If I were the president

President Kennedy famously said, in his inaugural address to the American public think not what your government can do for you but what you can do for your government. While it is true that he did not enforce the mechanisms that brought about the situation we are here, we can understand that it is this ethos that has brought us here today. So in this modern time, at this defining moment, I too return a question to you America: and that is, what can your government do for you? For too long have we sat by and watched our nation erode, the middle class disappear, the very cost of existence itself fly higher and higher and higher beyond any person’s dream of ever reaching the middle class. For too long have the wealthiest and most abhorrent Americans lorded above us all in palaces of gold and silver, lined with their ill-gotten opulence and greed. For too long have we worked, and worked, and worked all based on the faith – that simple faith – that we would all like to believe: that this is a free nation, that this is a just nation, that this is a nation where everyone who comes to these shores can achieve.

So then, we must understand that this statement too is true: freedom is not free. The freedom that we enjoy was fought for and purchased by the blood, sweat, and lives of our working men and women in the military and armed services. They share their kinship with every American soldier who has fought in every American war stretching back to the formation of our nation. But all too easily to those who have most commonly used this phrase over the past eight years, all too soon do they forget the other soldiers. The soldiers who fought against them, on American soil, to afford us all the liberties that we have today.

The soldiers by the name of Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King. By the names of Cesar Chavez and Malcolm X. Of Susan B Anthony and Gloria Steinem. Of Franklin and Teddy Roosevelt, who struck down the monopolizing interests of big business so that we today might have a middle class. These are the soldiers who have fought, and bled, and worked, and died here in America to make the world that we know today. These are the soldiers who have fallen by the wayside in the past eight years, for good reason least of all, for they are on the right side of history. You will not hear these soldier’s names come from the lips of the conservative moment. You will not hear their names invoked in glorious adulation. Because when they see these names, when they hear these names the sound that they hear calling to their ears is the million-strong voices of history calling again and again: you are wrong.

And such it is that we come to healthcare America. This which not even the 20th century’s finest president could accomplish, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. For forty years, we have felt the pinch of those who would purport to do us well. For forty years, we have felt the tightening purse strings of the moneylenders, schemers, and crooks at the heart of the insurance industry. For forty years, we have suffered under their tyrannical rule. So often do the Republicans incite the very spectre of our plan. It will ration healthcare they say, it will cause old people to die they say, it will result in care not getting to the most deserving people, at the most appropriate time.

To those who speak such words, and to those who agree with them, I will say this: Where do you live? Where do you live that this does not already occur? Where do you live where your fellow citizens are not routinely denied coverage, open to the fickle winds of bankruptcy the moment they lose their jobs. Where do you live where the majority of American’s primary health insurance is the local emergency room that will open them up to the exorbitant costs of the insurance industry? Where do you live, where the current system is fine with you? I understand why my compatriots on the right say the things they do. After all, they are in no position to suffer. They are already serviced by one of the best health insurance plans in the nation: the congressional public option. That of course, and 1.5 million dollars a day can make a man more certain to stand up for himself than stand up for his constituents. But these are the stakes America. These are the standards by which I will measure whether this succeeds or fails.

-A public option, at existing medicare reimbursement rates to drive costs down.

Joseph and the Maunch

Joseph took pills that nobody saw and nobody knew about, that no one had prescribed to him, given to him, sold to him, bought for him, or even mentioned to him, but he took pills nonetheless. Every day he trudged the seventeen blocks it took him to walk the long poured concrete sidewalk from his apartment to his office, and every morning right before entering the office, as his hand brushed against the clamming cool of the wrought-aluminum door handle, he would quietly flip the pill into his mouth, and swallow.

He did this for a few reasons. One: because the pills were not paid for, they were not taken from his deductible, and if you had pills just lying around the house, eventually – if you lived your life as Joseph did – you got around to taking them. Two: because – unbeknowest to everyone – Joseph liked to be left alone. This is not to say that he did not enjoy the company of his coworkers: he did. However his interactions with them were small, he did not express any particular desire to engage in the usual office conversational pieces regarding reality shows and politics and other mish-mosh, but for the most part he did not find them altogether disturbing.

No, what the pills provided for Joseph was a reprieve from the maunches.

The maunches was the name he had given to the sound, given because when it had first started occurring it had been the copy machine: one day out of the blue the seams in the plastic had opened, a long gaping tear ripped apart the machine, and long jagged teeth had appeared from the gap, trimming the abyss with strange plasticine molars. He remembered backing away slowly, backing out of the room as the copier hummed along endlessly, the sterile musk of ozone in the air, and the large gaping mouth flapping in the wind, sounding *maunch*maunch*maunch*maunch*maunch*.

He scampered back to his desk, frightened, afraid, unsure of what he had seen, and absolutely certain that the machine was printing out far more than the twenty copies of page reports that he needed. His eyes darted around the room: everything there, everything normal, but still the persistent *maunch* floated to him on the air-conditioned breeze, a perpetual reminder of what was there, and how he would eventually have to go get the copies.

After several long minutes, and just as Joseph was about to will himself to brave the emanating *maunch* and go get his seventy copies like a man, the sound stopped; replaced only by the familiar hum of the copier, copying away just like any other day. This initiated yet another bout of petrified contemplation for Joseph: what was going on, why did the copier have teeth, what was he going to do with fifty extra copies of page reports, and most pressingly: was he gone? He stared at his monitor: cracked, he thought marking off a mental check. He opened the drawer, dirty, he noticed, and closed the drawer. He picked up a red stapler, stared at it intently, then placed it down marking it off mentally red. Red replied the stapler, and Joseph’s mental checklist scattered onto the floor.