Imagine (Again)

Every so often I feel the need to re-post what I wrote 7 plus years ago...and sadly still relevant.

Imagine (Written August 22 05)

Can you imagine what it would be like to see them come up to your door?
In uniforms and grim looks on their faces, and your child in the war.
Can you imagine how it must feel when they say those five words?
We regret to inform you…do you hear anything but those five words?
Can you imagine telling your husband or wife your child is gone?
Your child whose birth gave your greatest joy is gone.

I’m sitting here in the middle of the night wondering how someone could question a mother or father who lost a child to this war. How could someone in good conscience accuse a mother of politicizing the death of their child? Have we grown so disconnected with our humanity we can’t imagine the day a parent sees the dark colored car drive up to their street, up to their house and uniformed men emerge?
If you’re a parent, maybe you can imagine hearing those five words. It’s your greatest nightmare. You lie awake at night wondering where your child is at tonight.
You hate hearing the phone late at night. You hate seeing strange dark cars in your neighborhood. You can’t stand the newspaper or television news.
Then imagine the five words. Will you hear beyond them? Will you know before they say them?
Then there will be telling the rest of the family. You tell it over and over again…you child is gone. You want to scream out insanely. How can they be gone!!!!!?
Imagine the memories of your child first walking. The first words from their lips. The first worrisome cold. How can they be gone?
Imagine when you watched them swim, or skate or play baseball or football. Imagine playing basketball with them in the driveway in the fall as the leaves turned gold. Imagine the graduation and the joy in their face.
Imagine the day they leave your house to enter boot camp. The next time you see them their hair is short and they seem different and changed.
Imagine the last flight you see them off at the airport. The last phone call from the place of the war. The last letter.
Imagine the day when, with a broken heart and empty soul, you follow the dark hearse with your beloved child inside a casket. Imagine the numb feeling as you get out and see the burial plot where your child will be lowered into the earth. There will be words from the Bible, the Torah or Koran. They don’t bring your child alive.
There will be family all around you but you’ll be as lonely as you’ll ever be. They’ll hand you a triangle in red, white and blue like it will replace your child or there is something there to comfort you.
Imagine the final moments as the casket is lowered into the ground. The thought of your child leaving this earth before you rips at your heart. You hear over and over the words of sympathy and comfort and they are arrows that smash into your spirit in reminder of your child.
Then everybody leaves, you’re alone with only the terrible thoughts of the death of your child. You wonder how it really happened. You wonder if your child suffered. You wonder if they died alone. Death for you would be a welcome thing instead of these thoughts you have.
Imagine after the first month or so, everybody seems to think you’re able to be yourself again. They’ll never understand you’ll never be yourself again; you’ll never be whole again. Your child is gone and each day is a struggle to get up and each day the sorrow begins again.
Imagine returning to work and seeing the looks and the avoidance of some and the overbearing presence of others. They don’t know.
Imagine going to the grocery store and seeing a child with a smile like the smile of your child. You want to scream out your child is gone!! They’ll look the other way to avoid the sadness you hold in your heart.
Imagine the silence between you and other family members. You’re left to think of the moments of each day when your child would get up, go to school, return from school, go to a friends, eat dinner, go to practice, get ready for bed. Each moment so damn precious and you failed to recognize it at the time.
Imagine hearing a song and becoming tearful because it was your child’s favorite. Seeing a book and the memory of discussing the plot and characters with such joy.
That’s all I can do. Imagine it. My mom and dad feared it each day of 1968. They imagined it but they never heard those five words.
I imagined my sons being that dead child as I sat here this late, late night. My heart ached from just the thought of it. I had memories of them swimming and running. I remembered the day of each birth. I remembered reading Mark Twain or Watership Down to them.
All those memories of my children came flooding back to me and I couldn’t really imagine how gut wrenching awful it would be to hear those five fucking words!!!
“We regret to inform you….”

Random Thoughts (from Facebook)

 
My wife and I are both RNs caught up in the constant struggle to provide compassionate and appropriate care to the most severe and persistently disturbed people in our community struggling with mental health issues. A struggle made all the worse by big pharma and big insurance.
Americans are constantly rejecting the single payer method of health care used in Europe and Canada. They want to believe the American health care system is the greatest system in the world. They want to believe they have "choices" in their health care. We're either naive or stupid!
Every day we are forced to deal with private companies acting as alleged case managers to control costs of government funded health care such as Medicaid and Medicare. They create formularies for medicines that are often slanted toward certain drug companies. They deny payment for drugs prescribed by the doctors of patients and force the patient to accept drugs that may cause severe side effects leading to muscle contractions, diabetes, excessive cholesterol, higher risk of strokes and heart attacks and assorted other health problems. And the private companies who are in truth, insurance companies, base medical decisions on how much they can save for themselves. How much profit they can make in deciding what care, what drugs patients are allowed.
So it begs the question of how much choice in our medical care do we really have? And why do we allow private insurance companies to run up costs to our care by creating a third party for profit between us and our doctors?
Recently I had labs done. They were routine labs for an old guy like myself. I got the explanation of benefits from the insurance company extolling how much I saved because I had insurance. They showed the total costs of the basic lab tests I had done were over 500 dollars but I didn't pay anything and the lab company was paid less than 1/4 that five hundred dollars based on a "discount" paid to the provider lab company. I also noticed my blood had been sent to the lab company's California lab when I know of at least 10 offices here in Denver owned by the same company. I use the company as a RN to send my clients to for their labs.
I fill out purchase orders for the same labs I had done and the actual costs of the tests are about fifty dollars. But if I had no insurance the costs of those labs would have been that five hundred dollar charge.
Another example is the charge my doctor sent to the insurance company for my physical was absurdly high. The insurance company invoked the "discount" rate for payment to my doctor. He ended up getting paid half the charge his office sent to the insurance company. I ended up paying a 25 dollar co-pay. That discounted payment was the true price the doctor should have received. Without insurance I'd have paid the higher price charged by my doctor if I could have afforded to even gone to him for a preventative care physical.
That's the game. Doctors over-charge so they actually get a fair payment for their services. A psychiatrist charges 280 dollars for a 45 minute session and gets 25 dollars in co-pay and the discounted payment of 125 dollars. Total payment 150 dollars for 45 minutes. Unless the patient is medically indigent (uninsured). Then it would be the full 280 dollars.
If you follow this out, you come to realize the doctors and insurance companies play a game that artificially inflates the cost of medical care for all of us. And I'm not even talking pharmacy costs yet.
So, this is the greatest medical care in the world as opposed to the care in the rest of the developed world? So why do Americans die at younger ages, have the highest infant mortality rates in the developed world? Why do Americans rate the lowest in all aspects of outcomes in their medical care and pay close to 20 times more than these "socialist" nations with single payer health care? Why does 1 out of every 5 or 6 children live in poverty and lack medical benefits? Why do we still have 48 million without benefits? Even after the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is implemented, why will there stil be millions without benefits?
This isn't the greatest medical care in the world. This is the biggest medical scam in the world. Inflicted on, apparently, the most misinformed patients in the world.

　


While we fight the battles caused by polarization, hate, racism, sexism, anti-GLBT rights and rejection of basic human rights (and the list goes on and on), it would behoove us to remember the true war melts down to the issue of economics. The haves and have-nots. The wealth disparity of rich and poor. Elitism as opposed to poverty. When we look at what fuels the polarization, inevitably we'll find the rich are the culprits funding it. The masters of war and those that would be king want us afraid, indentured and dependent. As long as we continue the internecine battles promoted and exploited by the plutocracy we give them the power they constantly seek.

　


So...when the politicians finally come up with their "gun control" laws do we think there will be any legal sanctions about occupations of nations, weapons supply to Zionist apartheid, rocket and gatling gun equipped drones, five hundred pound bombs or cruise missiles? Does the death of a young, unarmed Palestinian crossing the artificial barrier between a ghetto and an alleged "free" land equate with the death of a young child in a white suburban neighborhood? Are the deaths of young men in a gang infested area of South Los Angeles or Chicago's housing projects equal to movie-goers in Aurora?
Does the violence of poverty and injustice have a connection to a culture of violence that allows guns to be so freely available? Does the hypocrisy of politicians bought off by rich lobbyists have any connection to the sustained violence in this nation? Does the trade of more weapons around the world than all other nations combined have a connection to mad-men with automatic weapons and 30 round clips killing children and any other human they can find?
What's worse, a five hundred pound bomb indiscriminately dropped on a neighborhood in Fallujah or the hand gun deaths of kids in an American high school? What's more insane...the military budget consuming 56% of the budget or cuts in mental health care, care for the poor and children or ignoring the issues of returning veterans? Do the choices and priorities of elected politicians have a connection to the violence in this nation?
All the rhetoric and impassioned talk about curbing the gun violence in America is a ruse. The laws and sanctions being suggested are like band aids on an arterial bleed. Unless we make the connections leading to the problem of our cultural violence this nation will continue to bleed out.

　


When I returned from Vietnam I ended up homeless for six months. It meant living on the streets, finding shelter at the library, bus stations and other public places. Cops would wake me up in the bus station. They would do sweeps of the restrooms to make sure the homeless didn't loiter. The shelters were always scarce in those days. And the few shelters here in Denver were dangerous places, places filled with despair . I remember always being tired, always depressed, my feet always hurting, the cold always biting to the bone. I remember being downtown and watching the American landing on the moon. I didn't marvel at the accomplishment. I laughed in scorn that a nation could spend billions on such an endeavor while I roamed my city in the darkness of night along with countless other homeless.
Today, many of my clients are homeless. There are more shelters but there are more homeless. Governments from city to federal try to hide them more than they try to help them. These are the "untouchables" of America. More and more they are families and veterans. More children are becoming homeless. And our response to our homeless Americans is to stigmatize and ignore. We're all guilty of looking away as we pass them on the streets.
If I had one wish about the way we approach the homeless it would be that every elected official spend a week on the streets without resources. That every politician would have a special "moon landing experience" like I had.

　


I'm beginning to think all the "moments of silence" and all the "spontaneous memorials" for victims of our American violence aren't going to have enough hours in the day or flowers and teddy bears to go around. Maybe contemplation and real problem solving would serve us better.

　


You know the gun freaks who think they need to be armed for some stupid ass revolution they think they'll start against some bogus UN government run by Karl Marx will die and there will be no one to pry their guns from their cold, dead fingers. When all their wells are polluted by the chemicals of big oil and gas, when all their forests are dead as a result of opportunistic bugs and diseases, when all their oceans have finally become total sewage and all their air kills humans all their guns won't mean a damn thing. Their guns didn't help them in NOLA during Katrina. Didn't help them when Sandy destroyed so much of NYC and other Eastern seaboard areas. They can't shoot the super storms caused by the melted ice of the Artic and Antartica or the destroyed rain forests of Brazil. It's only a matter of time until their guns will be held in their cold, dead fingers. Most likely won't be anyone to pry their toys from those fingers, though.

　


As the sun sets in the west here in Denver, the GOP whines they didn't get a good deal and might just send us over the fiscal cliff. Question....didn't they accomplish that in 2008 when they crashed the economy? Or was it the two wars they started without raising the taxes needed to pay for them? Not to mention the human costs they managed to inflict. Don't know about the rest of the progressive community but I applaud the GOP for refusing the sell out deal Obama and Biden brokered. It's time to draw the line in the sand and let the GOP show their traitorous colors of elitism. John Huntsman was correct in stating the GOP is devoid of a soul. The actions of the GOP stooges clearly show they have no concern for the middle class or poor in this nation. They are bought and paid for by the likes of the Kochs, Edelstein, big oil, big pharma and the military industrial complex. They fail to realize how much 2000 dollars extra a year will impact the average family. Hell most of them haven't been in grocery store in years except to campaign. They don't worry about healthcare because they have "government" insurance paid for by the tax payers. Don't suppose their hate for big government extends to the freebies of insurance and pension they get from big government.
There really are no word to describe the detestable behaviors of the likes of Cantor, Ryan, Boehner and McConnell. Nor are their words to describe the sell out of Obama and the Democratic leadership.

　


My wife's best friend won't go out with her this week because the election has shown Americans have become "faithless and immoral". WTF??? My wife is the kindest person I know. She believes in Catholicism but isn't a zombie that accepts the dogma without thoughtful consideration. She stayed clear of politics with the friend to maintain the friendship. But because of my willingness to oppose the Church the friend knows we are two of "those people".
The zombie Catholic sect that believes the dogma of the misogynists is willing to elect a man who is a blatant liar, a ruthless job-killer, a war-monger and truly immoral. Why? Because he and his Opus Dei running mate are saying they will oppose all abortion, gay marriage and the right of "moral" employers to refuse insuring women who choose to use "THE PILL".
The local archbishop sent a letter wailing freedom of religion is in jeopardy if certain politicians are elected. And the zombies all fell in line. Apparently including the "friend".
This thinking is why I will not return to the Catholic church. Yeah, I know there are the progressive and liberal groups in the Church but they refuse to directly oppose Papal authority. I tell my patients to leave abusive relationships if the abuse has no chance of stopping. Why think the abuses of the Papal authority will ever stop? Yeah, I am a heretic.
This is the sad fact of political debate in this nation. We can't talk with one another. We propagate hatefulness instead. We see whites at "Ole Miss" riot when the black guy wins. And had he lost would there have been riots from the other side?
Most folks dismissed the poignant thoughts of a man horribly abused by police, Rodney King. When the cops were found not guilty of their crime riots began. Rodney appealed to all of us when he asked "can't we all get along?"

　

Some of the new age folks tell me the end of the Mayan calendar would herald a new age of peace and harmony. I can tell that's coming by watching the parents in Newtown bury their six and seven year old children or hearing about two deaths caused by someone pushing a human off a subway station wait area into the path of the oncoming train. Or the brutal rape of a woman on a bus in India by six men. Brutal enough she died from the horrific physical trauma. Or the continued budget of this nation giving the military more funding than most of the other programs combined. Or the jailing of Bradley Manning for speaking the truth.
Yep, as we approach the new year I can feel a new age coming for sure.

　

If we want to honor the children killed by the insanity of violence, we must connect their deaths to the social conditions fomenting that violence. It isn't just about guns, it's about a culture of violence we've allowed to percolate for decade after decade. It's about failing the oppressed, the addicted, the mentally ill while providing obscene amounts of tax money on militarism and prisons. Year after year mental health budgets are cut while year after year the military budget grows. Year after year prevention programs disappear while more and more prisons are funded.
To those who prefer calling the mentally ill wackos, nuts or loons, I say shut the fuck up until you understand psychosis, mania, major depression, auditory and visual hallucinations, delusions and personality disorders. You have no clue how parents of children struggling with mental health issues have to fight to get treatment. How some professionals tell them to give up parental rights in order for their children to get placed with social services. Or allow them to be imprisoned because jails and prisons provide more care than any other institutional entity in most states.
It's the failure of a culture when time after time children are slaughtered. A government that condones killing children as collateral damage of their wars shouldn't be surprised when there are mass killings at home. A culture that allows childhood to be tainted on a daily basis with images of brutal killings from television to movies to video games shouldn't be surprised children grow up with violent tendencies. Proliferation of weapons intended only to kill other humans can only lead to the horrible fact this nation has more gun deaths than any other nation in the industrialized world. By far.
If we want to honor the children, maybe we should think about changing their role models.....us adults.

　

We want to think we love our children but if we stop and think about it there is an ugly truth about the way children are treated around the world. Child soldiers, child prostitution, child slavery, child abuse are affecting millions of our children. When I worked with adolescents at a mental health facility the stories of abuse were horrific. Beatings and sexual abuse were a given for most of the girls. Beatings and often sexual abuse were givens for most of the boys.
It's always the same when we lose children we don't expect to die or be abused. There's outrage and horror. But then it recedes and we forget. We seldom think about the disenfranchised children enduring the daily horror, though. Who speaks for them?

　

I don't want to diminish the deaths of 20 young children and 6 adults to another American madman toting semi-automatic weapons to shoot his prey. I have grandkids close to the age of the children killed. I'd be enraged and bereaved beyond description.
I do have to agree with a young veteran friend who asks the question why these children warrant so much of our attention when there's been so many thousands upon thousands killed by other American armaments. Where was the outcry when our bombs killed entire villages and whole blocks that were inhabited by far more children?
Where was the outcry for the children of Fallujah, a city battered by multiple American assaults of artillery and bombs? Where's the outcry for the children killed all too often in drone attacks by American and Israeli military?
Where's the outcry for the youth sent to the failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Oh people will say there's a difference between all those I mention and the children in Newtown, CT. No, there's not. They all have one thing in common. Far too many victims are children and the weapons used are predominately sold by American arms companies.
If it is people who kill people then we need to look at the means by which they are killing them. And, without a doubt, there is a culture of violence that permeates this nation from the time of childhood until we die prematurely or of old age.
The enduring image of my war was the day I walked through a village the day after a napalm bombing. There was a smell of ham from the incinerated pot belly pig but there was also the smell of burned human flesh. As I found out as I got deeper into the village, it was primarily the burned flesh of infants, young children and mothers. How does another human grasp such a scene? How do we reconcile the dead children with our sense of morality?
At least once or twice a year, we find ourselves asking the same questions. Why do we allow the children to be killed without acting to change the culture of violence we've allowed? And that goes without asking why we allow the children of foreign lands to be butchered at the hand of those using "our weapons".
All the cretins and apologists for the NRA will try to justify the continued availability of assault weapons as a right of all Americans under the Second Amendment. They decry any attempt to control deadly weapons used to kill our children. And we refuse to identify them as the terrorist organization they are. They don't give a damn about our rights. They only care about further promoting the violence culture so their masters, the weapons industry, continue to reap huge profits on the backs of those massacred by their implements of death.
If the past is any indication, the deaths of the 20 children and 6 adults on December 14, 12 will only join the massacres at Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora's theatres and all the other tragedies caused by a person, usually male, who has some deranged or psychotic impulse to kill and ready access to weapons to carry out that impulse. There will be weeks of reaction but when it comes time for courage and action very few will stand up in the halls of Congress, the White House or state legislatures.
And that makes us a nation willing to sacrifice the potential of young lives simply to maintain the means to carry out the violence so deeply steeped in the American psyche

　

If only Americans felt the same compassion for the innocents killed by automatic weapons, cluster bombs, artillery shells, rocket fire, napalm, white phosphorous, bunker busters, drones and all the other multiple ways that we, the people, have been complicit in using.
If only they understood parents around the world feel the same agony and grief as those who lose children at the hands of killers here in the U.S.. Does it matter if the child is Jewish, Catholic, Muslim, Buddhist or Sikh? Does it matter what the race of the child is? Does it matter if the child is shot by a cartel in Mexico or by a gang in Chicago?

　

When the history of this time is written it will be the Boehners, McCains, McConnells, Cantors, Grahams and their simple minded weaseling friends who are portrayed as the traitors of the American people. But it will be Obama and his presidency that will be seen as war criminals along the lines of George W. Bush, Henry Kissinger and Ronald Reagan. Yes, Ronnie had wars few Americans knew about. Obama will be seen as the president that imprisoned young soldiers for revealing ugly truths about his military actions and those of his predecesor. He will be the black president that was responsible for stripping away the civil rights of all Americans in the name of national security. While we would like to believe our brave new world of social media revolutionizes our world, the revolution may well be the ability of government to intrude fully into our thoughts and ideals in a way no other government has ever been able to in the past. The priorities of environment and peace and justice have once again taken the back seats of the bus. The Zionists of Israel continue to enslave Palestinians as the American government feeds them the tools to do so. Obama and every other president has failed to acknowledge the correlation between that slavery and the one here in this nation or the gulags and ghettoes the Jewish people escaped. And don't buy the bullshit there's no comparison because there's no gas chambers. Death is simply dealt out in more sophisticated ways with weapons made in the USA. Or by starvation or buldozer. Why do we think ourselves the land of the free or a nation of justice when there is so much to contradict these beliefs?

There's a tendency to think rape is confined to female victims but that's really not the case. Over the last 28 years working in emergency rooms and adolescent units I discovered over half the males I worked with had been sexually assaulted. And many don't report assaults due to the stigma involved just as most women don't report it. Rape is rape regardless of who the victim may be. We really need to understand what causes such rage and hate to inflict such horrible pain and suffering on other humans. The outrage toward the rape and killing of the woman on a bus in India should be world wide. And we must remember her male friend was also a victim.
Please don't misunderstand, I'm well aware of the culture of hate toward women that goes far beyond rape and murder. I just want us to remember not all men are rapists and not all are free of rape.