Health care reform, II

Dear Senator:
In 2005, my sister got sick. She was only 27 at the time, and a former collegiate athlete who had always been strong and healthy. Soon, however, she was too weak to work, exhausted all the time, and in daily pain. Not one of the doctors she saw could either help or diagnose her problem. Our parents, who are both in the medical field (one as an MD and one as a PhD) called in every favor they could to help mitigate the devastating effects of medical bills for a daughter who was currently in graduate school getting her own PhD. Eventually, Jamie was referred to the Mayo clinic and finally diagnosed.
Her disease is rare, and thankfully not life threatening. However, there is no cure and treatment of her symptoms is very expensive.
My sister needs health care reform now. She is a young professional, and a vibrant and creative member of our economy and democracy. Yet because insurance companies are permitted by the federal government to deny insurance to people with preexisting conditions, she has little hope of EVER getting private coverage. This is inhumane and unacceptable.
The health care system as it stands is at best a national embarrassment and at worst a plague on our own best interests.
Please help us fix this problem immediately--for the sake of your own family, and mine.
Sincerely,
Traci Voyles

Health care reform

Dear Senator Boxer,
Thank you for your statement on the need for health care reform. I am writing to urge you to support REAL reform, and not concede to arguments against including a public option in the reform bill.
This might be our one chance to really change the landscape of American health care; please help be a part of winning this struggle on our behalf, and bring your fellow Democrats on board as well.
Pass the reform bill WITH the public option.
Thank you,
Traci Voyles
University of San Diego California

Treating border violence with...more violence?

Dear Senator Boxer,
Thank you for the email update I recently received from your office, dated July 23, 2009. This email indicates your enthusiasm to report to me that San Diego County will be the recipient of $5 million from the Department of Justice for the creation of something with the ominous acronym BUST--the Border Uniformed Suppression Team.
As a longtime San Diego resident, who has been quite attentive to the problems related to drugs and violence on and across our southern border, I would like to say plainly: NO THANKS. As your email notes, the "drug problem" is at its root a problem of drug use; therefore this money should be spent on prevention and treatment of drug addiction here in the US. Instead, this BUST policy operates under the wrongheaded conviction that an escalation of the violence and guns on the border will somehow help the problem. The San Diego-Tijuana region is quite well armed as it is--we do not benefit from policy that escalates the tenor of conflict in the region, nor the eventual proliferation of weaponry that always attends these kinds of arms races.
As my representative in the US Senate, I implore you to fight rather than support this kind of misguided policy. We do not need more guns on our border. We need sympathetic, nonviolent policy that sees community development, cross-border cooperation, public health, and drug-use prevention as the primary pathways to healing the border region.
Yours,
Traci Brynne Voyles
University of California, San Diego
tvoyles@ucsd.edu

Whither Environmentalism?

Am I the only one who has noticed the recent conflation of "energy" with "environment" in national policy discourse? Actually it's not even a conflation so much as a replacement, which is even more alarming.
Why am I so upset by this?
Because "environmentalism" as a policy umbrella simply cannot be reduced to (or conflated with or replaced by) energy policy--for both political and practical reasons.
The practical reasons are quite simple: there are a bazillion environmental concerns that have nothing to do with energy issues and/or energy resources. Air, water, and soil pollution, endangered species, greenhouse gases, and food production all come immediately to mind--and that is with deliberate avoidance of environmental justice concerns like lead poisoning of urban poor children, mixed-use zoning problems in underrepresented urban communities, pesticide poisoning of agricultural laborers, etc. and so on.
The political reasons are even more important. For the first time since Rachel Carson catalyzed the modern environmentalist movement, environmentalism as a political platform has critical mass or what George Bush would fumblingly call "political capital." This means that environmentalist policy could have enough constituent power to (finally) pose a counterweight to anti-environmentalist industry lobbies. And the economic crisis, crisis though it is, could provide an opportunity for a period of Green Keynsianism that would help us develop projects and infrastructure that support environmentalist goals--only a few of which involve energy concerns.
And yet a quick visit to www.whitehouse.gov reveals that President Obama has no "Environmental Policy" page--just "Energy and Environment Policy" (notice which one comes first). And the one major piece of environmentalist legislation in the Senate right now is called the "Green Energy Production Act of 2009." In Obama's faux State of the Union last night, his topics included economy, energy, education, and health care.
What's almost more frightening is that no one seems to have noticed this rhetorical shift. It seems subtle, even common sense. But the implications are quite scary: if our environmentalism is couched only in terms of energy, it means our policies for acting on environmentalism are severely limited.
It also means that, yet again, those who define themselves as environmentalists get pushed out of the mainstream policy conversation back up into a tree in their Birkenstocks. And no one can do good policy work from there.

The Belly of the Beast

So I'm thinking about going into government work.
I'll take a moment to let that ridiculous statement sink in.
Ready to continue?
Okay, so I'll start with a disclaimer: it's just an idea, one that's been gestating since I started casting about for new career options once I (finally FINALLY!) finish my PhD sometime in the next 12 months. Other options on the list of careers I'd like to have: consultant on environmental and/or social policy, research coordinator for an NGO, research report writer for policymakers, Great American Novelist, or the new Susan Sontag (I would also settle for inheriting Maureen Dowd's job). Any of these careers would make me happy (or so I like to think), but for reasons I will explain momentarily, government work feels like it might be a good fit.
Now, to most of you who know me well, and others who know me by reputation alone, working for the government is probably the last thing you think I would voluntarily do. (Recently, my boyfriend referred to me as a writer and when I asked him to explain why he would say that--since I don't, actually make my living with written work--he said "yeah, of course you're a writer. You want to expatriate in your 20s and you seem to hate the government. Sounds like a writer to me." The man is a genius.) Indeed, I have spent a sizable chunk of my professional career critiquing everything from the eugenic nature of federal aid and development work, to the questionable environmentalism of wilderness protection acts, to the clearly imperial desires of 20th century US foreign policy. And everything in between. So, given that my realm of political sensibilities leads me to these kinds of analytic positions, why would government work seem like a sensible career path?
My answer is at once cynical and (I hope) astoundingly mature: first, I have long since given up the pretense that within academia we progressives can change the world. We can influence it in positive directions, sure--by teaching the disaffected and over-privileged 19 year-olds of the world to think critically about the society they inhabit, by writing critical studies of racial, gender, sexual, and colonial politics, etc.--but our chances of enacting tangible change for the better tends to get reserved to the realm of "extracurricular activities"...and who has time for those when you're trying to get tenure??
Second, at some point in my education I was surprised to discover that the US government does have some democratic infrastructure, even if that infrastructure has never added up to the sum of its parts in terms of true participatory democracy. It also is undeniably guided by an ideological apparatus of freedom, equality, and representation, which has (for at least the last 60 years) required that imperialism, white supremacy, and institutional patriarchy at least hide their ugly heads under pretty rhetoric (I'm grasping at straws here, but I'm trying to be optimistic. Work with me.).
What I see nowadays, in the latter half of my 20s, and more importantly in the post-W political realignment, is that there is power in government that might be accessible to people who have strong visions of how policy and legislation can be made for work for us. I'm filled with sudden (albeit tempered) optimism about things like the Department of the Interior under Ken Salazar--and how people like me could be participating in the process of changing that historically destructive, racist, and anti-environmentalist Department into something that uses its power for good instead of evil.
Academics have a bad habit of overly-intellectualized disengagement from the actual process of governing; but what kind of good could we do with our own brand of lobbying for policy change? We don't have the money, but we sure as hell have the stubborn will to win people over to our worldview. And we also spend a lot of our time explaining shit to people who would rather not hear it (undergraduates), a skill that could translate easily to talking to politicians and bureaucrats.
For these kinds of reasons, and mostly for the potential and the resources that government has, I'm considering working from within the dreaded Belly of the Beast. Maybe by joining them, you can still beat them...or maybe I'm just losing my mind.

A Call to Action

This morning I had a Revelation. I was sitting at my kitchen table when it happened, engaged in my favorite morningtime activities (swilling coffee, eating obscene amounts of cinnamon sugar toast, listening to democracy now while simultaneously trying to read the news online) and, while reading a story in today's online edition of The Nation, it hit me: two weeks of gleeful celebration is enough. Now it's time to get back to work.
To what am I referring, you ask?
Nothing other than a certain historic election we had here in the US recently (have you heard about it? I think it was on the news). To progressives, liberals, and leftists desperate for a win--desperate, indeed, for some electoral relevance after 8 years of screaming into the wind--to these deserving, patient folks, these last two weeks have been spent in honeymoon-like euphoria. I know some who are still laying in bed, exhausted, twisted up in clean white sheets, chain smoking the cigarettes of the politically fulfilled (at least, if the election took place in a movie from the 80s, that's what they would be doing. With big hair and bright red fingernails.).
To these folks, and to the rest of us for whom Tuesday of two weeks ago felt like discovering a CNN-sponsored candyland, with justice-flavored lollipop trees and hope-dipped park benches, these last two weeks have felt like a blissful eternity. Surely the rapture of seeing Rachel Maddow smile her sweet, victorious smile has been ours for eons, not weeks?
But this morning came the Revelation: the time for blind euphoria has passed. The time to get back to work has arrived.
To be honest, the time to get back to work never left. Those of us who live in California (and in gayborhoods nationwide) have been hard at work demanding the repeal of the ghastly Prop 8; "President" Bush has continued to fulfill his destiny as a evangelical bull in our environmental, economic, foreign relations, and human rights china shops; and President Elect Obama continues to be what he is--a politician, however intelligent and moral.
That's right, I said it: the man is a politician, and the work we must get back to has to start with the recognition of that fact.
Politicians require critical mass. They can call it a mandate, or (cynically) "capital," or whatever--what they need is support from the electorate or they will get nothing accomplished; witness Bush's failure to dismantle social security. Obama's critical mass, and the people he must be responsible to, are the very people who are currently idling in the political stasis of victory. And we MUST get back to work.
Americans have a complex relationship to their government. While we embrace the ideologies of the best that Enlightenment political philosophy has to offer--participatory democracy, liberty, justice, equality--we have never been particularly good at the mechanics of it, as evidenced, among other things, by the sluggish pace of achieving actual participatory democracy, liberty, justice, and equality. Perhaps beginning with the Constitution being a closed-door affair, or perhaps because of the national delirium of Manifest Destiny, we have always treated these ideals as though they emerge from the ether, from a divine or secular mandate that America and Americans are simply an exceptionally (and inevitably) democratic nation.
This has never been true.
What is so astounding about Barack Obama is that he personifies democracy; it practically comes from his pores. But this is also what is most frightening about his coming presidency, because of our national predisposition to democratic laziness.
This is no time for hero-worship. It is no time for feeling victorious.
It is a time for belief in the PROCESS of democracy, not in the manifest destiny of it. Obama did not get elected because it was inevitable and he did not get elected because America is just inherently wise and virtuous.
He got elected because he mobilized a movement, because he is good at community organizing even at a massive scale, and because he understands that democracy is something you do, not something you are handed.
So we've had two weeks. That's enough. The time has come to mobilize ourselves, and demand that this man live up to the inspiration he brought out in our hearts. I'm not suggesting that we turn on him--of course not, he is our greatest and most powerful ally.
I'm saying that, to quote an old liberal-ism, "when the people lead, the leaders will follow."

Manifesto, redux

As we careen toward tomorrow's election, even as my list of "good signs" (e.g. Fox isn't even putting up an election predictor map, I suppose out of some fair and balanced resistance to admitting that their side looks to be losing) outweighs my list of "bad signs" (mostly: they've done it before), I can't help having gut-wrenching flashbacks to 2004. So I'm posting an email I sent to my dad the week after that devastating loss, what I called my post-2004 political manifesto, as a parting shot to this election season.
As a preface to the 2008 edition of this email manifesto, I'd like to say only that, while most pundits, press, and politicians are saying that this Obama-McCain election will be the most important of our times, I argued then and I maintain that 2004 was and is more important--perhaps even more so than 2000.
Why would I make such an outlandish (and unpopular) claim?
Because 2004 exposed our national political disposition for all to see just how far right the American spectrum has moved since 1964. Without 2004, we would have no Obama--because without 2004, no Democrat, liberal, or lefty would really know how legendary this 2008 struggle would have to be; 2004 was like the lightning bolt that, for a split second, illuminated our political landscape so we could see the size, depth, and cruel jaggedness of the cliff to which we had brought ourselves. Only from there could a possible Obama candidate have sketched an appropriately grandiose and ambitious plan, for snatching us back from the brink.
Without further ado, here's a portrait of the writer as a politically dejected masters student:

dad-
i look forward to talking to you!! but perhaps not about the events of
this week...i've got political hangover. it's actually been good for
my thesis because i've been fleeing from my television and new york
times by practically living in my office. unfortunately there's just
no escaping the internet.
i don't know how i feel now. on tuesday night my most overwhelming
emotion was the helplessness of total irrelevance. if every newspaper in the country, and almost every international political body states outright that this
man should NOT be president, and he still gets elected, then we no
longer have any inroad to stop the rightist trajectory of this
country. if he declared tomorrow that sodomy is nationally illegal and
that christianity is the official religion of the state, all of our
uproar would not be enough to stop it. the right won a fundamental
ideological battle over the identity of the country this week in the
same way the left did in 1964 with the civil rights act, and i suspect
that this second term will be similarly characterized by a distinct
aura of political extremism. hillary clinton just does not understand
that bush winning reelection doesn't mean that she has a shot in
2008--it means she has no shot, ever. at least, not in her lifetime.
the left will necessarily redefine itself in relation to the right,
and that means john mccain is now a flaming liberal according to the
re-adjusted spectrum. my only hope now is that this expedites the loss
of our standing as the world power. i hope that this results in total
emotional divestment from the american project, both here and
internationally. when we begin to cannibalize our own progress, to
reneg on constitutional rights, institutionalize anti-queer hatred,
and turn backward on women's rights (while invading countries based on
liberationist rhetoric), the world should recognize that the united
states is reeling out of its own control and should be rapidly
disempowered. this country is officially a failed experiment.
so i guess i do know how i feel.
that's my post-election manifesto.
i would never have made it through this week without hunter thompson, though...
call me somtime tonight if you get a chance. i really miss you right
now, of course. i suspect that my political depression (hangover?)
will pass but not as fast as it would i was home. but you're right
about needing to make future plans untied to this stupid reactionary
country. as my friend at the coffee shop said on wednesday morning:
'i'm over hating him. now i hate the people who voted for him.'
love,
tb