ex- Democrat on twitter talking to Mother Jones this week(don't worry, this isn't Tom Friedman talking to his cab-driver. First of all, that always struck me like the unscrupulous reporter on "The Wire" who managed to have so many broken dolls in pictures accompanying his stories that other reporters joked he bought them by the case. Secondly, although it went all right, and that did make me feel nice on a human level, I can't say it's a magic bullet.)
We come from similar...down-market enclaves in a red state that is, from my perspective, slow at getting bluer and probably spent more time in college working than getting wasted in Cancun. She had a sudden health crisis that disrupted her life...the disruption of being born imperfect formed my life. In some ways, we might always have a lot to chat about...may even have a favorite show or something, though the past few years have been hell on my fandoms anyway and I can't say I've had a My Show for a super-long time. But she saw something in Trump that wasn't the blowhard guy in the back of the room that had a lot of opinions but didn't do his homework(Which is even better than the fascist I see now) and I did not. To put it mildly. I always want to ask: What does this guy do for you, that you want to think about his name every time you fire up twitter?
Knowing that there are very few politicians that I could also list as direct impacts: Ted Kennedy, FDR, and Elizabeth Warren(the latter cause she made it so I don't have to pay a huge bank $15 for babysitting my money every month...it was always at the end so I dreaded not having it, because SSI really is that small, so every time I relax at the end of the month, though more out of ritual than true need at this point, I always turn a thought toward Massachusetts.Thanks, Dr. Warren!)
Still, as much as we did communicate, however briefly, there are questions in my mind that might not have been there five years ago. Like, would she have been as pleasant if, like so many women that share my name, I had been younger and black or Latina? Don't want to be a knee-jerk progressive straw-woman and say definitely not, but at the same time, I can't be 2000-era me and so sure we've gotten beyond "all that racial stuff". Maybe my disabled-person-on-a-short-leash "one of the Good Ones" pass would be transferable.
I am still thinking of her "pre-existing condition" too. It's one of the big ones that even makes disabled me hope that she smoked like a chimney or worked in a candy factory and licked things out of the dye vats....almost, anyway, just so there'd be some way of knowing it wouldn't happen to you. On the other hand, she's made it for now. What kind of health coverage does she have? Does she fear losing it? How much does she know about the sabotage of the health insurance markets?
No comments:
Post a Comment