The weight of a bad promise

This article appeared in the Virginian-Pilot, on July 30. They made one change replacing, "They gave us images of Uncle Sam in an ob/gyn clinic, donning rubber gloves and preparing to do what our current president has bragged about doing without gloves." with simply, "They gave us images of Uncle Sam in an ob/gyn clinic.” I kind of expected the change but it would have been interesting to see Republican “Fake news” (the ad) featured alongside the real news (Trump on tape) that he and his supporters would like us to forget.     

THE MOST COMMON defense I’ve heard for the Republican “Repeal and Replace Obamacare” bills, whether they be from Senators or Congressmen, is that they made promises to their constituents and they must keep their word.

President Obama also made a promise—to the country as a whole—to extend health care coverage to everyone, Democrats, Republicans and Independents alike. He kept that promise. Interestingly, Republicans on the day he was elected promised their base they would have nothing to do with this effort, and on day two and every day afterwards, continued with their “Repeal and Replace” promise.

Republicans warned about death panels. They gave us images of Uncle Sam in an OBGYN clinic. They continually tell us the richest country in the world can’t afford to do what every other country in the world does routinely. They are at a loss as to why drugs costing $70,000 in this country only cost $7,000 in other countries. Worst of all, they appear to seriously believe that money spent on poor, elderly, and sick people can be better spent by millionaires and billionaires.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave...when first we promise to deceive.

Yeah, I know. It doesn’t go this way. How about this one?  Don’t make promises if you can’t keep them, or if you shouldn’t keep them.

Promises always make life difficult.

I know this from watching Law and Order, the History Channel, and listening in on any interview with any Republican politician on any news show.

The cop shows up at a crime scene, feels remorse for the helpless victim and says something that makes his partner cringe. “Don’t worry ma’am. We’ll get the guy who did this.” He might have the best intention, but he can’t predict the outcome of the case and his partner let’s him know this.

General MacArthur, when driven from the Philippines promised, “I shall return.” Luckily, for him, he was able to keep that promise but it didn’t come about easily and the cost was high.

Then you have the GOP for the last seven years, promising to repeal and replace Obamacare. Unlike the poor cop on the beat, or MacArthur boarding a boat, they didn’t have what you might call honorable intentions. The driving force behind their promise was to stick it to Obama.

“Repeal and replace” has become the holy grail of Republican politics. Every Republican in every state in every district for the last seven years has been running against Obamacare.

How has this ruse paid off? What has it gotten them?

Well, it’s taken a while, a lot of money, and a lot of bad faith promises, but they finally have complete control of the federal government—Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches, and a fair share of the state governments. What they are learning, in the words of the titular head of the party, is that health care reform is harder than anyone thought. Repeal and replace is even harder still.

Yet, all we hear from these opportunists is, “We made a promise—to our constituents—and we have to keep that promise.” What their constituents are telling them is, if they replace, “Repeal and replace,” with “We’re going to take away your health insurance,” many of those constituents are prepared to replace their elected officials.

There are good promises and there are bad promises.

If you make a good promise, work hard to achieve it, but eventually fail, people will be mad but they will probably understand. This is the way it was for a long time for politicians trying to extend health care benefits until Obama finally succeeded in doing so.

On the other hand, if you make bad promises, work extra hard, even fanatically hard, to achieve them but keep coming up short, sensible people are going to say maybe you should rethink the original promise.

This is the problem with health care in America. Too many people don’t have coverage. Drugs are too expensive. Pharmaceutical companies are motivated more by making a profit than making people better. So are insurance companies. Scam artists are taking advantage of patients, insurance companies and government agencies to make a crooked buck.

A promise to fix these problems will go a long way to making people forget Republican s have spent the last seven years trying to fulfill a bad promise.     

Meet-ups: You never know who you're gonna meet

I had gotten an article published in the “Sunday Forum” of the Virginian-Pilot and was busy online, defending my position to critics—some whose names were familiar to me while others were new additions to my growing list of Internet infantrymen fighting the battle of words gone wild in the virtual world of anything goes.

This ritual was interrupted by a phone call from a man named Frank who had gone to the trouble of looking my name up in the phone book. I don’t know why anyone even bothers to do this because no one has a listed phone number anymore. I still do, and maybe Frank does.

He liked the piece and in the course of a short conversation, we discovered numerous things we had in common and decided to meet at a Panera’s for coffee later in the week.

There we spent several hours discussing politics and government—we were both Democrats; immigration—we were both third generation Italians from New York; and the world in general—we were both college educated, had had successful careers, were now retired and both liked to write.

After finally exhausting every topic, we said our good-byes but not before agreeing to a second “meet-up” down the road.

This was last November. The holidays came and went. He and his wife went on a cruise. My wife and I continued our frequent visits to Richmond to see the kids and grandkids. Many months went by until one day in early spring, I received an e-mail asking if I wanted to get together again.

I did and we agreed to meet again.

When I arrived, he was already seated at the same table reading the newspaper’s editorial page, just as he’d been doing the first time we met.

I came up behind him and as I was taking my seat, I offered up my standard greeting.

“How’s it going?”

He put his paper down and looked up. “It looks like Clinton is going to win.”

“Yeah, I think so. If she gets by Bernie, I don’t think she’ll have any trouble with Trump.”

For the next ten minutes, we discussed every facet of the on-going primaries and the issues at stake. As you might expect, neither of us had changed our positions on immigration, taxes and money in politics.

He reiterated his family’s experience settling in New York City. I talked again about my family’s arrival in Rochester, by way of Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania and Bridgeport, Connecticut.

At this point, he folded his paper, rose from his seat, told me he enjoyed talking to me, but that he had to be moving along.

“Yeah, nice talking to you,” I said as he walked away.

I watched him light up a cigarette as he stepped outside the door.

My only thought was, that was mighty short. We hadn’t seen each other in five months, I had driven about 20 minutes to get here, and we’d only talked for about ten minutes. Hell, my coffee was still too hot to pick up.

I was still working on it when a man approached my table—a man who looked even more like the man I had talked to five months earlier than the man I had just spent 10 minutes talking to.

“How’s it going?” He asked as he sat down in his chair. “I see you have your coffee already.”

“Yes I do. Just waiting for it to cool. How have you been?”

I looked out the window. The man I was just talking to who I thought was the man that I was now talking to was still on the sidewalk, smoking his cigarette.

Had Frank been waiting for this man to leave? Did he not want to interrupt us? Was he waiting in the wings all that time wondering who my new friend was? Was I going crazy?

If he had seen us, he didn’t mention it. It never came up. For all I knew—and I really didn’t know what I knew—he had only now just walked in when he sat down. Whether it was true or not, I didn’t know—and I certainly wasn’t going to ask.  

We talked for a couple of hours about all of the same stuff we talked about the first time we met, which happened to be the same stuff I had just finished talking about with the stranger. When we said good-bye, we agreed to meet again.

“Maybe we could start a discussion group,” he said.

He didn’t know I was already working on it.

When I arrived home, I walked in the door. My wife greeted me.

“How’d it go?”

“Well, it was a little strange.”

“How so?”

“Maybe you should sit down.”

 

Amelia Earhart Luggage

I never really did understand the reasoning that went into naming Amelia Earhart Luggage. I mean, what was the point? Seriously?

 

About seven years before her plane crashed in the Pacific or possibly was stolen in mid-flight by aliens, she crashed another plane on this day, September 25, 1930 at the Hampton Roads Naval Air Station.

 

Later that night at a dinner party she made light of the accident saying, “It was just one of those little things.”—Like a bump in the road, perhaps.

 

If Mitt Romney had been alive then and running for—I don’t know—maybe pilot-in-chief, he might have been heard to exclaim, “Just a little thing! Just a little thing! My God, her plane flipped over and she calls it just a little thing. How out of touch can one person be?”

 

Anyway, when I realized that today was the anniversary of that crash I went looking into my archives—a box labeled “Rejected Stuff.” This was a letter written to the Virginian-Pilot on May 8, 1979, just a few months after we had moved to Virginia Beach.

 

Editor, Virginian-Pilot:

This month’s giveaway at a local bank is a beautiful matching set of Amelia Earhart luggage—“Something to hold your dreams.” It’s good to know someone has a sense of humor although the last people I would have suspected would be the banks.

The possibilities for Amelia Earhart luggage are endless:

 

Say your mother-in-law came over for dinner one night and never left; and that was six months ago! Give her a beautiful matching set of Amelia Earhart luggage for Mother’s Day and kiss her goodbye forever.

 

Say you borrowed $500 from a friend and now he’s beginning to threaten you. Don’t fret. Borrow another thousand and send him on an all-expense paid trip to Pago Pago with his brand new matching set of Amelia Earhart luggage. Watch your money problems fly out the window.

 

Say the 9 to 5 rat race has you beat and you want to get away from it all. Buy yourself a beautiful set of Amelia Earhart luggage and say goodbye to your workday blues.

And say, it you feel your mother-in-law or friend might get bored on their upcoming excursions, why not pack a handsome surprise in their brand new Amelia Earhart Luggage? How about a copy of Wiley Post's Come Fly With Me?