Love Your Nearest War Veteran

Maxine Hong Kingston was on Bill Moyers Journal this week.

Here's a picture of her



Quite a woman! She'd written a new book, Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace ...she really hadn't written the book - she'd edited it. It is a collection of stories written by vets about their experiences in war. Many of them had carried these stories with them, silently, for as many as 30 years. She has a writer's group of vets, apparently, and helps them, in the group, to write their stories. The vets interviewed on the Moyers program attested to the healing properties of the exercise.

It was touching to watch the healing vets - and Maxine Kingston was inspiring to watch, as she explained why telling the story you'd been keeping sealed up allows for a reintegration of the personality, and the dissolution of the numbness, alienation, or shame that stunts the veterans lives after they return from war.

War is insane. It's mass insanity. Handfulls of men in power throw thousands or millions of people into violence in order to continue in power. That violence is horrific, insane, destructive. It traumatizes many (if not most) who experience it. Those it doesn't traumatize, it changes. The societies involved loose whole sections of the fighting generation...

We all know this.

But we keep on doing it. And all those vital young people continue to be taught the tools and rules of war. What would they be doing if they weren't fighting? What would their families be doing?

Listening to Maxine Hong Kingston made me want to take my developing expertise in our nations' benefits system and try to help some veterans with their benefits problems. One wants to reach out to these young people and try to make them whole again. They've been through a lot - based on the society's injunction to them to serve. Society surely owes them some nurturing.

Wouldn't it be cool to start a volunteer organization that assists veterans through the medical/benefits systems when they return? Anybody interested?

Owen's Fine Trajectory!!

In the Rocky Mountain News this Friday morning:

Bill Owens is off to a job where they privatize the infrasture for profit...."Owens will work with the bank's infrastructure group as it tries to capitalize on the trend of governments selling off their assets to the private sector..." - this totally fits my picture of Bill...

...and there's a new Federal Immigration Bill trying to get through Congress - the details are very nicely laid out in columns of rules that would be implemented if the bill were to pass...4 columns of 5 or 6 rules each....a totally new or vastly expanded bureaucracy is envisioned.....

(I have all this up close and personal experience with our Social Services bureaucracies....it's with me as I read the paper.)

And I think about the 5 computer systems that Colorado bought that don't work....under Bill's astute leadership.....

And I think about Bill capitalizing on a private company - complete with profit seeking investors and share holders - to implement the new immigration rules....

And I feel kind of tense all over; my stomach aches.

I think, "He's made an effort - through bad management - to make government infrastuctures operate so badly, governments want to get rid of them......then he goes and gets a job in which he will make bundles of money with those same bureaucracies.....or ones just like 'em...only run right...which he could have done as governor (run them right), for the benefit of taxpayers ....but would rather do for himself, for his own benefit...." ....I don't like these thoughts.

It makes me think I'm a conspiracy theorist.

Am I the only one who thinks these things?

What is this privatization thing about anyway??? Why does a private company make money doing the same thing that government looses money at??? Please, somebody, explain it to me.

Selling off our roads and bridges.....the idea disturbs me...I think, "What's next? Should we sell the legislature, too?" Oh, right. We already did.

Sometimes I wish Americans could stop thinking about Anna Nicole Smith and that Hasselhoff guy long enough to think about how we're taking care of the things we all share - the systems that make the rest possible....or to at least observe the trajectory of the changes occurring.

Forwarned is forearmed.

Kaiser is Peanuts

Arches near Moab, 2007

Standing in the lunch line at work yesterday, someone comes by handing out paper plates. She's giving two to each person because the plates are flimsy and it takes two to keep your sandwich off the floor. My companion takes two from her and carefully separates them and hands one to the lady behind him. He's helping the paper plate lady. She notices and hands him two more to give to the next person, which he does. She tries to give the lady with just one another one and he intercepts it to give it to someone else. Now the paper plate lady has three people with just one plate each. She tries to explain...pushing plates at him. My companion peers sincerely at her through smudged spectacles, and hoists his sagging blue jeans up with his empty hand. He has no idea what she's talking about. There's no point in explaining it anyway...the line ahead has shortened - we put out our plates for our sandwiches and move on.

I love my job. I love these people with the saggy pants and the good intentions.

They have a heckuva time in the world we've created, though. I've been trying to help one woman, for example, who moved from the Denver catchment area to ours, and needed to have her medical records and payeeship transfered. Her therapist had filed the necessary paperwork, followed-up, followed up the follow-up and months were going by without results.
So I started in - I followed-up the previous follow-ups...Social Security here told me the woman was out of the country, so her case had been suspended. "She's right here in my office", I said.
"We show she's out of the country. You'll have to talk to the central office," they said.
So, of course, I did. "Oh!, said the central office. "That's just a code we use to suspend - we can't issue the check until we have the payee paperwork."
"But we've sent the payee paperwork", I said. "We've mailed it and then we've faxed it twice."
"Oh" said the office, and after a lengthy phone interview with the woman, who was, indeed, right there in my office, and an even lengthier pause while they determined the payee paperwork was located in the backlog - the suspension was suspended; and, after a call back to the original office, we were all told to wait for develoments.

That was a month ago. The woman now cannot pay rent, cannot buy food, cannot buy medications...and, after a follow-up to the follow-ups of last month, I'm told that requests to get it out of the "back-log" and processed will be dispatched marked urgent. This is the maximum best they can do. We are told to wait for developments. So it goes.

A few days before that, I was told by the phone company that, due to privacy laws, they couldn't tell my client her own phone number ...my client, they said, would have to wait until her phone bill arrived to know what her number is.

At my new job, I have Kaiser health insurance. I used to have Kaiser, years ago, and hated it. At this job, they'll buy your insurance for you - if you agree to take Kaiser....the "other insurance" offered - which you can buy if you wish - is prohibitively expensive. So, tightwad that I am, when the choice boiled down to Kaiser-for-free or something-else-for-lots-of-money, I naturally picked the Kaiser. I pretty much won't use it, though. Haven't gone to a doctor since I got this job. Feel great. Wouldn't have gone if I'd had the other insurance, either. I think the only safe time to approach doctors is when you're bleeding and broken in some obvious way- or maybe if you have an infection or something...I'll grant that there are times when doctors are necessary, but those times are very rare...and remain rare as long as you don't go in there looking for trouble.

When people ask me why I hate Kaiser so much, I tell them the truth: it's their phone system. Whenever you contact them, they take the opportunity to waste your time telling you in detail about things you're not interested in, before allowing you to complete the business you've called about. I can't take it. I refuse to call them. Period.

So it's not just people with schizophrenia who're having trouble with our "systems"...

We have a guy with schizophrenia, though, who has just been denied benefits for the second time - which, given his current position in life, means that he will be homeless, without medication, without anything at all starting next week. Compared to that, my Kaiser issue is peanuts.