March 27, 2010 02:43 AM UTC

Apology and Honesty

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• by: peacemonger

The last week on the blogs have been intense. Several bullies have pushed my buttons. In response, I have stooped to belittling a couple of bloggers, something I used to never do. I am a person of faith and conviction, and I know better. I am sorry to all I allowed to hook my temper — it’s not what my heroes — Ghandi, Kennedy, King, Obama, and others, would have done. I had a good cry this afternoon after my friend Scott sent an email to me, asking why I continued to support Michael Bennet, despite all the bullying I get for it from the extreme left. I just want to lay it out on the line for all of you.

I grew up in a working class family. Mom was a housewife; Dad worked for a factory and belonged to the union. Money was always tight. Those who know my real name (I ask them to have integrity and not ID me on the blogs) know my story — I have told it elsewhere.  

My Dad was deaf since he was twelve, so he had to drop out of school (in the 1940’s, there was not yet guaranteed special education). He matured early, and was lucky to get a good factory job by lying and saying he was 18. My parents married young, were religious, and they had a big family. They believed God would provide, not knowing how.

I remember being poor enough to have two pair of pants that fit me — one to wash and one to wear. I remember not having a winter coat until Christmas one year, so I wore my windbreaker with many shirts underneath as I walked a mile and a half to school in that upper midwestern town (Mom had more kids than seats in the car and couldn’t drive us in those days). Yes, it was so cold sometimes, I had to stop a few times to warm up in between — at the 7-11, at the bowling alley, or at my friend’s house.

My Dad’s union was the greatest thing that ever happened to us, although my Mom never gave it credit then (she was a Republican). When we had health insurance, life was wonderful. When we didn’t, it was Hell.

I remember being so sick one time (I suspect it was pneumonia because years later I had a chest x-ray and was told I had scar tissue although I never smoked), I pleaded with my Mom to take me to the Dr. I had been coughing for weeks and felt horrible. I remember my Mom saying, “I can only take you to the emergency room and you can’t go there unless your fever stays 103.”  I laid in bed, coughing, crying and hoping it would get worse.

We didn’t have dental insurance until I was 14 years old. When I finally went, as a freshman in high school, my Mother dropped me off at the front door, and told me to call her when it was done. I had never been to a dentist before, so I didn’t know what to expect. I remember the dentist explaining to me that our insurance paid for fillings and extractions, but no anesthesia.

I didn’t want to bother my Mom. She had things of her own to deal with, which is not appropriate to go into here. I told the dentist I would be brave, and asked that he please not bother my mother.

I will never forget the sound of the drill, the smell of the smoke and feeling of having a mouthful of teeth drilled without any pain medication. I had to come back again and again and again. I was ashamed, and I never told anyone. My fear became worse as did my shaking, until finally, one day the dentist told me he would have to tie me down when I came in.

Today, I am so terrified of the dentist, despite great insurance, I rarely go. When I told my dentist the horror stories of my childhood, he denounced the dentist as “barbaric”. My fear is so intense, I left his office in the middle of a root canal once, and ignored his calls and letters for almost a year. His letters said, “There is a gaping hole in your jaw. If you don’t come back and you get a blood infection, you might die.” I actually remember thinking for a long time, “Which would be worse?” (Eventually, I did go back. They now put me in a soundproof kid’s room with Sesame Street paintings on the wall and drug me up to the max.) I have a broken tooth right now in fact, and every day, I think about calling… but I don’t. When the pain is worse than my fear, I’ll call him again.

I chose to support Hillary Clinton early on in the ’08 primary because she had a better health plan than Obama, in my opinion. When Barack won the nomination, I decided to fight hard with him to get the health reform he promised. The memories of going to bed in pain as a kid urged me to fight for other children — children and adults I do not know.

I became a fan of Senator Michael Bennet’s early on, despite initially wanting Andrew to get the appointment (yes, Arthur Lewis did a great job on the “Appoint Andrew” campaign and we are friends today). Michael Bennet promised to be a consistently strong ally with President Obama. When the expansion of S-CHIP was passed, I could hardly stop from dancing around the room.

I went to events where Michael Bennet was speaking, and at first, sat quietly in the back of the room. From the beginning, he listened, he cared and he understood. He did not have an opinion on the best plan in those early months (Jan-May), but when he did finally make up his mind on the public option, he talked about it everywhere he went. Michael returned a call to me personally once, and we talked for a long time about health reform.

I went to more town halls, rallies and meetings on health care reform than I could count in 2009. I was obsessed. I took hundreds of photos at them. I saw my (until then) hero Andrew Romanoff give a short speech at a Single Payer  rally in May, but after that, I did not see him anywhere the rest of the summer. I finally saw him the September weekend he announced he was running for Senate, when I asked him, “Where the hell have you been?”.

I watched Michael Bennet and Jared Polis and Ed Perlmutter and Betsy Markey fight off tea-partiers at all the events — dozens and dozens of them — not with their fists, or with weapons, but with words. Everywhere Michael went, people on the left and the right were giving him crap.  The right-wingers called him a socialist and a Bolshevik and an Obama-lover (we know what that is code for). The lefties called him “Banker-man” and “the annointed one”.  

Michael never complained. Michael answered each person with respect and grace and thoughtfulness. If he didn’t know the answer to a question, he said so. If he wasn’t sure how he felt about something, he was honest and said, “I will give some thought to what you are saying.”  No grandstanding, no ego, no flashy speeches, no trying to impress anyone. Just Michael Bennet being Michael.

At some of these events, I met the Lucero family, whose grandson and brother died from a preventable asthma attack because his plan did not cover the more expensive medication. I spoke with the Wilkes family, good friends of mine, whose son Thomas with Hemophilia uses medication that costs them $1,000 per dose. I met Tanya, a teacher at a preschool who had a brain tumor, and lived with daily pain because she is an immigrant and has no insurance. When I thought I couldn’t hear another horrible story, I went to more.

Mostly, I went for my sisters, Mary and Sharon (not their reall names). Ten years ago, Mary tried to kill herself because after two hospitalizations for chronic medical conditions and no insurance, she had tens of thousands of dollars of debt. She owed more to the hospital than she would ever make in her life on her meager wages as a college-educated Montessori teacher. My sister Sharon was married for 30 years, and when her husband left her for another woman, she lost her house. She became homeless and depressed, and lost her job. She has a home now, and started working again, but still has no insurance. It’s been eight years since she had insurance. She has sores all over her legs, and no idea what that means, or what they are from.

Jared Polis has heard these stories, and so has  Michael Bennet (I even shared some with Jared’s Mom!). I cried telling one of them to Ed Perlmutter. I cried telling them to Susan Daggett, Michael’s wife, just the other day. My friends in “Health Care for America Now” know these stories, because I have cried to them, too.

I’ve worked for two years collecting stories of people in pain, people who have lost their homes, people who have heard and seen and felt things that some of you cannot imagine in your wildest dreams. My friends and I sent those stories to Congress… often. To get attention from their staffs (who became accustomed to seeing us) we dressed up as Pilgrims or brought little Christmas trees, or cookies or candy or Superhero capes. One time we even showed up driving an ambulance. One of my friends in Mark Udall’s office told me the other day, “With health reform passing, I am really going to miss you coming in here and bugging the shit out of me”. (Keep in mind, however, for every call or visit we made, hundreds of corporate lobbyists were doing the same thing on the other side.)

One time we arrived and Michael and his family were in the office, celebrating Michael’s 45th birthday. He called us “his friends” and told his staffer to let us in “the back”. They offered us cake and we enjoyed hanging out with his little girls, and talking some more about health reform.

Say what you will about Michael Bennet at DPS, and at Anschutz. I don’t know the first thing about any of that. Michael Bennet has been there for me, and he’s been there for Mary, and Sharon, and Zumante and his sister and Grandmother. He has been there for Thomas and for Amy and for David and for every other person whose stories my friends and I have shared with him.

Several days ago, I heard from friends in Congressional offices that the entire US Democratic Congressional delegation agreed to resist all temptations to amend the reconciliation bill, so that it would pass before the session was over this week. I can tell all of you this, swearing on my grandmother’s grave, if Michael Bennet and Harry Reid had the votes for the public option, it would have been in the bill. Instead, Reid promised Senator Bennet and Senator Sanders that it would be brought up in a separate piece of legislation. I heard that from a number of sources.

I got a call from Michael Bennet yesterday. He  said,

And that, my fellow bloggers, is why I am an ardent Bennet supporter and not a Romanoff supporter. Call me names. Call Michael names. Call his whole staff and campaign and the city he was born in, names. I couldn’t give a shit.

Michael is a good man. He has a huge heart, a great wife, a beautiful family, and a passion to make life better for everyone. No matter what happens in this election, no one can take away his integrity, his accomplishments and his class.

Michael, Jared, Diana, Mark, Ed, John and Betsy saved lives. They saved childhoods. They saved dreams. And for that, I will always have their backs.  

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