OBAMA IMPROVES VETERAN CARE

As a veteran I have been troubled by our nation’s treatment of its military since the beginning of the Iraq war. The continuous rotation of soldiers and marines into combat zones with little or no rest is horrendous and has led to an extremely high incidence of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. Anyone forced to endure multiple rotations into combat situations is likely to emerge with some level of PTSD.
One of the most blatant contradictions within the Bush administration was the difference between the flag-waving rhetoric and the treatment of veterans. We saw it in the ugliness of mistreatment at Walter Reed and in the practice of prescribing psychotropic medications for PTSD suffering men and women so that they could be sent back into combat situations.
Department of Veteran Affairs regulations in place during that era made it increasingly harder for our veterans to obtain help in dealing with their PTSD, but the Obama administration has changed regulations to enable treatment.
In the past, veterans had to prove that they served in a specific situation which produced symptoms of PTSD. The paperwork was often arduous and the reaction of those charged with evaluating applicants was frequently demeaning and discouraging. All this kept a great many suffering veterans from seeking or obtaining help.
New regulations will not only eliminate the need to link the presence of symptoms to a documentable incident and the people present, but will also recognize that even those in support roles can be susceptible to the disorder.
The upshot is that one of the many problems faced by our veterans is being addressed. We should all be watching to see whether the changes have a real effect and also whether or not other problems are seriously addressed.
Will this administration stop sending people into multiple combat and other high-stress rotations? Will they end the military slavery created by extending service terms beyond the time agreed to at recruitment? Will veterans be able to obtain services throughout the VA system without humiliation or subjection to services below accepted standards of care? And, ultimately, will this administration that so proudly touts transparency achieve ultimate visibility by re-instating the draft?
The American public remains ignorant and powerless in relation to military policy by virtue of the distance created by a totally volunteer military. A volunteer army removes widespread objection to inappropriate warfare and attracts not only the highly motivated patriot, but those who cannot imagine anything they would rather do than fight and kill.
A draft forces all citizens to evaluate the quality of the war they or their sons and daughters are forced to fight and so requires constant public analysis that could squelch false wars like the one in Iraq.
Yes, we need a military defense, but we also need to use our military correctly and wisely and to honor their service by providing quality care for them.
Score one for the Obama administration, but demand more.

Fat Chance

I recently spent some time with my brother and nephew fishing and, like most fishermen, discussing the ways of the world. We spoke of the way America’s thought was twisted into acceptance of a war against a nation that had nothing to do with 9-11. We spoke of the enormous price we have exacted from the people of Iraq – at least 200,000 Iraqis dead and 2 to 3 million displaced in retribution for the 3,000 Americans who died that day. We spoke of the continuing civilian deaths in Pakistan and Afghanistan where we have yet to extract retribution from those who did perpetrate 9-11. To say nothing of the financial, spiritual and mortal price the American people and military are still paying.
My nephew observed that if we were truly a Christian nation we could not wage war at all, much less inflict such damage on other nations in the name of national retribution. “Nor,” my brother said, “could the Muslims.” They’re right.
Fundamentalists might quote an eye for an eye, but that is not Christian. It’s an Old Testament reference belonging to the descendants of Father Abraham long before Christ. Even if it could apply to Christianity, it called for equal retribution, not unbalanced vengeance. Christ himself called for the abolition of the old laws. (Christ's new commands, (John 13:34f), are [1 Love God and [2 love your neighbor.)
Muslim fundamentalists might point to the Koranic saw advocating death to infidels - no more a valid imprecation today than eye for an eye - but they ignore Mohammed’s letter to the orthodox church in Constantinople advocating peace between Muslims and Christians.
The fact is that both warlike references belong to by-gone days, and the truth is that the irrationality of our attack on Iraq in response to 9-11 provided more fuel for fanatics wanting to embrace Jihad than anything we could have done short of bombing Mecca. We would be far better off if we had practiced the restraint the Pennsylvania Amish showed after the killings at their school. Their refusal to seek vengeance was a Christian lesson for us all from which we could grow both politically and spiritually.
Instead we are caught in a mesh of circular reasoning that leaves no one in the right and everyone in great danger. The saddest fact, as my nephew pointed out, is that both sides are disobeying the basic tenets of their own religions.
Mohammed saw the Christ as a great prophet. Jesus, being first, couldn’t speak to Mohammed’s beliefs, but both preached the same message - peace through loving generosity to others – and both suffered the ultimate degradation of their message into twisted reasons for war.
The only hope for mankind in that crazy scenario is for enough people to join King and Gandhi in the belief that each of us must be living examples of the change we want to see in the world. Either religion truly practiced could do that, but will they?
Fat chance.

A Tribute to A Great Lady

I wish I’d known Joan Collins all my life, but I first met her when she organized a meeting to oppose war with Iraq. All this retired school teacher really wanted was to enjoy her grandchildren. But, being Joan, she couldn’t truly enjoy them or feel good about their future if our country attacked the people of Iraq in what she believed was an immoral and unnecessary war.
Her heart ached for this county caught up in the lies about WMDs and the false connection of Saddam Hussein to the events of September 11, 2001. Her heart ached equally for the people of Iraq who would simply be “collateral damage.”
Instead of sitting back and enjoying her well-earned leisure, Joan stood up far taller than her 5’1” and acted. She gathered like-minded people around her to make plans to do something – anything - to communicate to the powers that be that war with Iraq would be a tragic mistake. She did her research and thought things through before speaking or acting. She wrote letters to this newspaper. Some ignored the truths in what she said and responded with ugly personal attacks that were like a crown of thorns to this gentle and loving woman. Even though deeply hurt by this, it was not in her to respond in kind. She kept writing, marching, meeting, and talking in the hope that her carefully researched and thought out opinions would at last be heard and acted upon.
She wanted nothing more than to be heard and to generate civil discourse on a subject that deserved the highest level of scrutiny. The acid responses saddened her deeply, but she fought on.
If my wish had come true and Joan were Queen of the World, her way would have been to invite the world’s leaders, nabobs, peaceniks and war mongers to dinner. After the world’s best ham ‘n beans and peach cobbler, she would gently lead the discussion towards resolving conflict. All would be well. It was a lovely fantasy, but it had at its base the notion that people are interested in civilly discussing issues, thinking them through, and compromising. Sadly, as the attacks she suffered attest, that's the real fantasy.
Joan left us July 31, 2010. We have lost a soft but strong voice that spoke for peace, for the disenfranchised, for our children, for you and for me. Joan was a soft-spoken gentlewoman. She was filled with compassion for anyone in need, and her work was not just in the peace movement. She created programs and projects to help local children. She could always find a way.
Many people’s lives have been improved by her gentle example. The world will be a lesser place without Joan. We have lost a reluctant leader who taught us to stand our ground and not lose the hope that our voices will be heard. May we all honor Joan by being slower to speak and quicker to think and by building rather than tearing down.

FLOATING WITH THE GODS

This past week-end I had the privilege of participating in what had to be one of the finest float trips that occurred on the continent this year. It was like fishing on Mount Olympus in the company of the fly casting gods – a week-end I will never forget.

Kyle Kosovich of Longboat Outfitters asked if I would serve as commissary for a trip he was hosting for Zach Matthews, a contributing writer for Fly Fisherman magazine. Zach is a world class writer, photographer, and fly fisherman. He wanted to write about fishing the North Fork of the White River, so Kyle called in Brian Wise, guide for River of Life Farm, Bryan Yates, a past flats fishing guide in the Florida Keys, and Randy Hanner, a member of the U.S. Fly Fishing Team who finished 22 in world competition last year.

My job was to paddle a 20’ longboat loaded with gear, set up camps, help cook and clean up, and play a little after-dinner guitar. When one of the guys asked why I wasn’t fishing I just told him that I wouldn’t pick guitar if Doc Watson was there and I wasn’t about to show my butt by fly fishing beside guys like him. All told, I did my best to stay in the background. My reward was watching those guys work.

Bryan and Zach dazzled me with their mastery of what to me is the mystery of fly tackle. They casually threw beautifully bending loops in 60 foot casts as handily as I can cast a spinning lure. Brian and Kyle wowed me as always with their abilities, too, but Randy was the man to watch if you wanted to see fish landed. A fine caster himself, his style, though personally more flamboyant, was in sum much more refined and subtle. It was as if he could catch fish on command.

Schooled in French and Polish methods learned during international competitions, his favorite method is nymphing upstream. Casting no more than a leader’s length and pulling the fly toward him in a drift of no more than three feet, he often set the hook and at the same time launched the fish into the air and whipped out his landing net to catch it before it hit the water again.

The stream is my religion. Standing in a running stream, the rushing roar of water dashing over cobble drowns out the concerns of the world while the line establishes a connection between the fisherman and the universe. There is no line of separation, only connection. It is all consuming, and people with skills like these fellows possess make the connection even deeper.

The first day and night were all about the spirituality of fishing. Then Saturday dawned and I went downstream to be out of their way. I waited near a popular put-in where the connection was shattered by hundreds of people putting in with their inner-tubes, coolers and boom-boxes.

I saw a kid probably not twenty kneeling on one side of a tube with a two foot plastic paddle. Draped over the front of the tube was a child under two years old. They were accompanied by a canoe containing another young man, a cooler and a dog - which says a lot about their priorites. Not two hundred yards from the put-in, the young tuber, tired already of spinning in circles cried out to his friend in the canoe, “What am I gonna do, Dude?”

I thought, what you’re going to do is kill that baby, DUDE, and I wondered how far they thought they were going to get before that child was screaming in pain from being draped over that raw, hot rubber inner-tube while burning in the 90 degree sun. I wanted to shout at him to get off the river before it was too late, but, stupidly not wanting to seem intrusive, I held my piece, but lost my peace.

The rest of the afternoon was a steady stream of rental canoes, inner-tubes, plastic blow ups, boom boxes and beer. Some people were competent floaters doing their best to enjoy a day on a wild Ozark stream, but the majority was out of their element.
Two girls passed by whining about the spider they found in their canoe and were answered by a woman in another canoe who said, “Well, I just saw a huge water snake”, her voice quavering to relay her contempt for the beast. And I thought – they live here folks. If you come out here wanting it to be just like your living room, why not stay home, watch some “Wild Kingdom” and drink your beer in air conditioned comfort?

The last straw of my day was the drunken woman who was floating by in a tied-together flotilla of blue plastic tubes while I was setting up the second night’s camp and letting the campfire burn down to coals for the evening’s grilled pork chops and baked cinnamon rolls. “Got any hotdogs for us?” she yelled. I said nothing. “Hey, you got any hotdogs for us,” she cleverly shouted again, and still I said nothing.

“He’s ignoring me.” She told her friends, “That’s so rude.” I’m rude?? I thought. I was enjoying the peace of the river and my work until you came along.
I had set up four tents and the others were all downstream fishing.

“Hey, you in the yellow shirt. Do you sleep in all them tents, just going from one to the other all night or what?” This lady was so clever.

“We have a party here,” I said, and went back to my work.

By then they had drifted far enough downstream that I suppose it was too much effort to keep trying to communicate with me, so she just said, “Oh” and then shifted her focus to whatever caught her attention next, and I, at last, was left in the peace and beauty of the river where I stole out to do battle with and lose to an over 20” rainbow who taught me that I might be able to fool him, but it was going to take more skill than mine to bring him to net.

The real fishermen came back, the stories flowed, the pork chops and cinnamon rolls disappeared, and we connected with one another in the peace and beauty of the river. The fishing gods, the river gods and the fly casting gods had all returned and all was well with the world once again.

THE HEALTH CARE DEBACLE

Three times in my life I have seen the country at odds over health care. The first was over the creation of Medicare, and it was a quiet storm compared to what’s going on today.

Today’s battle is epitomized by this anecdote from an article in the Washington Post that told of a health care town hall meeting in South Carolina where ‘a man stood up and told Rep. Robert Inglis (R-S.C.) to "keep your government hands off my Medicare."’ The Congressman tried to explain that Medicare is a government program, but heckler would not listen.

That would be funny if it wasn’t so sad, but it illustrates how successful the anti-insurance reform right wing has been in confusing their followers.

The argument isn’t really about health care reform at all. No matter what Washington does in the coming weeks, the kind of health care people get in this country won’t change. If it was about health care reform, the AMA wouldn’t be endorsing it because that would call for restructuring of physician and hospital incomes to European levels.

The Democrats are trying to take the power over and control of health care delivery out of the hands of the insurance industry. Given that we all are or know people who have gone without coverage due to cost or pre-existing conditions or been denied payment for services even if we have coverage, I can’t see why anyone including Tea Partiers wouldn’t want that.

The Republican counter-budget as written by Paul Ryan – R, Wisconsin contains their proposals, touted as the way to avoid “socialism” and a “government takeover of health care”. Here they are:
1. Significantly reduce benefits to anybody under 55 at the time of passage, and then privatize social security.
2. Replace Medicare with a system of vouchers for buying private health insurance.

Why in God’s name would I want to trade the Medicare I now have and which allows me to see primary care doctors for $10 a visit, specialist for $35 and hospital costs with a reasonable deductible for a voucher to get back into private insurance? That is insanity.

We have operated our own business for over twenty years during which I carried catastrophic insurance with a $5,000 deductible at a cost of about $3,000 a year. My wife couldn’t get that wonderful coverage because she had pre-existing conditions, so her catastrophic coverage – excluding those conditions – ran about $5,000 a year. Our average income over those years averaged below the $65,000 level, so on average about 12% of our gross income went to insurance we never used. Beyond that, if we had needed to use it, we might have found out, as several friends have, that our insurance would not pay for the services we needed.

I’m also pretty fond of my social security check, minimal as it is. I did my own saving for retirement, but social security is the hedge against loss of private investments in a shaky market. I wish they’d just expand Medicare and be done with it.

The Health Care Conundrum

Are you against a public option in health care because “government can’t do anything right”? If so, try this:

Walk into a senior citizen center and say, “Everybody who has Medicare and wishes they didn’t, raise your hand.” You’ll think everybody in there is an amputee.

Now go to a VA hospital and say, “I think the government ought to get out of the health care business. Raise your hand if you’ll sign this petition to stop funding the Veteran’s Administration.” The only hand you’re likely to see is some veteran’s just before it hits your nose.

Next, go to the Division of Family Services and say, “If you have Medicaid and wish you didn’t, raise your hand.” They’ll laugh you out of the place.

Let’s try another test. Drive to your nearest vehicle license bureau on a busy day. Walk in and say, “I’m sick of seeing my tax dollars spent on highways. How many of you will sign this petition to stop spending federal dollars to maintain the interstate highway system?” Or you could ask them to help you put a stop to state tax support for state roads. How many takers would you get?

Don’t like any of those tests? Try this one. Go to a library and ask for signatures on a petition to quit spending tax dollars on libraries, or ask the parents and teachers at any school to join your protest against using tax dollars to support education. Any takers? Not likely.

Here’s a question for YOU to answer. Be honest, now. Do you think tax dollars should be used for those purposes listed above?

If you said yes, then you don’t believe that the government can’t do anything right. Beyond that you don’t think there’s anything wrong with democratic socialism. That’s what pooling tax dollars for the common good is, and there is nothing wrong with it.

I know far too many people who are putting off health care until they can get Medicare. Not one of them is against a public option. They know that their private insurance won’t pay for the services they need, and they sure can’t afford to pay for it themselves.

Here’s the conundrum. How can people know something works and still condemn it? I know people who’d fight to keep their Medicare and/or VA coverage but won’t support making it available to everyone. If you fit that description, examine your conscience because you should be ashamed for not doing right by your neighbors.

The business of private health insurers is to prevent people from collecting on claims while administrators make huge salaries and the stock continues to rise. The business of public health insurers is to operate with less than 18% overhead while paying doctors for their services. Why would you choose the former if you could have the latter? It’s time we looked beyond the sound-bites and put some of our tax dollars to work getting the health care we need.

Our Ignored Crisis

It has been two years since I posted to this site. I was too burned out by my political focus. I'm back now to write more generally and less rigorously and more likely on environmental issues than political ones. I hope readers will enjoy the journals of my excursions into the outdoors.

Today's edition is a copy of a submission that should soon run as a "Voices" column in our local newspaper, The Springfield News-Leader.
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Our Ignored Crisis

While most of the rest of the world is poised to address a world-wide ecological crisis, we argue over whether or not Al Gore was blowing smoke. Tick talk.

Even ignoring climate change, evidence of planet-wide degradation is devastatingly clear, and if humankind doesn’t recognize and adjust, we soon will have poisoned our nest beyond the point of no return. Sadly, our nation is a primary polluting culprit as well as the biggest obstacle to correcting the problem. Tick talk.

The issue is STEWARDSHIP. We are now fishing out the last of the breeding stock of the cod, sole and haddock. Salmon have dwindled so that they may never recover. Rockfish and blue crabs once plentiful are almost gone from Chesapeake Bay. Coral reefs are becoming a thing of the past. The Marshall Islands and others like them are being submerged world-wide. Fresh water river sediment is loaded with heavy metals; the water with chemicals and pharmaceuticals. Streams and lakes everywhere carry warnings about the danger of eating the fish. Missouri’s mussels are disappearing, and our air is polluted, but politicians say all’s well – the stock market’s up. Tick talk.

Humankind’s record as stewards of the earth is abominable, and it doesn’t take a tree-hugger to recognize it - just common sense. The Bible recognizes man’s dominion over the earth, but fails to instill a sense of stewardship, and the world’s political and economic structures prevent humanity from fulfilling that responsibility. Tick talk.

The well-being of our corporations far outranks the well-being of the planet or its people, and most citizens seem to believe that nothing that will increase our cost of living is acceptable. Tick talk.

The cost of energy produced by any means other than coal or nuclear power is too high to consider changing sources or behaviors. Clean coal and safe nuclear power don't exist, but we aren’t about to do anything that would make our electricity rates rise, so we invent fables that allow us to keep them and ignore facts that will sooner or later become incredibly invasive realities. Tick talk.

Each American burns four to six times the carbon resources of the average citizen of any other industrialized nation. We do it with our cars, air conditioners, fireplaces, clothes dryers, night lighting and attitudes. We need to see that the clock ticks while we talk. We are citizens not just of America but of the world. Weapons and armies eat up our wealth in ways that neither we nor the rest of the world can afford. Nation states and their interests have gone the way of city states and dinosaurs. If we don’t realize that soon we may very well go the way of the dinosaurs ourselves. The environmental clock tick tocks while we tick talk.