Single Payer Blues

It seems that The Left now practices the politics of regret, and The Right the politics of revenge. 

My politics, as personal as the sacred is personal, sways toward The Far Center Left one day and The Righteously Agnostic Right the next.

Raised during a time when men still wore ties to work, I followed my grandfather’s example, a man who decided to escape the coal mines of Ohio and Pennsylvania, seeing his six brothers returning from the ‘office’ day-after-day with black lungs. He died long before I met him, wearing a suit and tie and trying to sell insurance during The Great Depression, moving the family around while looking for work—Thomasville, Georgia, Albany, New York, Moundsville, West Virginia—leaving behind a widow with two young daughters, one of whom became my mother. 

It’s the classic American fairy tale, moving west in search of federal assistance and a better life while raising the young ones by their own bootstraps. The mantra then as now is that the raw materials to build a better world are all around us, right in front of our eyes, but we don’t know where to start, and that something will always be at least slightly wrong as it can’t be any other way. 

What’s left of The Left is made up mostly of those who kneel down and without quite asking for forgiveness whisper, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” The Right is as ruthless as ever, not even taking the time to write the thank-you notes George H.W. Bush wrote in the old days to his domestic and foreign partners, invoking a ‘thousand points of light’ after conducting military operations Panama and the Persian Gulf.

Perpetual tiredness, disinterest—not the good kind of disinterest but the real thing—revulsion, waking up every morning as if in the mineshaft, then turning my attention to the news which gets better and better and worse and worse everyday, I and my fellow citizens seem to be mired in the drought of original thinking in which all political action is either dismal or deemed not worth undertaking.