reasonable care is covered and all doctors are participating providers, so a patient has more choice. You can bitch about compensation, but in a socialized system doctors wouldn't have to buy malpractice insurance and could spend most of their time practicing their profession and less of their time fooling around with insurance companies. You can bitch about cost but a centralized system can be run cheaper and more efficiently. The list goes on.

Look, there is no perfect system, but health care is a basic need and a little more complicated than buying toothpaste, though if you have tried to buy toothpaste lately, that's getting pretty complicated as well. Socialize the hell out of it, I say. Just one kind of toothpaste that works is fine with me.

You see, I’m the socialist that your mother Anne Coulter and your daddy Glenn Beck warned you about.* I am not one of those crazy racist national socialists who worship Hitler, but a democratic socialist. In my interpretation this essentially means that I think that some things (basic needs) should be centrally managed by a democratically elected government that is transparent and actually concerns itself with the welfare of the people. By "the people" I mean the average people, the working people, the producers, the people who are not in control of the system and in fact pretty much get screwed by it and therefore require representation.

It's not that I think the government we have now is all of these things, but that is another issue for another day. It's not that I think everybody should dress the same way or even make the same income. It's not that I don't think people should take responsibility for their actions and it's not that I don't love liberty. However, the free market is not the answer to everything and it’s definitely not the answer to health care. If a guy is having a heart attack and he can't get to the hospital for treatment because he can't afford it, more likely because he works his tail off and doesn't get paid enough, not because he is a lazy bum, this is NOT liberty. However, even if the guy is a bum and his heart attack was his own fault because it was ultimately caused by eating too many cheeseburgers, I'm still not willing to tell his kid or his mother or his spouse or his best friend, "sorry, health care is a privilege, not a right", though I have to admit that my evil vegetarian brain does think that in this case the cows are getting their just revenge.

Are you going to tell a marathon runner that because her bad knee was caused by too much marathon running that it's her own fault and therefore she should just suffer the consequences and not get surgery? Find me one person who lives perfectly and dies without ever having a health issue. Even this person has at least one relative with congestive heart failure or a thyroid problem.

Anyone can go around shouting “Liberty! Liberty! Liberty!” and it sounds really good until one starts to actually think it through. Then one realizes that liberty becomes more complicated when there is more than one person involved, and the last time I looked there were several of us human being types stumbling around aimlessly on this planet.

There are always conflicting needs and conflicting values. There is freedom from and freedom to. There is the consideration that my liberty ends where yours begins. Laws and regulations are necessary unless one wants to live in a world run exclusively by bullies. You may have the right to drive a hummer, but I also have a right not to contract cancer from breathing your exhaust. You see how that works? It’s called civilization.

* Please, Anne, Glenn. Don't reproduce together.

Part II: Access to what?

Since Joe Lieberman killed the public option, I've decided there's no hope for this country. In fact, the day the public option died, I drove my Chevy to the levy and almost decided to throw myself into the raging river. Fortunately for my cats,  I instead decided to die a slow death and throw myself into art.

So I've given up on politics and just do art in my spare time, which I don't have much of, being a working person in America. Never-the-less, while toiling on a project one day I thought about how strange it was that in an indirect sort of way, Joe Lieberman was my inspiration. It was then that I started to think about health care again. What occurred to me was that back when I would run around with my forehead furrowed and my hands on my hips shouting about access, I forgot to examine the thing that I was insisting on access to.

"Access to what?" I thought.

You see, people, it became apparent to me that if we opened the proverbial door to the wild place called “health care in America” we would find a tangled web that is virtually impossible to navigate and even dangerous. In this world communication sucks, wasteful, unnecessary spending is rife, the big picture is often ignored, paperwork trumps people, patients are generally treated like shit, have most of their time wasted and are lucky if they leave the system better rather than more impaired, stressed out or addicted to pain medication. Sometimes they get well in spite of the system, not because of it.

Notice that I'm blaming the system, not the people in it. There are all sorts of competent, knowledgeable, compassionate, hard working health care professionals . However, I have seen the innumerable examples of the inefficiencies, callousness and frustrating serendipity of the health care system in America first hand because A. I'm a nurse working in a hospital and B. for most of my adult life I have been sick.

What I suffer from is a mysterious roaming back/hip pain that is usually absent but can be so crippling that I am unable to get out of bed. Over the years these “flare-ups”, as I call them, have become more frequent, more intense, and last for longer periods. Most of the time, I just plow through it, taking good care of my body with exercise and a balanced diet, but occasionally it gets so bad that I have no choice but to go to the doctor. Usually, by a "doctor" I mean Dr. Jack Daniels, which works pretty well and only costs 16.99 for a 750 ml bottle,  but sometimes, this means an actual doctor in an emergency room or clinic, the only two options I had as an uninsured person, which is what I was for most of my adult life.

 

In any event, over the course of twenty years, and hundreds of tests I was finally diagnosed with “ankylosing spondylitis” and, more recently by a rheumatologist with "some kind of spondylitis but not the ankylosing kind” since my spine apparently slides around like it’s greased with butter. This rheumatologist who I was finally able to see now that I do have health insurance, listened to me for five minutes, examined me for three minutes and then handed me a prescription for what I now refer to as the “miracle drug”: meloxicam.

 

I swear I'm not getting any kick backs, but I’ve never felt better in my life. Meloxicam is just a measly old NSAID, not one of those expensive designer drugs that you hear about on TV. You know, the ones that come courtesy of our clever neuroadvertisers who know that the only thing more attractive to the human brain than a person dancing is a content, smiling person arranging flowers. 

 

So, this may sound like a success story, but it was a bumpy twenty year road to my little yellow pill. For example, a few times I waited around the emergency room in excruciating pain until being sent home half a day later with an information sheet on exercises and instructions to take Tylenol. One time a doctor told me “I think it’s some kind of rheumatoid thing, but you wouldn’t be able to afford the medication so there isn’t much I can do.” One trip brought on a four day stay in a hospital on a heparin drip with somebody telling me I had a pulmonary embolism and another person, four days later, telling me that whoever read the CT scan was “hallucinating”. Most of the time I was barely listened to and then treated like a liar or a drug seeker. Once, a doctor practically shoved me out of her office telling me that, according to my blood tests I was in perfect health and suggested an over-the-counter anti-inflammatory and warm compresses. This despite the fact that I had told her several times that I slept on a mattress made of Aleve and snacked regularly on warm compresses. I was still in crippling pain. 

 

One day, I was hopping around an empty waiting room after drinking copious quantities of water for an ultrasound (this during the era of the “ovarian cyst” hypothesis of my mysterious roaming back pain) and contemplating the closed opaque sliding window that the secretary who I'd spoken to briefly forty five minutes before presumably still sat behind. I thought either everybody had forgotten about me and gone home for the day or there had been a nuclear war and the opaque window was made of some special radiation proof plastic that protected me. This window, I thought, was the perfect metaphor for the system as I saw it. Then, though maybe it was the azotemia since I’m pretty sure that my urine was backing up into my blood stream, I started to fantasize about my perfect health care system.

 

There was no doubt, first, that my perfect health care system would be patient centered, holistic, and completely tax-payer financed. There would be no insurance companies at all. The system would contain health care entities that would operate pretty much the same way they do now but with the stated cultural changes.  What would be really different, and this is the part that would have me hammered and sickled if I ever decided to bring it up at the next Tea Party Rally, would be the annual  weekend “health retreat”.

 

This is how it would work in a nutshell. All citizens, from the time they were born until the time they died would be strongly encouraged/incentivized to go. During this retreat, the person would get a full check-up that would include quality time with physicians and a plethora of routine and customized tests. The record that resulted from the health retreat would be in a protected data base that could be provided to the other health care entities as needed, so that the patient’s history/baseline would be laid out, in an organized, linear fashion. In addition, and as an incentive, the retreats would be pleasant, with plenty of down time for people to attend cooking and or exercise classes, get a massage, take a dip in the pool, or hang out in the sauna. It would be a weekend getaway for the whole family, just with some needle sticks and x-rays and maybe a few mandatory classes. For instance, all diabetics might have to attend a refresher course on diabetes, updating them on the latest information. The possibilities for education on prevention and healthy living are endless.

 

I think the benefits of this system are quite obvious. It would save time and money, emphasize prevention, catch serious problems early, improve communication and remove waste generated by redundant testing and scattered health histories.

 

So, this is what I imagined as I hobbled around in the empty waiting room, leaking urine into my panties and having no idea when or if somebody was ever going to come through the door to get me. After an hour and a half I ended up rushing to the restroom and just letting it all out. When I knocked timidly on the opaque sliding door to inform the secretary she shook her head scathingly, clicked her tongue and told me I had to reschedule for another day. 

 

 At least there hadn't been a nuclear war.

 

Thanks a lot

The other day, my loving, secure, generally happy relationship came to a tragic and abrupt end when my boyfriend of five years finally decided to leave me. I am as flabbergasted as I am devastated, since I thought we had a tight, permanent bond. The day had progressed in a normal fashion: we went out to breakfast, we went to the library, we bought a bag of fruit, we went home, we had lunch, I said "you seem uninspired. Was there something wrong with the lentil soup?" and he replied in a quivering voice; a lone tear meandering slowly over his stubbly cheek, "you don't want to know."

We debated this point back and forth for several minutes and arrived at the conclusion that, no matter how painful and difficult, I did, indeed, want to know. I wonder what would have happened if I'd said "you're right...judging from that particular phrase, your tone of voice, and that teardrop, I actually don't want to know. Let's go to the movies!"

Maybe we'd still be together.

He never said directly "it's over" or "I don't want to be with you anymore", but he didn't have to. He went briefly over the issues as he saw them. We are such very different people, he said. The cons had finally outweighed the pros. He had stopped being happy long ago. We have irreconcilable differences like the fact that I defend the rights of the ants in the kitchen and the spiders in the basement. That I think most beauty products are dangerous carcinogens. That I believe the band Styx is sort of cheesy. 

I want to buy some land, start a hobby farm and live off of the grid until I'm eighty-five. He wants to lay around on the deck of a cruise ship, play Eagles' covers on his guitar for baby boomers and eat hotdogs until he drops dead of a heart attack at sixty. He was holding me back from my dreams.

Since under similar circumstances and in less important relationships I had a history of wild emotional outbursts, I am proud to say that during this heavy moment I remained extremely cool. There was no point in begging, arguing, probing, getting angry or throwing things, I reasoned. I knew this only because I'd tried all five of these techniques in the past with terrible results. If you love something, set it free... I read this poem once in sixth grade and I was finally coming around to trying it out. Since I was busy being cool and he really didn't have a heck of a lot to say since none of his complaints was particularly new, the whole thing was over in less than twenty minutes.

"Leave," I told him. It took him a while to comply. He's slow and blubbery. Kind of like a manatee.

After he left, I had a long, pensive, numb moment where I simply sat in the rocking chair looking around the lonely house at all the things we'd accumulated, mostly items he'd scored at estate sales. I depended on him to supply me with wine glasses and bring home weird instruments. He was my decorator. He was my foundation, my best friend, my confidant, my only real family. I held his felt hat and cried.

Later, I got drunk on whiskey and went on a smashing rampage that resulted in several casualties including irreplaceable photographs, a complicated puzzle that required months to put together, and his Takamine guitar that he hardly ever played. Luckily, the Yamaha that he prefers was at a safe distance: out in the car along with his expensive sound equipment. I then wailed uncontrollably for hours and the cats scampered away taking shelter under the bed. I'm glad, because I didn't want them to hurt their little paws on the broken glass.

At the end of it, I still felt like shit. I stood in the middle of the destruction wishing I'd been a little bit more selective about the pictures I'd chosen to smash. For example, I wish I'd smashed the crude line drawing of the corkscrew with wings that was probably painted by some frat boy in Art 101 instead of the Picasso.

You are probably shaking your head at this juncture thinking "no wonder he left you. You are a lunatic and a destroyer of art and instruments and a frightener of felines". You are also thinking: "there must be another woman involved." 

And of course...you are right.

I'd had these thoughts for a while, not so deep down, in fact, they were pretty much perching like hungry pigeons on my frontal lobes. He'd been displaying odd behavior consistent with "cheating" for several months. I know how to identify these behaviors because I educated myself utilizing a credible website with pictures of really foxy people on it called "ten ways you know your partner is cheating" and he hit almost every one. I confronted him directly and often, though usually I tried to stifle the paranoia. I told myself that if I bugged him too much it might become a self fulfilling prophecy. Maybe his behavior has nothing to do with me at all, I thought. Maybe he is merely depressed and he'll talk to me about it eventually if I just give him some space. He is fifty-three. It is about time for his mid-life crisis.

The next day following the twenty minute drive-by break-up, I found out the truth when he came over. Lest you think he came pleading for me to forgive him and take him back, I need to disclose that his visit was only after I insisted that we at least needed to give our five-year relationship a few more minutes of our attention, and perhaps discuss those practical things like what we were going to do with the lease and the picture of the flying corkscrew.

"I smashed your Takamine," I said, gesturing to the splintered wreck in the corner as he walked through the door.

"I was going to give it to you anyway," he shrugged.

"Damnit!" I yelled, "I needed a good guitar!"

"Serves you right," he replied.

It was after this discussion that he slunk into the chair across the table from me and began to methodically and tearfully spill the beans. There was another woman involved, he confessed. A woman from Ohio.

"Ohio?" I asked, scratching my head, and taking a protracted sip of my blueberry tea, "you've never been to Ohio."

"We met on-line about a year ago," he said, "we've never actually met in person."

His wet eyes grew wild with disillusionment and pain as the absurd tale unfolded. They had started out as friends, he said, playing a mindless on-line picture guessing game. I remembered when he started playing this game. I remember him showing me a drawing she'd done of a rooster and thinking, "that's stupid". Just another one of those irreconcilable differences that he spoke of.

Eventually, they got to know each other. As it turned out, she was fabulously wealthy, talented, educated, kind and beautiful. She owned vast estates, jets and horses. He knew all of this because it had been confirmed by pictures that she had sent him and a few text messages from her uncle. At some point, he began to disclose intimate details of his relationship with me.

"Why aren't you married?" Miss Ohio sagaciously inquired one day while drawing a picture of a sausage.

"I don't know," he replied, "is that a submarine?"

It was then that he had the epiphany that perhaps he didn't want to make a life long committment to me. I was not the right person.

After many encounters like this and a growing bond, it began to occur to my boyfriend just who the right person was. She couldn't draw a sausage to save her life, but other than that, she was perfect. She was his soul mate. God had finally answered his prayers and it wasn't in the form of a scratch ticket. Miss Ohio had been provided by God to rescue him from the clutches of his destitution and his inadequate meat eschewing ant-loving hippi girlfriend who he had absolutely nothing in common with. In contrast, the lad who was raised on radio in a shack by the Mississippi river and worked in factories most of his life had much more in common with his rich jet-setting Julliard trained equestrian princess.

At least I can draw a decent sausage.

"At first I didn't understand what she saw in me," he confided, "a fat, broke, street musician who plays Eagles' covers? But she told me she was surrounded by so many fake people who were after her for her exquisite beauty and her deep pockets, and I was real."

Unfortunately, however, as it turned out, and as you probably suspected: she was not.  

When he left the afternoon following the twenty-minute break up he left with the knowledge that he had eaten his very last lunch of lentil soup and endured his very last conversation about the many possible designs of chicken coops. The next morning, she was sending a jet to come fetch him and carry him off to be with her for eternity. From hence forward, he would eat steak every night and make beautiful love. He would play Eagles tunes on the custom-made Gibson she bought for him and she would play Chopin on her polished grand piano naked beneath billowing muslin curtins. No more would he fret about the fact that he could not provide for his children. No more would he have to clean cat boxes, take out the recycling and cope with the fly infested compost. In addition, Miss Ohio was so generous she was even going to pay me off; his poor, abandoned, grumpy girlfriend who provided him with health insurance but never once put on a six-thousand dollar piece of lingerie. It would soften the blow and make him feel like less of a louse if I were compensated some how. It wasn't as though he didn't care about me at all. He loved me and wanted me to be happy, too.

I wouldn't have let him go for less than twenty-thousand.

"So, what happened?" I asked, since judging from his expression things hadn't exactly gone as planned.

While he waited for her, he explained, the story took a nefarious turn. First, a little background. Several years ago, Miss Ohio had watched as her prosecutor husband was brutally murdered in front of her by angry thugs and she had lived in constant fear for her life ever since. Consequently, she was under close survellience and had her own personal security guard. At the very moment that Miss Ohio was readying her jet for take-off to come rescue my boyfriend (did she mention she was a pilot, too?), her personal security guard, the man who had watched over her for years, flew into an unexpected jealous rage. Secretly, it turned out, he had always harbored deep feelings for her and now his chances for fulfillment of his fantasies were about to be crushed by the fat broke street musician. He wouldn't let that happen, he said. He sent my x-boyfriend threatening texts. He had no choice but to take her hostage. He sent him pictures of her naked, bound and gagged. My x-boyfriend didn't know what to do. He began to panic. He ran to our local police station, burst through the door and announced that the woman he loved was in trouble. Somebody had to take action quick!

"Sir," I imagined the police officer saying with a note of pity in his voice, "Calm down. Have a seat. You've been suckered. You've been scammed. You've been...catfished."

Catfished? I can see the look on my x-boyfriend's face as the truth finally dawned on him. As absurd as it may seem, it had never even crossed  his mind until that moment that the woman he loved wasn't telling him the truth. The very qualities that make my x-boyfriend so wonderful are the very same qualities that led him into this trap. He is honest, trusting and ethical to a fault. He could never have even imagined deceit of this magnitude. It is incomprehensible to him.

Trusting? Ethical to a fault? Honest? Though his behavior under these circumstances belies this description, I insist that for the most part, it is apt. The spell worked on him so perfectly, as though he'd been brainwashed. He reminded me of a person who had joined some sort of cult. I could hear the scaffolding cracking in his brain as he began to consider the stony reality that faced him. Even though the woman he had fallen for was not real, she had been real to him and the loss of her was just as painful as a death. In addition, he was questioning his faith in humanity and his faith in God. The night before he went to bed brimming with anticipation and hope for the future. Today, he woke up broke, unemployed, homeless and unhealthy.

Is it true that my boyfriend was unhappy? Probably, since I'm pretty much intolerable to live with. It is true that I wanted to perhaps adopt a child, something he didn't want to do, and that I was pushing an alternative life-style on him that he didn't really care for. So, yes, I think our relationship was destined to fail. However, as recently as six months ago he was buying me pianos and writing spontaneous love notes to me in soap on the bathroom mirror. Our relationship has been under a dark cloud since she entered his life. I think it brought out the worst in him and, in response, the worst in me. Compared to this perfect woman my flaws became more apparent. For example, the fact that I defend the ants in the kitchen might have remained a humorous quirk, a testimony for my true love of living things, instead of an annoying habit that reveals my disgusting tolerance for dirt and grime. Compared to this perfect life on easy street our humble slog to get by paycheck to paycheck must have seemed unbearable.

This brings me to the point of this entire essay. Obviously, I'll never know who this person(s) is/are or what her/his/their motive was. Since there was really nothing to gain, I have to conclude that it was merely sick entertainment carried out with no regard for the real consequences. Maybe the person who orchestrated this deception was lonely or suffering some how. Maybe they were bored. Maybe they were just mean.

However, no matter what the pathetic reason, I have one thing to say to the person or persons that scammed my boyfriend and wrecked my life. I'm forty-five and I waited forever for a relationship as wonderful as this one.

Thanks a lot, assholes.

My three minute fiction essay that didn't win

She closed the book, placed it on the table, and finally decided to walk through the door.

“I can’t take it any more,” she grumbled, as the door slammed firmly behind her: heavy and air tight, like the lid of a coffin.  

The now deserted chamber was hardly empty. Buried beneath the clutter and dust, Blattie perched upon the edge of a stool finishing off the last of his supper. Churning his head mechanically and crushing macadamia nut between his jaws, he pondered her departure with a mixture of curiosity and dread. Though it was true that she often left the apartment, there was something about this particular incident that felt portentous.

Blattie went over the sequence of events in his mind. First, of course, there was the piqued expression on her face followed by a horrified shriek. Second, there was the book:  larger and flimsier than others he had seen. Third, there was the ominous phrase “I can’t take it anymore”.  These words seemed prophetic. These words summoned doom.

Blattie attempted to quiet his ganglia. He told himself he was overreacting and appeased himself with gratifying memories. In fact, in most cases when she left the apartment Blattie was delighted, since when she returned, her arms were laden with a variety of colorful, crinkly containers. These packages would eventually be opened with a fresh, liberating pop followed closely afterwards by an indulgent deluge of food. He had become accustomed to the rich, sweet crumbs that gushed bountifully from these bags and her fingers like succulent rain.

For most of his life, as if enchanted, Blattie had trailed her through the well-worn paths of the cramped apartment. He scurried over stacks of papers, books, clothing, and electronics. He disguised himself among crates of toys, boxes of pens and skeins of yarn. While she slept, the gentle rise and fall of her body felt soothing as Blattie meandered and foraged for delicious treasures along the vast folds of her bed sheets.

Still, he could not suppress the visceral chill that originated from deep within his hemolymph and radiated along the ridges of his exoskeleton. “From plenty follows danger,” he knew the presage well, but since he had been born into prosperous times, the significance of these words had never fully resonated until this moment. There was an eerie connection between this event and the stories he had heard around the colony, harrowing stories of chemical Armageddon and scarcity that made the hair on the back of his legs stand up.

He knew, for example, that before his hatching there was nothing around the house to eat but wet newspaper, soap scum and, if one was fortunate, a little piece of fetid fruit. Once, his uncle Arthro had lived for months on a sliver of dried crust and a small cardboard box. Previously, there had been someone in the apartment who had similarly provided his ancestors with abundant sustenance. When she left for the last time she had uttered the same words: “I can’t take it anymore”.

Blattie flicked his antennae contemplatively. He had to uncover the truth and warn the colony. To confirm his suspicions, Blattie decided he needed more proof. Now confident and without hesitation, he darted to the table and mounted the book.  Peering over the edge, he apprehensively fixed his two-thousand eyes on a slip of yellow paper that had been torn from its pages: “Exterminator” had been marked with a thick red circle.

Blattie’s spiracles tightened. Just then, the lock clicked open. Blattie dashed into the corner as a fine, deadly mist filled the room.

From the bottom: a simple solution to the education crisis

“Ping.”

The first time I heard it I ignored the sound and enthusiastically returned to giving instructions for the day’s project to my generally apathetic ninth grade class.

“Ping. Ping. Ping.”

This time the sound was accompanied by giggles and snickers. I identified it immediately. Someone had lifted the beads that I used to illustrate how alleles separate during the process of mitosis and meiosis and was now playfully flinging them around the room.

“Ping. Ping. Ping. Ping. Ping.”

 Not wanting to appear too alarmed, my first reaction was to pause long enough to let the class simmer down. I then calmly requested that the “alleles” be returned. I waited. A few students shuffled reluctantly over to the supply table, deposited their booty, and shuffled back. I waited some more.

“Sorry for chucking the beads,” one student mumbled.

“You mean alleles,” I corrected.

When I felt like the distraction had been satisfactorily extinguished, I jovially began to address the day’s project, again. We had already wasted ten precious minutes, and I had spent all night planning and preparing. I was excited to get started.

“Ping.”

This was my first period class.

By third period it felt like an epidemic. I locked up the beads. I admonished myself for leaving them out in the first place. It was too late; there were already hundreds of them circulating. I tried humor, anger, even begging to get it to stop. At the end of my last period class, amidst beads whizzing through the air, ricocheting off of every surface, I crawled back to my desk, put my head in my hands and cried.

The bell rang. A few of the kids came up to me and said they were sorry. A few gave me lectures on laying down the law. Most of them hurried out the door, giddy with mischievous excitement. One student stayed after and helped me sweep up the beads.

This was one day of my first and last year attempting to teach ninth grade biology. There were days that were better. There were days that were worse. As the year wore on, disillusionment began to set in. Gradually, I was less likely to stay up all night designing and preparing some magnificent lesson and more likely to hand out a work sheet.

Half way through the year I alerted the administration that I was failing as a teacher and quite possibly having a nervous break down. They promised to visit my classroom more often. This happened for a few weeks, but the visits tapered off and chaos was eventually restored. I began to despise going to work. Everyday, I felt as though I was at war and had been shot full of holes. I made up my mind that I was going to quit.

About a month before the year ended the students had all heard the news.

“Why are you quitting?” they would ask, entirely bewildered, apparently ignorant of the extent of my torment. “You just started!”

“Because I suck at this job,” I replied, committing myself to the principle of complete honesty. “I want to teach you biology. I want you to love it as much as I do, or at least understand it. I want you all to be successful. The truth is, however, that I am unable to make those things happen, because, quite frankly, I don’t know how to handle your behavior.”

“Well,” one student said sarcastically, “they are just going to replace you with some earth hater.”

Okay, so sometimes they were funny, too.

I share this riveting story of downfall and defeat in order to raise a point that I find is omitted from every discussion I hear or read about education reform. Most experts seem to agree that “good” teachers are the most important factor in improving education. Therefore, much of the debate seems to center on how to attract “good” teachers and remove “bad” ones. However, what I believe goes unrecognized in this ongoing dialogue is the dual nature of the teaching profession. In order to be an effective teacher, one must be adept at two very disparate, sometimes irreconcilable, skills. The first is being able to teach and the second is being able to manage.

To illustrate this point, I am now going to brag that I am an excellent teacher. I am creative, interactive, enthusiastic, passionate, patient, and knowledgeable. Teaching biology is more than a job for me, it is a mission. I had been teaching for several years at the community college level, a job that I loved, but I needed full-time work and benefits, and felt I would be “good” with this age group. I, myself, had been a defiant kid who had been highly disenchanted with the prison-like, uninspiring atmosphere of public school. I remembered how this felt and was determined to make my classroom different.

On the other hand, as I believe the story above clearly exemplifies, I am not an effective manager. My disciplinary skills are pitiful. I am easily manipulated. I am a transparent pushover who hands out second chances like candy. Some of these kids scared me; they knew it and took advantage of it. Every day I would write up scores of students, only to find myself ripping these documents to shreds, telling myself that the kid really was not that bad, convinced that I would solve the problem “in house”.

Obviously, without these management skills, my teaching abilities were rendered irrelevant.  Despite my sincere efforts, very little biology was learned that semester. Though it is worth noting that it was only a few students who were regularly causing me trouble, I devoted the majority of my time attempting to address behavioral issues that were disrupting the classroom, and very little time actually teaching. Some days I was lucky if one full sentence escaped from my mouth.

So, the question is, where do I fall? Was I a “good” teacher or a “bad” one?

While we are oversimplifying, I would like to address this question by calling for a slightly more complex descriptive model. Instead of the good/bad dichotomy, I would divide up the profession into four categories: those who are good at managing and teaching, those who are good managers but bad teachers, those, like me, who are good teachers, but bad managers, and those that are terrible at both.

The first category is rare. These are incredible, superhero like people. The second category, unfortunately, is more common. I think it is obvious why this must be the case. It is a pretty good gig to get paid to play around on face-book while students sit quietly filling out work sheets all day. There may be a few teachers who fall into the fourth category, but most of them would probably never enter the profession to begin with. It is the third category that concerns me. There must be a lot of us, and I think that we are the ones that leave the profession in droves.

Could good teachers learn how to be good managers? Maybe…or maybe there is something inherently incompatible about these two roles. If a teacher is engaging her students she must be moving around the classroom. She must be physically next to them, conversing with them, asking them questions, keeping them on task. A good teacher rarely sits down to survey her classroom. She cannot always be aware of the spiteful little monsters in the corner, quietly dismantling her microscopes.

It is for these reasons that I propose my very simply solution to the education crisis. For those teachers who want it, I think all classrooms should have two adult figures: one who handles the teaching, and one who handles the managing.

Though there is not the space to lay out the details, I can think of many ways this could be achieved. Somewhat facetiously, my favorite would be paying fully vetted ex-prison inmates, former gang members, or other menacing characters to do the job. We could call them “bouncers”, though I would never advocate grabbing students by their collars and tossing them unceremoniously out into the hallway.

In any event, there is one thing I am absolutely certain of. I am certain that if discipline had been taken entirely out of my inept hands that year, all of my students would have learned…a lot. In addition, I would have loved my job. I would have gone back. I would still be teaching.

There must be a lot of us out there.

Lies of Omission: The Case of the McRib Sandwich

I turned on my radio, spun the dial, thought I’d listen to some news for a while

Grabbed the knob, spun it around, got NPR, here’s what I found.

Real news? Hardly a trace

Just one damn marathon marketplace

The nasdaq is up the dow’s in the cellar

And NPR sold out to Rockefeller.

                                 -Utah Phillips

I've been listening to NPR all of my life. When I hear it I have an autonomic response akin to a feeling of safety or security, like a suckling baby lying trustingly in the arms of my nurturing, adoring mother. The soothing, familiar voices of sensible, moral people placate my anxiety. I crave the sound of those disembodied voices: teaching me, offering me a path of clarity, protecting me from ignorance. NPR has been such a large influence in my life, in fact, that they have contributed to my development as a human being arguably more than my actual parents who, in contrast, basically tossed me to the wolves.

In the last few years, however, I've noticed a significant change in my relationship with NPR. I'm not sure exactly when it began since it was a gradual, insidious change, but lately, instead of the above described reaction that previously characterized my feelings towards it, I've become aware of a creeping hostility and distrust: a feeling of betrayal. It is as though my omniscient trackers of the truth who I rely upon to bring me back fat fruits of wisdom are instead returning from their journey with a product that might look tempting on the surface, but upon further investigation is flavorless and even full of rot.

Whether this bait and switch was always present and I was simply too seduced to notice, or whether it can be traced to the increase in corporate underwriters is a job for a much less lazy person, but there is no doubt that when I turn on NPR I am more likely to hear a piece on a cocktail recipe than I am an in depth analysis of the root causes of rainforest destruction. Rarely, do I hear any real criticism of American imperialism or any serious investigation into the perils of global capitalism. In fact, it appears to me that most reporting on NPR rests upon the a priori notion that the U.S. imperialist agenda and the principles of capitalism are essentially "good". Though there may be some attempt to explore the symptoms, the effects are rarely traced back to the root causes. The honest facade makes the obvious corporate bias even more sinister.

Of course, even if one takes issue with my use of the word imperialism or with my assertion that capitalism is the root cause of many of the world's woes, it should be widely agreed that it is the job of an organization that markets itself as a serious "news source" to perform the important public service of a thorough investigation into all of the forces that shape our world. It is not enough, for instance, to do a quick story on the destruction of the Amazon Rainforest without asking questions about the role of western companies meeting western demands for meat products, metal and lumber.

Let's look at a few concrete examples. A reading of the 2007 Morning Edition story entitled "Unlikely Allies Battle Deforestation in the Amazon" gives the impression that in general, global corporations with just a little bit of pressure from environmentalists are working towards a solution and that the ultimate cause of deforestation in Brazil is entirely the fault of local forces. Another similar example, "Electronics Fuel Congo Conflict" discussing coltan mining in the Congo sounds promising but ultimately barely touches upon the role of western forces and concentrates mainly on local corruption. Furthermore, the searches that I did on these topics did not turn up any more coverage. Each of these transcripts left me feeling hungry; and, damnit, if NPR has done its job I should feel satiated.

Speaking of not feeling satiated, in further defense of my thesis, I have examined NPR's coverage of the icon of American domination and capitalism: McDonald's Restaurants. Though there is no lack of potential material for criticism that includes the negative impact of fast food on health and the environment, the scourge of the low-wage job, the disgusting human/animal/environmental abuses of the meat industry, the presence of heavy metals in fertilizer, marketing drugs (fat and sugar) to children, etc. I find it difficult to find any NPR coverage in which any of these themes is even casually mentioned let alone pursued. Instead, NPR has squandered its coverage of McDonalds upon their attempts to make menu changes to satisfy cultural differences globally, their attempts to improve their image by complying with nutrition labeling and offering healthy choices, or, of course, the incredibly newsworthy adventures of the McRib Sandwich.

In each of these examples, I am not making the case that farmers, warlords, miners, purveyors of corruption, law enforcement, parents, overweight people etc. should not share the blame for the bad things that happen; I'm simply arguing that they don't deserve all of the blame. NPR does not utilize a broad enough lens and doesn't ask the really tough questions or even deign to put America or capitalism under the interrogation light. In all of the above cases, the damages done by global corporations and "first world" life-style demands are either omitted entirely or drastically downplayed. It's as though the NPR position is to sit back behind a glass divider and point out the terrible things in the world but not examine America's complicity or hypocrisy.

A few years back I read John Perkins' wonderful book Confessions of an Economic Hit man. In it, he makes some incredible allegations about the direct involvement of the US government and global corporations in the destruction of the economies of "developing" nations. Either John Perkins is a deranged compulsive liar or a messenger for an extraordinarily disturbing truth, or he's somewhere in the middle, but I couldn't count on NPR to investigate. They'd rather fill me in on Janet Jackson's nipples getting exposed during the half time show at the Super bowl.

Okay, I know there are other sources of news, such as Z magazine, Democracy Now! and Counterpunch, that I rely upon and wish had a broader audience. But NPR is "main stream" and there is absolutely no reason why they can't be just as intrepid. NPR promotes itself as "thorough" and "sincere" and "objective" and claims to provide a "broad perspective"; it should live up to its own description. Besides, even if the American imperialist agenda and global capitalism are forces for good then at least prove it to me by giving me the evidence. NPR simply leaves the question off of the table.

War is Peace

I've made the unsubstantiated observation that as a general rule, Americans dislike having uncomfortable discussions and therefore usually converse about neutral things, such as celebrities, products and pets. To illustrate, I was recently silenced at a party for daring to engage in conversation that was "too controversial" and not "inclusive" enough, even though I was talking about the presidential election. Swallowing my anger along with my next shot of whiskey, and mentally reviewing the long list of things that kill real democracy including complacency, I politely nodded my head to the litany of silly cat stories that followed. Just for the record, I experience joy in the presence of silly cats as much as the next person, but I take this as a given and do not feel the need to waste my precious social time reviewing the time-honored crazy antics of Felis catus. Yes, my cat runs around the house for no reason, too. Yes, it's funny. Now can we talk about politics and religion?

So, it was in this context that I was genuinely surprised whilst in the gym the other day shamelessly eavesdropping on a conversation that actually weighed a few pounds. I mean, maybe not enough to build rippling brain mass, but enough to tone up the ganglia a little. While most of the time I instinctively scramble the unbearable clatter that characterizes the average American conversation, in this particular exchange I began to hear words and phrases that wrestled my slumbering outer liberal into attention; words and phrases so provocative that I even made a special trip to the locker room so I could scribble them down on a paper towel since I can never rely on my disheveled memory. Later, I promptly lost the paper towel since I cannot rely on my disheveled memory. For this reason, I am unable to repeat these words and phrases exactly for you here, but I do remember the most sinister and provocative phrase of them all: "What's wrong with Ward Cleaver?"

Though I'd love to attempt to answer that question, I am trying to converge on a point for which such musings would prove superfluous. Therefore, I will resist the temptation to do so here and instead present to you a general description of this conversation that took place between two gentlemen on stair-steppers. During the conversation, each described himself in one way or another as "conservative". Beginning with the Ward Cleaver comment, the theme of this discussion was the destruction of the american family by the liberal/politically correct lurking among us, a theme that eventually evolved into reflections upon the growing epidemic of wussiness that these gentlemen believed is presently being vectored by overprotective parents to their all too sensitive, spoiled, allergy laden children. Again, in the interest of point convergence, I would like to put aside some of the tasty contradictions inherent in the simultaneous advocacy of these two ideas, and exclusively focus on the second one.

"I grew up in the Vietnam era," the older man said, "kids died. That's just the way it was. You got over it. Kids got beat up in the school yard. That's just the way it was. You got over it. If you didn't like the food you were given, tough, you ate it or you starved. You got over it. That's what made you a man. You didn't talk about it. You just got over it. I heard about this kid who got a pass on reading "To Kill a Mockingbird" because he was 'too sensitive'. I had to read that book when I was in school. I didn't like it, but I got over it!"

So, yeah, I thought, I agree with this guy, to a point. I think reading uncomfortable books improves your mind and playing in the dirt improves your immune system and I, too, have been frustrated by the spoiled nature of some American children when I have sweat dribbling down my face and thirty impatient people to wait on and mom is gently prodding little Samantha to choose between severally equally nutritionless items on the kids menu. This is me thinking: "Samantha, they will all make you hopelessly addicted to fat and sugar for the rest of your life, and Bessie the cow was inhumanely slaughtered just like Wilbur, so really, does it make that much of a difference? And, mom, give her ten seconds and if she can't decide, order her a bowl of broccoli and that'll teach her!"

However, most of the time, when I'm not in basic primitive survival mode like I am at work, I do prefer choice, democracy, kindness, peace, individuality and life to commandments, totalitarianism, cruelty, war, conformity and death.  So, in that regard the wussy movement gives me hope that there may be a trend inching forward in that direction in the small cultural subset of white middle-class suburban America, even if the bond of white bread dough that holds families together is being permanently disrupted by too much communication. 

As I was just about to make this very eloquent statement exactly how you see it here, however, the two men departed with their unchallenged opinions totally INTACT and I was left alone with sixty more minutes on the stair-stepper and an idiot box full of hundreds of nutrtionless yet tempting television choices. Unable to help myself, I turned it on and flicked through the channels in order to do a rough survey on the number of guns I saw. I was now entertaining chicken versus egg, life versus art, man versus woman, and other delightful dichotomies that typically charge through my mind in response to violence on television when suddenly and unexpectedly, a beautiful thought came blasting through, courtesy of the wussiness conversation.

And the Grinch thought of something she hadn't before. Violence, she thought, doesn't come in a store. Violence, she thought, is a little bit more!

Maybe, I thought as a choir of Whos joined in, the wussiness movement in our real lives (us being the small cultural subset of white middle-class america) sucks the warrior instinct out of us and deposits it upon the stories we tell as reflected by our pop culture. Just maybe, though I'm not entirely convinced, but maybe, the increasingly graphic violence in movies, television and video games does not desensitize the humans that feel the need to watch it, but preserves the aggressive instinct in a harmless fantasy bubble. In other words, increasing violence in this venue is a good sign for those of us rooting for a progression towards peace. I never thought I'd say this, but, hooray for Mortal Kombat!

But, of course, this from a person who argued once that increasing divorce rates are not a pernicious sign of the destruction of the institution of marriage, but an auspicious sign of intolerance for unhappiness.

I'm not saying it's true.

The Billboard and The Elephant

Oh, the things I would do if I didn't have to spend most of my time either going to work, at work, or recovering from work and had more money than just enough to get by! Don't get me wrong, the benefits of living on a $30,000/year income under American capitalism do not escape me, it's just that they are tremendously outweighed by all of the disadvantages: the amount of time I spend doing something I hate, the nagging fear that at any moment my life could totally collapse, the nagging fear that when I am old and incapacitated I will be lying in my shit  for hours, my only real wish being that somebody come by and put a pillow between my knees. Not to mention the systemic problems with capitalism: overproduction of waste, stress-related illness, environmental destruction, alienation, the emphasis on the more primitive aspects of our human nature, the destruction of community, income inequality, etc.

I am trying to escape from it, of course, and I have several long-term plans in the works to slowly extricate myself from the traps of mainstream American culture. This is tricky business, since my skin has grown around the straps and I must be careful not to injure myself in the process. More on this later. For now, I wish to fantasize on what I would do if I had a few extra million lying around or if I weren't so painfully shy that I could actually behave like a capitalist and raise the money.

First, I would save the elephants. I have an affinity for all living things and even defend the most hideous life-forms of all such as leeches, infectious organisms, mosquitoes, coakroaches, and humans, but I have a special relationship with the elephant that goes back several months when I was at the St. Louis Zoo for the first time since the whole concept of a zoo disturbs me on some level even though I know all about the great things they do. I think the feeling could be described as love at first sight when one of the adult elephants that was so far off in the distance that I could've squashed its head between my thumb and index finger, suddenly began to charge towards the crowd in a sort of slow, graceful trot with it's ears billowing in the wind. The beauty took my breath away.

"You're crying!" my boyfriend said incredulously as the elephant, who was now right in front of us, raised his trunk up majestically infront of his innocuous face, his incomprehensible size rendering the ballet even more sublime. "Yes," I thought to myself, "I'm in love with this elephant."

I think my boyfriend was a little jealous.

"I am not a man!" the elephant appeared to be yelling, who is arbitrarily a male in this story simply to avoid using the term "it",  "I am an animal!"

So, most of my money and time would go to help elephants and all other similarly threatened living things on our planet. Of course, any effort to alleviate human poverty, ignorance, greed, poor resource utilization and all of the other scurges of our species that either directly or indirectly lead to the destruction of our life-support system would also get my attention.

After that, if I had just a little money left over, I would promote public art. I would buy existing billboards and hire starving artists to paint upon them. That's it. Art not only for art's sake but also for the sake of reminding us all that while commerce matters, it's not the only thing that matters. In fact, I would even argue that while commerce gives us the tools to survive, art makes the effort worthwhile. That's why the art would be on billboards; since billboards are a medium for the marketplace, so placing something upon them with no conceivable monetary benefit would create cognitive dissonance leading to some sort of break in the dull, seamless routine that grinds around in the American middleclass consumer brain.

I remember hearing some anthropologist say on the radio once that Homo sapiens should be renamed Homo manipulans because what really characterizes us is not our knowing stuff but our desire to change stuff. I would take that one step further and say that our most unique diagnostic feature is not only our desire to change stuff, since other animals do this as well, but our desire to change stuff in impractical ways, which is what art is. Art is our special talent. Art is us.

So, on the one hand I'd use my resources to innoculate the world against the scurges of humanity and on the other I'd use my resources to promote our most amazing attribute. Then I'd buy some land and build an intentional community out of yurts and earthships. Then I'd dance, play music, raise bees, grow vegetables, socialize and generally enjoy the fruits of this one fucking life that I have.

But, of course, no time for that. I have to drag myself kicking and screaming to work. No, Bill Clinton, it doesn't give my life purpose.

Dear Hollywood, why do you hate me?

So, here I am at the gym watching television again and catwoman, who is portrayed by a young Halle Berry is beating the crap out of the older villain who is played by Sharon Stone. I watch the entire finale in which Sharon Stone, whose nefarious plan is to unleash a toxic compound upon the sagging, wrinkled faces of sad older women who can't stand the thought of losing their sex appeal, finally falls to her grisly death: the skin on her cheeks cracking to reveal the aged person that she was all along underneath her artificial marble-like skin.

"There it is again!" I think to myself as I pin the example on the schema I've constructed specifically for my casual and biased research into this phenomenon that I like to call "Snow White  Syndrome": the blatant loathing, continuous thrashing and/or outright obliteration of the older woman in Hollywood movies. Though I realize that this is not the only lie that Hollywood tells, it is one that I find isn't often discussed. While the young female is busy kicking ass in order to perpetuate the myth that violence is strength, the older female is either being brutalized, extinguished, or she is simply unpalatable: weak, desperate, hideous, jealous or sad.

For example, while practical, clever, gorgeous, warrior teen Katniss is whipping out her bow and arrow in the Hunger Games, her mother is so emotionally unstable that she is unable to be a parent and her older female escort is a frivolous phony who apparently bathes herself in cover-up. To pull an example from an entirely different generation, Working Girl shows a young, smart, unthreatening female breaking the glass ceiling, but only in the context of replacing her older counterpart who is envious, bitter and cruel. It is also important to note that in each of these movies, the older male is portrayed as kindly, paternal, and in even in cohoots with the younger woman to participate in the scintillating marginalization.

In any event, I guess it wouldn't bother me quite so much if the contagion remained quarantined in the movies. I see the war on the older woman in real life and you know where I see the missles coming from the most? Women. Women who say they don't like women. Women who turn their beautiful faces into expressionless masks because there is so much pressure to worship youth. Older women who engage in persistent self-loathing and repeat disparaging myths about themselves such as "men grow old gracefully and women just grow old". Young women who say they don't care if they turn their skin to leather in a tanning booth because "nobody will want me when I'm older anyway." Never mind the cancer.

It's as though women are telling themselves these things in order to buffer the inevitable blow from their bleak futures as hopeless, lonely Mrs. Robinsons. However, it appears to me that it is less like "being realistic" and more like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The conclusion? In Hollywood, it's still a man's world.  Women are allowed to be strong as long as we are elevating male values of aggression or entertaining male fantasies for sex and nurturing. We can run around in tight leather jumpsuits with guns strapped to our luscious young bodies and we are allowed to be mothers and grandmothers. If we are older, we are allowed to display our power only if it is fueled by a deep jealousy of the younger woman that is replacing us and is eventually destroyed only to reveal the pathetic, weak person who is buried inside. What we are not allowed to be are older women with sex drives and feelings of self-actualization, real confidence and fulfillment.

"Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's more attractive, happier and healthier than ever? Who's feeling like she finally owns herself, finally knows herself, finally kind of likes herself? Who's finding beauty and delight in the complexity of the mind and doesn't really give a rat's ass about the complexion of the skin? Who wouldn't go back to being twenty again unless she were paid enough money to spend her life walking the planet and saving elephants?"

Me, at forty-five. Fuck you, Hollywood.