| I remember it like it was yesterday.
It was four years ago today, and I was just coming off a brutal rotation - we had lost a lot of seasoned staff in the wake of the HCA takeover and I am the sort of supervisor that leads from the front. If my staff has to work overtime, I work overtime too - I don't ask anything of anyone if I am not willing to do it myself - so I had worked twelve of fourteen days, and I had put in 88 hours over the preceding eight days. I was looking forward to a lazy Saturday, and my husband was intent on seeing I got it. He had unplugged the phone, turned off on cell phone and threatened the lives of our progeny should they trouble me at all. I was intent on letting him spoil me.
When he heard me get up and go to the bathroom he came up and asked me if I was up to stay. When I told him I was, he told me to get back in bed and rest, he would bring me a cup of coffee, a bagel and the newspapers.
I was more than willing to comply, and he is good to his word, and the first twenty minutes or so were pure bliss. Then I read an article in the KC Star and I was fired up and commenced to bitch.
I have actually been online in some way or another for over twenty-five years. I searched academic databases doing the research that was part of my job and my education starting in the mid 80s. I was getting email on a green monochrome monitor that scrolled a line at a time with the receiver of the phone in the cradle of a 12-baud modem at a time when most offices were still using IBM typewriters. But the only social thing I did online was chat with other military wives. (The Balkans was the conflict that gave today's active duty spouses the prototype for the electronic support group.) After 9/11, I tracked down people we had served or studied with to make sure that everyone was okay. But I didn't really use the net for politics until Matt Blunt came to power in Missouri (I'm still pissed off at John Kerry for pulling out of the state three weeks before the election and costing Claire the governors mansion.)
When he slashed first steps, he was attacking the most helpless of all my patients - he was hurting children who needed specific therapies to overcome deficits. I found a couple of groups, we organized, we fought, and we stopped him.
So back to the bedroom in our old house...
I read an article about the further cuts that Blunt was making to the social safety net, and learning that the foster grandparents program was being defunded set me off. A grandmother who is raising her grandkids to keep the family intact deserves $136 per month, I think. Traditional foster care costs more and disrupts family bonds, and it offended me no end, and I started to rant.
My husband, who was teaching that year and dealing with those issues every day, listened politely for a while and then he asked the question that launched a thousand posts..."Why are you telling me this again? I already agree with you."
I stopped cold, and looked at him and said "You know what? You are exactly right," and I kissed his cheek, got out of bed, put on my robe, took my cup of coffee into the office and two hours later my first post was up on the original Blue Girl, Red State and I was suddenly a blogger.
I think this excerpt from that first post might qualify as "coming out swinging."
Our fair haired governor - and new father of a healthy baby who will never experience want or need - has slashed the state Medicaid budget, and he is eliminating such wasteful programs as the "Foster Grandparents" program, that keep foster kids with family. Our Governor has children who will never receive an immunization in a public health clinic, never wait for a city bus, never wait eight months for a dentist appointment. The Governors child will never receive a free lunch in public school, nor be taken into custody of child and family services when the only parent in the home gets arrested. And the Governor is just a child himself...He is making decisions that affect peoples lives and he has no frame of reference, no perspective. He's never been hungry, or truly cold, or truly hopelessly desolate. I would wager dollars against dimes that he never came home from school to a house that had the power cut that day, and neither will his new child. I congratulate the governor and his wife on their healthy new baby, but he needs to think about all the other babies born in Missouri so far in 2005 whose fathers aren't the Governor and who will experience the things I mentioned above.
And the rest, as they say, is history... |
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