An absolutely irrelevant note about foreign policy

Last night, a cab driver assaulted me.

No, it wasn't the usual, "You nice lady. You married, Miss?"

It was about healthcare. I spent about 15 minutes (the entire ride) trying to explain to a man to whom I just explained the word "breathing," why our country didn't have national healthcare already.

"Germany, England, France, you pay nothing. Obama say in 2014 we pay a little bit. This good plan, Miss?"

He was a leaden pipe full of hot water, and if his long beard weren't black, I'd've thought it was steam. Here we were, Jew and Muslim driving toward the neighborhood we both live in (Bensonhurst/Dyker Heights), and we weren't talking about "loneliness" or Israel.

In the past, drivers, and in fact, people in cafes, my left-wing psychiatrist -- a fair number of people have engaged me on foreign policy early in conversations. I learned about Israel's latest controversy while sitting in the waiting room of my psychiatrist's office --reading TIME magazine. Yet, we didn't get into it at all in session. We were both more concerned about our pets and about the obvious necessity to increase my anti-anxiety medication. The latter has become a staple of how I "deal with" the state of our economy and my job. In fact, economics has ruled most of my social and medical life since Bloomberg took office.

Yesterday afternoon, at a cafe, no one even bothered to put the closed captioning on when our Secretary of State Hlilary Clinton was on CNN. Perhaps she is aware of her own place as a kind of throwback to another time. I was shocked to find she has now grown her hair long and set it in the "Upsweet" popular in the 1960's. Will the Jackie-O make-up follow?

I still have no idea what announcement the former-First Lady/Presidential Candidate and powerfully staunch hawk was making. At a time when world economies continue to be in need of serious vision, hardly anyone cares about what we hope to be our foreign policy. Excepting of course those unfortunate people whom we might be bombing, boycotting or bungling attempts to provide humanitarian aid. Sadly, most of those people are really facing the results of our economic policy which has remained stagnant since we voted in resounding force for change back in 2008. Take those receiving the humanitarian aid known as unemployment. --I know they're not the same, but de facto, they are. In a WORLD which lives on credit and in which money is no longer measured by the gold standard, the question of what we pay and what we afford has to do with psychology and not finance. If that weren't true, everyone would've pulled their money out of the stock market years ago as very few sectors of any economy are truly flourishing. Unregulated capitalism leads to a lot of cheap goods, bankruptcies and reorganizations as well as monopolies. None of this provides much entry-way for the average citizen to benefit. No Milton Friedman fan can defend/explain or fix what happened in Russia if you want proof on a smaller scale than our worldwide dilemmas.--

What I did know this week was that President Obama said it was important for Congress to "do the right thing" and extend unemployment. That's about as strong and open-hearted a phrase he has used in some time on a liberal cause and it made me hopeful. Our President doesn't want to see people suffering. That's important.

It did not give me an answer for what to tell my driver. In the end, we haggled about his tip, which I had mistakenly not added using the new touchscreens mandated by our lovely Mayor. This is perhaps because I pushed the button to turn the screen OFF very hard possibly damaging it., so that I would not have to watch the especially bad and tourist-driven television it will proffer it I did not. In the end, I reviewed the receipt multiple times and handed the driver much less than the percentage I would've tapped in had the machine been working properly. I resented the argument, though I knew it was his right to make it. I wasn't about to NOT tip him, but there were more polite ways to raise the issue that the tip did not seem to be calculated. For someone who had been fervent, but open to my opinions in an overall discussion of economics, the push and shove on dollars was a little unsettling. If I hadn't been so tired and were generally a more confident person, I might've used it as what we is called a "teachable moment." The same tension with which he fought over three versus five dollars is what drives the argument against healthcare. It is also what some people call, "bad business" as it's not the kind of behavior that makes someone want to step into your cab again. Since it is truly random whether or not a driver sees a passenger again, I guess it doesn't matter. It is an industry, then, which can be used as a microcosm for examining our economy. Essentially, it is driven by an exchange between two people and the value of the service fluctuates depending on individual moods and the weather. Like a magnate, a cab company survives by having so many cabs that they can cover their losses. There is very little ability to control quality beyond a minimum. (I get out of cars that don't have air conditioning or heat and I suspect that's where most people draw a line if they have made the decision that they need to pay the fare.) It is a mobile marketplace complete with haggling salespeople.

If he was asked, I am sure the driver would prefer not to have to raise the issue of a tip. I'd certainly prefer that the agreed upon price somehow provided him with adequate sustenance. But, that would require a decision by producer and consumer on what the set value of the entire service IS. What does the driver deserve to make? What does a human being require for healthcare?

Of course, most of the time, I take the subway or bus, but I was trying to avoid the death-claw of the humidity on the platform last night. I was able to do so, in no small part, owing to the long history of labor bargaining for a fair wage and benefits. But, someone who isn't so lucky, who might take the train and find breathing suddenly difficult might then be rushed to the ER. There, he or she would receive services which, if he/she is uninsured, for which he/she won't be able to pay. Because we are not as cold-hearted a people in New York as people think, our hospitals don't push people toward their deaths and refuse them treatment. Yet, we don't just agree to provide all members of our city with insurance because we would rather engage in daily bargaining than commit our wallets. (What is a healthcare plan which will be implemented in 2014 but conjecture -- at most, a gauntlet on a bargaining table.) I wonder at how much this would really cost us if we sat down and considered:
1) What REALLY is a fair amount of profit? Yes, there is unfair profit. Maybe we should call it unreasonable profit -- a profit margin which will ultimately make it impossible for any consumer to afford the product. That requires a certain honesty on everyone's part. For example: No one needs a 150 dollars sneaker which is not orthopedic and no one should be making 140 times what it cost to make the sneaker, assuming that it took some Indonesian woman at Nike one whole day to make that pair for her wage of one dollar.
2) What is the REAL COST of our treatment? The price of the 15 minute glance-over and routine blood tests most people get, at best? Is that the treatment which our doctors really think is enough if they were being paid adequately? Not being as liquid as my mother was, I go see doctors who take my insurance. Even when they are good, they are still overworked and behind schedule.
3) Do you find it unpleasant to step over homeless and sick people on your way to work, or do you just consider this some reaffirmation of Calvinism, Fascism -- or do you just enjoy the feeling of being inside a painting by Francis Bacon?

If we thought about all of this, we might then turn up the volume on Mrs. Clinton, as, I am sure something she was talking about had to do with paying for bombs or humanitarian aid. For the value of the former, see question 3 again

The Innocent Bystanders

This year, I lost more students and colleagues to violence and illness than I have in all the years I have been teaching. I've lost close family, too, particularly my godmother Mary Pearce, and I've written about her elsewhere on this blog. This is the first time I've been so inundated by unexpected and accidental deaths of people younger than I am. The most recent student, Michael Gonzales of Tilden HS, was a sweet kid -- a true teenager in the best of senses. He liked to skateboard, dance and he mostly had his head on his shoulders. He was not an academically aggressive student, but when pushed, he tried. He was navigating the academic world better than his skills might've allowed.

Tomorrow there is a candlelight service for Michael. I don't know if I will go because I sometimes feel as if I join in grief almost to prove my own life was important. I was at Tilden for one year. In that time, I must've talked to Michael almost every day. But, I never had him for a class -- I subbed for his advisory teacher a few times. I spent a lot of time convincing him to GO to class, and he mostly did. Like a lot of kids, he rode the limits of how far he could stay out of class without pushing it to the point of not graduating. He graduated last week. He died July 4, 2010. A bullet meant for somebody else hit him in the chest.

So many of the students' postings on Facebook ask the familiar question -- Why Mike? And some speak of wisdom far beyond their years and experience. Some students talked about how this taught them not to hold onto anger -- whatever fights they might've had with Mike paled now in perspective. Some wrote the equivalent of W.H. Auden's haunting warning, "We must all love one another or die."

If I were to try to explain to those students (and to myself) why so many "good die young" it might be an extension of Auden's warning adapted to 2010. We must all remember, whenever we bring violence into the environment, whether it be gun violence, whether it be the violence that propels us not to get people appropriate health insurance or just anger, we ENDANGER everyone in our environment. (I lost a student to Ketoacidosis. I have a friend who has survived that many times: the difference is education about Diabetes and insurance.) Our "beefs" are minimal -- the world, and life are not just about us. Whether we foolishly build a post office near a runway because it seems convenient, or, as I did a few years ago, we let off steam out of hubris, we inevitably endanger someone who will come into contact with our work who does not see our mistake coming. As a colleague once said to me when I faced punishment for my mistake, "You weren't thinking about the students who would need you the next day." Whoever brought that gun on July 4th, wasn't counting on missing. That's hubris, too. Not to be callous, but if you think you're going to be perfect at taking revenge, and then you hurt someone completely innocent, not only did you not get your desired goal, but you are now going to be punished for something you didn't want to do. So, even if you "made peace with the consequences" of hurting your intended victim, you royally miscalculated and now two people will have their lives cut short -- you and the innocent bystander. Even if you got your revenge, you weren't thinking about the people around you who need you -- maybe people you haven't even met yet but whom you could have/were intended to meet. If you say to yourself that you don't care, that G-D lets the violence happen in other places and doesn't stop it, you are just fulfilling a cycle of violence which inevitably hurts people whom you or someone you had no intention of hurting loved and helps no one. Do something positive and watch -- people you care about and people you didn't even know will benefit. And the energy will come back to you.

So, why does G-D let this happen to innocent bystanders: to remind us that we are responsible for everyone we come into contact with. That every decision we make, especially one involving violence, includes everyone in our immediate world. As people often say these days, "It's not about YOU." It's about everyone around you.

If I could give Michael's friends advice tomorrow, I would say to remember a time in which they had pure fun, whether it was with Michael or someone else. Hold that moment. The next time you feel angry in any way, reach for that moment. And remember that you don't want to deprive more people like Michael, like Terrance Wright, like Nakemia Riley...like Karen Hunter, of that moment. Give more when the instinct is to pull away. Be extra careful when you feel like you can "let something go." Have no hubris. And recognize that the people you care about do need you. The world needs more of the good people I have lost.

Hold tight to those memories of fun. Be generous -- let the world have the care it needs. No one should die because of something which can be prevented. We should never let our prejudices get in the way of medical research as we have with so many diseases. When in doubt, give. If you're a doctor, take on the extra patient. My uncle is very lucky. His friends gathered around him when he was diagnosed with cancer and his network got him to the best of care quickly. People put him at top priority. A veteran, a father and a good man, he deserved that treatment. But so does everyone.

This country could feed the world if everyone donated 15 dollars a day. There are limits to how much profit anyone needs to make. Anyone who has been in an emergency room knows that good, smart doctors know how to find a way to get people the priority of care they need. It can be done. It is done. And I can list tons of airports with grass alongside their runways -- room for error. Because none of us are perfect, and its hubris to think we can be.

I am lucky for the good memories I have of those I have lost. I will try to hold onto them when I feel angry, stingy, lazy or "above it all." I will try.

Mike's friends have put together a really thoughtful site on Facebook.: RIP White Mike http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=137750112917814