“This is the cause of my life: new hope that we will break the old gridlock and guarantee that every American – north, south, east, west, young, old – will have decent, quality health care as a fundamental right and not a privilege.”
-- Sen. Ted Kennedy

Like many (and perhaps most) Americans, I have been closely following this latest round of debate over health care and its reform in the United States. And like Ted Kennedy and others who believe that decent – and I would add, affordable – health care should be a right of all Americans and not a privilege, I have become increasingly dismayed by right wing opposition to the health care plans being debated in Congress and across the nation. To debate the merits of a plan is one thing; it’s quite another to use the tools of fear and ignorance and hate. Kennedy's death and his words and hard work on behalf of health-care reform and other social issues have finally moved me to give voice to my thoughts on these and related matters.

It’s become increasingly clear that the conservative agenda is simply to defeat the Democratic party’s health care legislation and, in the process, to deal President Obama a major, perhaps defining, setback. For all their criticisms of the plans being debated, conservatives (and even some Republican moderates, such as our own Sen. Lisa Murkowski) have failed to produce a reasonable alternative, even as their far-right factions have fabricated notions like “death panels” and evoked images of Nazi Germany. That Sarah Palin has, without proof or apology, participated in this fear mongering is a sad commentary on her own legacy. That she and Rush Limbaugh and their political kin continue to make outrageous and unsubstantiated charges despite all evidence to the contrary is both inexcusable and pathetic.

The evidence is overwhelming that our nation’s health-care system needs to be changed. It’s not working for the tens of millions who can’t afford any coverage at all and it’s not working for many of us who have to buy “catastrophic” coverage and who sometimes learn that even such coverage is not enough, as too many insurance companies employ staff whose job is to search for any reason not to pay. It is unconscionable that a country with our resources, our riches, should not provide decent and affordable health care to all of its citizens. Call it socialism if you like; the same term could be applied to many of America’s federal and state programs. Is it not a form of socialism that every Alaskan resident receives a Permanent Fund dividend check each year? What else would you call a government handout that’s available to every resident?

It bothers me no end that Alaskans, who applaud our Congressional delegation for bringing to Alaska billions of federal dollars each year, would then demonize Obama and the Democratic party for wanting to make health care affordable to all Americans. Alaskans are such hypocrites.

And as pointed out by others, where’s the logic in spending tens of billions of dollars annually in Iraq, on an unjust war sold to the American people on false pretenses – a war we never should have gotten into and one that appears to have made the Middle East (and consequently the world) a less-safe place – and, at the same time, not to take care for American’s own?

I’ve been reading lots of commentaries in recent days, from the left and right and middle (though it’s hard to say who’s in the middle these days), trying to better understand the American people and how we’ve sunk so quickly into this latest quagmire, after the historic election of President Barack Obama and the hope that came with his election. Three recent pieces in particular have stayed with me, not surprisingly written by people who at the progressive end of the political spectrum. One is a commentary by Leonard Pitts, which ran Aug. 23 in the Daily News, under the headline “Those who stun us are our fellow Americans.” Like Pitts, I find these to be “strange times” marked by “profound cultural and demographic changes that will leave none of us as we were.” I hear the utterances of Rush and Sarah and the shouts of angry ignorant people whose main goal, it seems, is to raise havoc at “town hall” meetings and, all too often, seem believe that our president is a tyrant who’s pushing for death panels and an end to our Democracy as we know it, and, like Pitts, I wonder: who are these people? As Pitts notes, “The distances that divide us cannot be measured in miles.” Some of the people who’ve attacked health care and our president seem to inhabit an alternate reality.

A second piece was Tuesday’s Paul Krugman column, “Reagan’s zombies just won’t go away.” Krugman, an economist and avowed progressive, rues the fact that our nation’s capital “is still ruled by Reaganism – by an ideology that says government intervention is always bad, and leaving the private sector to its own devices is always good.” Krugman then points out that not even the clear failure of Reaganism in practice has killed the idea, making it a “zombie doctrine: Even though it should be dead it keeps on coming.” This is relevant now, of course, because those who continue to believe and preach the zombie doctrine of Reaganism are among the chief critics of health-care reform, despite the inanity of their arguments. Krugman’s own arguments and examples make sense and I won’t repeat them here, since interested readers – left, right, and middle – can easily track them down. But I wholeheartedly agree with his concluding thought: “How will all this work out? I don’t know. But it’s hard to avoid the sense that a crucial opportunity is being missed, that we’re at what should be a turning point but are failing to make the turn.” And for that sad fact, we must hold both Democratic and Republican leaders accountable.

The third piece was on a different yet related topic: racism, which of course is simply one form of intolerance in what seems to sadly be an increasingly intolerant time. Intolerance is born of ignorance and fear, which as noted above are being used to demonize Obama and Congressional Democrats as they work to reform health care. The Aug. 22 commentary by anthropology professor Alan Boraas, “Alaska must deal with its racist past,” should be required reading for all Alaskans, especially those who believe that racism no longer exists or is not (or ever has been) a serious problem in Alaska, despite the recent hate crime perpetrated on an Alaskan Native by an ignorant and hate-filled couple right here in Anchorage. Boraas lays out many examples of Alaska’s racist legacy and it’s a sad – and I would guess, largely overlooked or ignored – reality that we must recognize and address if continued healing and change are to occur. There are plenty of other examples of intolerance, including Anchorage’s divisive debate over gay rights, and our mayor’s denial that discrimination and intolerance based on sexual orientation are a local problem. And need I mention our state’s intolerance of wolves and bears, which has led to unprecedented predator control efforts across state lands.

The common themes here, I suppose, are the necessary recognition of past and present failings of our community, state and nation, our culture, our species; and the need to change, to shift away from fear and ignorance and hate and a political system that too often favors corporations at the expense of people and other life forms, toward a way of being that treats all humans – and non-humans, too – more respectfully, more compassionately. May it be so.