Sob Stories

Last night, I attended an event at Antioch Baptist Church in Cleveland called an Interfaith Service of Remembrance, Hope and Action for health care. Its purpose was to memorialize those who have suffered for lack of health care and to energize people going forward. It was sponsored by more than a dozen faith and social-justice groups.

Much of it was lovely: Rabbi Shawn Zevit of Tikkun Olan played guitar and sang in English and Hebrew, the Duffy Liturgical Dancers lit candles with elegant gestures, and Antioch's Rev. Marvin McMickle spoke forcefully of the need of all of us to come out of our "grand houses" and pay attention to those in need — referring to the story from Luke 16 of the rich man "dressed in purple" who ignored the beggar Lazarus outside. Five individuals presented stories — four told others' stories, while one woman told her own. She spoke of sitting with her mother, in pain and dying of cancer, and a young Dennis Kucinich, around their Tremont dining-room table 39 years ago, and how Kucinich promised that if he was ever in a position to make a difference, he would. She related how she is now dying of cancer, and the battles her family is having with insurance. She begged Dennis to support health-care reform.

Her story and the others left many in tears. And at the end of the program, the crowd was encouraged to all both our senators and to write a letter to Sen. Voinovich on a form provided for that purpose.

This service had much less of the feel of wallowing helplessly in misery than the appearance in Cleveland of the Mad as Hell Doctors a few months ago. But I still have the feeling that the wrong people are hearing these stories, which are everywhere. Almost everyone knows someone who has one. It makes me wonder about someone like George Voinovich — by all reports a person of deep faith, and someone who lives in the city, in Collinwood, where many are struggling with issues of joblessness, home foreclosure and loss of access to health care. How can he not be hearing such stories, and how can he not be listening? Does his obsession with the budget deficit and costs completely cocoon him from human misery? Is he really content to stay in the grand house and not heed the cries of his constituents in such desperate need?

Certainly, there are some venal, craven fools in Congress. Someone like Joe Lie-berman — who professed to support health-care reform to win Democratic support but now parrots Republican talking points he surely knows are untrue to defend his now intractable opposition — is beneath contempt. But given that so many of THEM profess to be devout as well, I have to wonder how hard they work to be deaf to the pleas of the sick and the needy. I’m just having a hard time understanding how they manage to shut out the pain of the world in order to maintain a fiction that all is well on the health-care front and reform is some kind of plot to destroy America.

I would like to see people like Senators Mitch McConnell, John Cornyn, Tom Coburn, James Inhofe, David Vitter and yes, Joe Lie-berman, marched into a room and forced to listen to real-life stories of peoples’ fights to get access to health care. Then I would like to see them tell these people to their faces why they really don’t want health-care reform.

Senator George Voinovich:
216-522-7095
202-224-3353

(Our other Senator, Sherrod Brown, had a staff member at the service. Call and thank him for everything he’s done at 216-522-7272 or 202-224-2315.)