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Those of you who happened to read post I originally did at HuffPo (now cross-posted here) re: why I became a progressive may remember that I get a little emotional about my family and the lessons I learned from them growing up. So you may see me from time to time doing really personal posts about my family, like this one. You see, being a baby boomer, I'm at that point in life where a lot of the people I grew up around are fading. My Uncle George died a few weeks ago. My Aunt Dee died this week. Another Aunt is chronically ill in Pasadena, stuck in an HMO which is treating her poorly. My developmentally disabled brother has developed muscular dystrophy and is having trouble swallowing food.
As the "greatest generation" fades and comes to their final years, and as the massive baby boom generation keeps aging and the frailest among us start having big health problems, our society's dysfunction and lack of compassion are causing immeasurable pain. The luckiest among us, myself and my family included, have people who are there for us in the tough times. Even for these lucky ones, though, lack of money or connections all too often allow the terrible treatment of people in their most vulnerable moments- those stories in Sicko were not isolated cases that happen every once in a while, but things that happen to millions of people a year.
And for people in trouble with no strong advocates, this society has created systems far more hellish than anything in Dante's Inferno. Fortunately for my brother, my mom is a bulldog with a backbone of iron when the system is messing with one of her kids, but too few disabled people locked in the human services bureaucracy have advocates like my mom. What happens to Kevin's friends in that system who have no one on the outside who loves them scares the hell out of me.
We live in a country where we send brave young soldiers off to war, and if they are injured we put them in hospitals with mold on the walls where nobody pays attention to them. We honor the "greatest generation" with books and ceremonies and movies and speeches, but when they are in their greatest pain at the end of their days, we let them get treated poorly so that insurance and pharmaceutical companies can rake in unprecedented profits. We comfort ourselves with talk of a safety net, but we let bureaucracies make that safety net so tattered and torn that it leaves the people without the capacity to fend for themselves with little help and no hope.
One of the reasons I have been so happy to align myself with the online activist community is that you are really good at shining a light on problems. I hope this community will always be the people in this country who make sure that the people who get forgotten by everyone else get remembered by us.
Open Left is all about analysis and action, and this post hasn't done much of that, so I'll let you get back to your regularly scheduled programming. But to all those who are going gentle, or not so gentle, into that good night; to all those in pain without someone to advocate for them, I wanted to let you know that you are remembered, and that there are some folks who stand by your side.
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