Untitled By Jessica Meuninck-Ganger

On a regular basis I am made aware of our healthcare system’s inadequacies. Four years ago, I was a new mother wrapping up my graduate work in Minneapolis. My husband was not able to add my new son and me to his healthcare plan because we were far too expensive to insure. I independently purchased insurance at a high cost and with an unaffordable deductible. It was the most reasonable I could find. The plan cost our family $12,000 a year. Between my 3 part-time jobs, which together equaled far more than 40 hours a week, I was ONLY able to contribute enough money to pay for our insurance. Not one penny went towards our household budget. Luckily our family has been blessed with good health. Unfortunately, my dearest friends are not so lucky.

My best friend (at 30 years old) was diagnosed with MS, and soon after, she lost her job and insurance. Since then, insurance companies consistently turn her down because of her pre-existing condition. She’s worked and waited for the past 5+ years hoping that a stretch of time might clear her record. During this period she has not seen a doctor. Several times she went blind for a week or more, had several episodes of seizures, and lost strength in her hands. These episodes frequently cause(d) her to miss work at her various jobs -which include small businesses and non-profit organizations that can’t offer affordable plans.

Because another dear friend (an 34-year old artist) couldn’t afford insurance, he went two years without seeking medical advice about his physical problems, including: loss of balance, impaired hearing, and increasing paralysis of one side of his face. We, friends & fellow artists, came together and held a fundraiser. The effort partially funded his doctor visits. His tests revealed a brain tumor the size of a fist, which was quickly growing and had to be removed immediately. Although he made it through, after two years of multiple surgeries and extensive therapy it’s unlikely that he will ever be in place where he can pay off his debt and live comfortably.

And, I could share more and more and more and more stories. This series of prints illustrates the completely appalling state of our current healthcare system. The prints advertise absurd (yet possibly affordable) “alternative therapies” for our physical, mental, and social challenges.

 

 

 

 

"Sugar Coated" by Melissa Wagner-Lawler

Currently, I am one of the few lucky Americans to have health insurance.  I use the term ‘lucky’ very loosely.  It was only a few months ago that my husband’s job cut our health care benefits.  This puts quite a strain and stress on me, especially because I am a diabetic.  Before the benefits were cut, we weren’t so lucky either.  The month before we found out that our insurance plan would be changing, I started to receive harassing letters and phone calls from various doctor’s office.  It turned out that although we had been paying for health care benefits out of our paychecks, the employer had ‘neglected’ to actually pay the insurance company.

Nothing was covered. We are currently involved in a class-action lawsuit in order to get our medical bills paid.

This piece serves two purposes - first, I wanted to figure out exactly what my current insurance plan would cover if I were to experience a diabetes-related complication.  Second, to serve as a reminder to continue to live a healthy life to protect not only myself, but also my wallet.

(Since this show started last year, I have since lost my health insurance.)

"HOLEY HEALTHCARE ISSUES" by Joseph Reeves

On Healthcare?

Yes on healthcare, of course-

What about healthcare?

All about healthcare, All-

Ways All about healthcare Always.

In so many ways- NO,

All Ways-

Healthcare is an issue that is in the Southern most

State of my

Mind.

The Southern most State

(of my mind)

is filled with fear, and

Doubt, and

It lets me go On and

On and

On

Making this crappy

Poetry-

And

In some ways,

Well actually;

All ways-

Im really very worried, and

Not just about

Myselfmyselfmyselfmyselfmyselfmyselfmyselfmyselfmyselfmyself,

But the  W H O L E

Country, the

Whole healthcare issue-

The hole healthcare is-

And we have watched it

Become,

Became,

Began as-

Began as what?

We used to have integrity

(as a country)

We used to give a

Shit.

Get this-

Honestly,

The whole reason,

That this Whole Hole issue,

In the Whole Holey Healthcare issue,

Is even such an issue for me,

Is because of all the medicine ations-

Or medications- or whatever,

That I am supposed to

Take

Take

Take

Many many many Times-

EVERYDAY,

For My

Bi Polar

Dis Order- Or

Whatever.

Its dawning has now become,

A Tangible thing for

Me.

And, sometimes- I am even

The Master,

But,

Mostly Not.

I can feel and,

Be aware of-

This shift in my chemical

IMBAlance.

From the depths of a crippleing

Low-

To a fluid and semi-controlled,

Extravagantly painted,

Euphorically laced state-

Of mania.

I can even feel myself write

Faster,

And I can barely grasp the

Concept-

Of this very poem.

Fleeting notions-

Both abstract, and

SEMI-logical-

Are Shot from the cusp of

My brain, and

Into my eyes

(where they can be lost

very easily) And

This shift of states,

-if you will-

feels  like something I

Can control,

But when it shifts back

The other way,

I will think-

Alright than DIPSHIT, If you

Can control this,

Than just stop feeling this way.

Just go ahead, and try.

And I will wonder,

In the pit of my gloomy slump-

WHY,

I cant,

Just Try.

But I should probably introduce myself before

I get into all this personal stuff.

“My Name is Joe,”

(“Hi Joe,”

Sighed the other displaced loons)

“And I have a Bi Polar Disorder…”

It was O.K. though,

Because,

They all had one too.

Others even had two, or

Three of them.

When they started comparing sizes,

I decided to leave.

And after I left, I began to

Think about what was right.

And what was right,

Seemed to be no longer left

But in its place, there

Was A Void.

Avoid, I remember thinking-

At all costs-

A trip to the Doctor

Since-

Insurance will no longer cover

You. I wondered though,

If in their GIANT computer syster,

My Absence-

Had left A Void?

A Void? My mother asked,

That’s impossible, Rose gave me the

Check on Sunday,

And said-

That we shouldn’t cash it til Tuesday-

Its Wednesday night,

We SHOULD be fine!

Sonofabitch (my father defeatedly

Sighed)

Workmans comp. dosent get here

Until Monday at least-

We have to pay for Amandas field trip,

And we NEED to pick up

Your meds,

You cant go another day without

Them,

This is ridiculous…

And at the time, I can even

Remember,

Not

Understanding how anyone

Could ever

NEED-

A Pill.

An ever frustrating contrast

To my –Now-

All too real Understanding

Of mental disorders.

Dis- ordered

Disorder- disorder- dis-order,

WHO- ordered this anyways?

And why?

I certainly didn’t, can I

Take it back, or,

Return it for store credit?

Can I UN-order it, or

DIS-order it?

I'm sure not.

I slip at having to use such terms-

And they wonder why I would never

Talk to those people?

Those fucking people-

With their presumptuous

Tones, and the

Mockingly infantile color

Schemes- Displaced puzzle

Toys working as cheap metaphors

For their personality-

And they keep talking in

Circles- aroundandaroundandaroundandaroundandaroundANDITSNODIFFERENTTHANLISTENINGTOAPOLITICIANEXCEPT-

Their a politician who actually gets paid,

To care about your life.

And the cicular questions only provide

A Venue, for

You, (as the actor)

And I don’t perform well under these circumstances;

Im always busy wondering if these

People ever even

Have Hot Dirty

Sex?

Is there possibly some dark unseen

Animal Interior-

Beneath the guise of this- neatly manicured/early 40’s/ letting herself go lately/ ready for her 11:00 yogurt- Façade;

That might allow her to explore her

Curious fascination with Anal

Sex, and if so,

Would she-

Like all good employees-

Wash her hands before returning

To work?

Maybe so,

It probably depends on where you go.

My mother, wisely-

Taught me the nature of these slow

Moving currents early on.

I am not a morning person, so it pays

To do your math twice in

This situation.

The Milwaukee County Mental Behavioral

Health Center, or as the

“regulars” or “loons” call it:

“County”- opens the clinic doors at

8:00 am

This is when and where you came if you

Were a disorderEE,

Without health insurance.

When the doors open at 8, there

Is usually a line of at least

15-20 “regulars”

Already waiting.

You know they are regulars, cause

They know how early you need to be

There, in order to

“ BE SEEN,” (as if their merely

Laying eyes upon you were a blessing)

The regulars all know their

Numbers, and they know

The odds, and the figures

And, their knowledge of this system-

is no longer a burden, but-

a way of life.

When the doors open at 8, the

House releases their odds (usually

The same or very near)

“The Doctor will only have time today

To see 6 people…”

the nurse is

Accustomed to the heavy sighs,

Urgent protests, and

Elaborate stories that proceed.

Some people listen to the drone of

the A/C at work, or

the static of their C.B.,

While-

these people, listen to the drone ramblings

of people with O.C.D.-

or P.T.S.D,

and given enough

time-

I bet its easy to

ignore.

My mother (and most of the time,

Me) would stay up all

Night, (so we wouldn’t sleep in)

And be to County between

5:00 and 5:30 (equipped with

Coffee and a good book)

To make sure we were among the

First three in line, and as

8:00 calmly approaches, and the

line grows to slowly wrap around the

corner; layers of differing

tones of chatter grow upon themselves-

like mold on the caffeteria

oranges- and everyone participates

in this social exchange of gripe;

Particularly the people beyond the tenth

spot in the line, from the

vaugely functional, just- got- this- job- and- cant-

offord- to- lose- it, DisorderEE’s,

to the

Dis-functional, just- released- orange- bracelet-

Brand,

of Dis-orderEE’s-

And everyone of them knows, the way

It will go (County bookies say odds are as

Unfavorable as 100-1 against the

Doctor having time to get to

A #10 spot)

But these displaced Gamblers regard

The odds as merely,

Medical rhetoric; because

somehow-

Their case is different,

And the fact that their issue, Simply

Cannot wait another day; Simply means

Just that,

And it,

Thust forth-

MUST be added to todays list

Of “Things To Do.” 

Oh,

But Poor Naïve Loon,

You simply must know,

Somewhere in there,

That-

These things only equate as

Concrete,

In the mind of a

DisorderEE,

and not the

Mind of a Doctor, or

Politician, or

President;

Or probably even your

Neighbor-

But,

You never know,

and

Its best not to be

Presumptuous.

This whole holey healthcare

Issue-

Holey Healthcare ANXIETY,

Holey Healthcare FEAR,

Holey Healthcare OPPRESSION,

This WHOLE HOLEY HEALTHCARE HEIARCHY!

What would A.G. say about

This?

Not my beligerent

Ramblings, but-

Holey Healthcare?!

Is americas Crusty,

Callow, Core- Really so far

Removed- as to have

Michael Moore have to remind

Us of our Human

Rights?

This aside from our

Already forgotten

Responsibilities?

Generations of them will

Come- Become,

Became- Income,

Re-veal, Re-Veil;

Going,

Going,

Going-

GONE.

A Void being transcribed

Into the abyss

"No Home" by Brian Carlson

In the United States, every night, an average of seven hundred thousand people are homeless. The statistics are formidable…this number is larger than the current population of Milwaukee. Austin, Memphis, Boston, Fort Worth, and Washington D.C. all have populations lower than this number.

“No Home” was filmed on a winter’s night in Milwaukee. I traveled with the outreach van for Health Care for the Homeless, looking for homeless people on an evening that dropped below freezing. In pockets all about the city, under bridges, in alleys, behind low walls and hedgerows, in run down industrial areas we might not travel to, parks, and openly on the sidewalks before our Milwaukee County Courthouse, human beings tried to sleep, tried to make it through one more night. Some huddled under cardboard. Some had pulled trash bags up over their legs and wrapped about them. One man lay uncovered, directly on the cement.

My short video and installation doesn’t do much, in itself to help resolve this problem.

It is one small lantern helping illuminating a problem…that is all. Homelessness will go away when we direct our attention to the problem collectively, when we “get the picture” of the scale and nature of the problem and decide, as a nation, that this is completely unacceptable and must be eradicated. Homelessness will come to an end when we prioritize the health and the worth and the freedom of all of our citizens.

Huge disasters that arise “out of nowhere” startle us and capture the attention of our media. Katrina or 9/11 or the wildfires in California can elicit strong response from our citizens and from our leadership. Homelessness, although it overwhelms these disasters in scale, is perpetual, is not a “new story” and, perhaps due in large part to the stigmas associated with ‘homelessness”, fails to capture our attention, fails to elicit a strong media response and, fails to touch our hearts. Homelessness is ugly…we don’t want to think about it.

My suggestion: go to downtown Milwaukee and invite a homeless person to lunch. Talk to them. Ask them how they became homeless, what the “system” is like for homeless people in Milwaukee, ask them if they are protected by police, and ask them how they survive. Learn about homelessness from the homeless. Then contact your congressmen and tell them they should take care of these citizens. Vote for candidates who seem most attuned to the needs of all Americans. And …in the winter, drop off some clothes or blankets to your local shelter or relief agency. They will be used.

"Diabetic Artist Revisits Roe v. Wade" by Zoe Darling

Although the human body and its complex systems – with their strengths and weaknesses – have always been central to my work, the unrelenting, daily regime of Juvenile Diabetes currently influences much of what and how I create. Recent pieces have been constructed from diabetic paraphernalia that this disease forces me to use, then asks me to throw away. To translate accumulation into a language that communicates a specific duration of time, I sort and organize my diabetic garbage into visual systems. In My Jewels: 120 x 12 the 120 glucose test strips that I used each month add up to a year of time spent. Personal medical data is used to draw attention to the repetitious, ritualistic narratives that hold everyone’s daily life together.

In little love book (gold & green) an ode to roe I draw attention to a different kind of time spent – the time-consuming, manual labor of typing. For this piece I re-transcribe the text of the historic decision of Roe v. Wade, a case decided before my birth, which in my lifetime may be overturned by new Supreme Court appointees. The material for this three-volume accordion includes gold voided personal checks whose pages spill out of green birth control dispensing clamshells. I use an old Royal, on its last legs, to type the text. Banging on this aged machine is nothing like the soft fingertip touches I give my new little laptop. Typing is hard work. And as I work through this piece, I see old dusty New York lofts, with rows and rows of young women – pounding out documents and letters for important men. It made me think of all that has been accomplished to advance women’s rights in the decades before my birth and how a small group of white males – sitting in small safe rooms – are working now to rescind reproductive rights of women. This project is a work in progress. 

Typing Roe v. Wade includes images from a video of me typing little love book (gold & green) an ode to roe. Using at times humorous, at times uncomfortably personal text, I explore the contradictions that exist between the woman who was known as Jane Roe and the Norma McCorvey of today. I also use the extreme differences discovered, to reveal and try to make sense of recent life altering choices I’ve made, with the help of my alter ego, Darling Zoe.

"Dreaming America" by William Fry

It's as if the artery in my head blew up to save me from myself. Here. I. Am. Wake up to a birthday inoculated by a paralysis inoculated by cost management. It still amazes me how little doctors know about paralysis.

Here, we'll hook you up to electric diodes to "activate" your muscles.

Daddy, when can I come home? Honey, you are home. You're here. But I didn't feel home. I didn't feel like I did before. But there was the dry wall, the carpet, the warm light. There was the lawn. There was the car. There was my room.

I'm often wrong.

Here, we're going to shoot BOTOX into your arm so you can accentuate the use of your wrist muscles.

I can't close my hand. I can't... close my hand. That's normal, don't worry about it.

Still can't close my fist.

We need to document your paralysis for your insurance company.

You need to prove I'm a cripple?

No. We need to prove how crippled you are.

The monitor next to your bed 'blip blips' with the rhythm of the American dream and as you lie sleepless listening to the wail of death surrounding you you keep checking that monitor. Keep checking if the dream is still there. Keep checking if you are in fact still alive, or if the faux existence dreamed up in your head has given up the ghost and you can get back to the nothingness you once were.

Brothers and sisters the worry here, at this hour, is whether Brother Lehman and Father Mac can save they own ass or if they stick it in ours. Take 700 billion for the team, you know? We didn't know that Arrogant Ignorant Goliath's were running the show until now. But shit, they got us under a pressure cooker now cuz, though we may be broke out off our own surpluses, we's about to get broker. Now I know what your saying my brothers and sisters:

What the fuck do I care about some rich folk up on Wall Street for?

That's a good question sister. That's a fair, fine question. You see,  this is what happens when the plantation master falls dead in a field, whip and all. Word gets round town and they think, "Oh no, no no, what would these slaves do without their masters. What would these poor ignorant assed people do? They might starve to death. Though we already starving. They might resort to violence. While our backs still bleeding. They wouldn't learn to adapt. When we've done adapted for the last four hundred years."

Now I know what your thinking, brothers and sisters. And guess what? You're right. Goddammit, if you ain't right. But what we gonna do? What we gonna do? We been doin ' it to death brothers and sisters. We gonna turn the other cheek. We gonna do whats right. We gonna let Auntie Fannie paddle our broke asses. Cuz if we don't, well, shoot, if we don't. Well then, we all gonna end up dead. And none of us wants that. I know, I know what your thinking. Your thinking, well ain't that a bitch. And you know what? You're right.

But goddammit if it ain't the American Dream.

I died on May 10th, 1996. I now can say this without any true discomfort. But rest assured, my body fell to the ground with the proverbial thud of a lifeless shell, and I woke up two intrinsically mindless weeks later in my deathbed.

I am at a strange crossroads in my life. For ten years I was classified as, I suppose, "normal." And while 'normal' remains in my mind an obscure notion, lacking the clairvoyance our homogenized society has prescribed it, I lived the first ten years of my life defined within it. And now ten years later, I've lost all definition.


But I realize that I am, of course, in a crowd of free-minded people. I am not under the dogmatic gaze of prejudice that lies in the annals of this culture, this city, this country.
The other day a little boy ran up to me and said, "Hey mister, what's wrong with your hand?"

I looked into the little boy's eyes, and after the shock of being called mister faded, blankly replied, "Oh, I was paralyzed when I was ten."

He looked at me with a curious expression on his face and said, "What does paralyzed mean?"

I looked at him, smiled and said, "I suppose it means that my arms broken."

He responded to my smile by smiling back, but then abruptly put a look of horror on his face, grabbed my left hand and said inquisitively, "Why don't you fix it?"

His question, lacking the coy tack of a formal acquisition, but of a curious mind trying to learn all that it can soak up, was utterly reasonable, but at that present moment in time, was the last thing on my mind.

It is odd how children act. If you are an unknown authority figure, children mostly maintain reasonable behavior. They know that you have some inexplicable superiority over them, and so they preserve civil, albeit innocent, discourse. However, when I was a child I was, after my aneurysm, called cripple, beaten up, severed from social gatherings, and cast out. This was by everyone, including my friends of that time, and I was left alone by something I couldn't control, but kids are kids. And I understand now that children have a hard time coping with something they can't understand, and they tend to deal with that difference by belittling it, and holding themselves above it. Perhaps this is human nature?

But this little boy grabbed my fingers. His loving little paw cusped my impotent, paralyzed, hand with an empathetic grace that I had never known, and have never felt again. He was not afraid of my disability, and, perhaps unconsciously, lifted a veil of disparity between me and the rest of the world.

People respond to my handicap differently, but there is one common truth: I am not allowed to label myself. When I utter the word "crippled" to define myself it is frowned upon, and people act like I injured their ears. I receive complaints of, "Will don't say that about yourself." or "Why do you have to dwell on your handicap Will?" Some even have the gall to say, "No, Will, you are not a cripple." It seems hypocritical to me to tell someone not to say they are something, especially if that thing is the truth.

For I died ten years ago and when the new me rose out of that bed my left side was lifeless. I tried to get out of bed and when I realized that I could not feel my left leg I hit the floor and brought down all the equipment hooked up to me with it. As the nurses ran in I looked up with tears in my eyes and said, "Why can't I walk?" The head nurse looked at me and replied, "Child, I am sorry honey, but you know that your left side is paralyzed." I have been living with those words for the rest of life.

I have had to accept that yes, I am crippled. When I walk into a store, or get on the bus, I get stared at. When I wake up in the morning I put on my clothes with one hand. When I ride a bike I have to strain to get my hand on the handlebars. I live with it every day. My handicap is not some transitory stage that I can simply dismiss except on those rare occasions it comes up. Much the same as anyone who is physically diverse from the norm.

But I know that I am not only that. I am also William Fry: son, painter, writer, musician, and all that jazz. Yet I do not feel comfortable without the word cripple on that list. Not because that classifies who I am, or that I am pleading for your sympathy, but that it is what made me who I am today. I really did die ten years ago, my brain erupted in a puddle of red and I flat lined. Somehow my heart came back to echo the drone of t-thud-thud, but that wasn't all. When I woke up, I shared the same memories as the child born: William Leonard Fry, but humility left only the name the same.


But none of this mattered to this gentle little boy. He had true concern, and dismissed everything that our culture tells us, and touched my soul. He did not ask, "Does it hurt." or "Can you feel it?" He just felt bad for my hand being broken, and wanted to help me, a stranger, fix it. And with his innocent touch I was totally comfortable with who I am.
       
Total comfort is something I think we, as humans, lack. We take medicine to be more socially acceptable, use narcotics to forget the pain of reality, drink alcohol and all our woes wash right of our minds. We have sex, over eat, under eat, masturbate, dress a certain way, and listen to a certain brand of music all in the name of not being comfortable with our selves. We even pay people to tell us how to be comfortable, and watch television shows selling us their pokerfaced commodities.
       
And yet this little boy gave me pure consolation. With just his touch my body disappeared and all that was left was 'Me.' I looked at the little boy's little hand clinching at air and fall to his waist. His mother called for him and reality hit me in the face. I wanted to run after him and tell his mother what her son did for me. I wanted to pik him up and hug and thank him. But I was still in shock, and my young seraph went to live the rest of his life without ever knowing that he had changed mine.

I continued on that walk four years ago and realized I really only had to answer one question to be at peace with myself: Who am I?

"Stay and Fight" by Sarah Horne

I work in the healthcare industry, at a nonprofit organization for the homeless and economically disadvantaged in Milwaukee. We provide primary care and psychiatric care to a client base of thousands. In this industry you hear the term "burnout" thrown around quite a bit. You see caseworkers and outreach workers enthusiastic and happy one week and then quitting abruptly amid a flood of tears and cursing two weeks later. You see a lot of glassy eyes and slumped shoulders. You hear a lot of off-color bordering on inappropriate gallows humor because sometimes laughing about all of it is the only way my coworkers can make it through a day.  I work in the medical records department, so my contact with the clients is minimal, but the medical records room has become a place for employees to trade war stories and not only vent about clients and other employees, but express wonder and frustration about what's going on in Washington these days.

A lot of what I am about to tell you is going to seem impossibly underinformed and somewhat naïve, because as closely as I am following politics and the elections and the state of the health care industry in the United States, and even though I feel like the last year has absolutely galvanized me and made me feel sick and hopeful and angry and afraid, the fact is that I come from a comparatively privileged, lucky life, and there is still so much that I just simply don't know. I had two parents who loved me and wanted the best for me growing up. I went to college, got an English degree, went through all the trials and bitching and moaning about the cares and worries that come with a sheltered good-girl middle class life. I was protected by my father's health insurance until the age of twenty-five. Even though the following five years were kind of unsettling if I really thought about what could happen to me and how much it would cost to fix me if something did happen, and how $8.50 an hour temping jobs were really not going to cover it, the fact is nothing major did happen. I've never even broken a bone.

Compare my story to the people who come into the clinic every day. These are people who have fallen through the cracks. These are people who grew up in The Bad Parts Of Milwaukee, the ones who you hear about on the six o'clock news and cluck about, and who you get all liberal white self-righteous about while feeling powerless to do anything. You feel either guilty or secretly relieved, relieved because you are not them, and then you feel guilty about your sense of relief. These are men and women who trade sex for drugs every day. These are men and women who have seen emotional, sexual, and physical violence all their lives and escaped to the streets and to homeless shelters and to the fog of drug abuse because they can't take it anymore, and they are the people who stay with their abusers because their abusers are the only ones in the world who truly know them and claim they care. Sometimes it is less dire than that—sometimes they come because they are working, can't afford health insurance and just need a professional to talk to. The extremely dire situations are the ones who are handled by the caseworkers, the people who are on SSI and can't handle things that we take for granted like being able to pay an electric bill or being able to handle a trip to the grocery store. These are the people who don't bathe for weeks—not because they are crazy or psychotic, but many, many times because they have known some kind of abuse in their lives, and if you smell bad, people stay away. It's a shield. It's the only way they know to signal to the world that they have known and experienced intense, unthinkable pain.

     
Our client base is growing exponentially what feels like every week. Sometimes it is more paperwork than I can handle, and I am just the goddamn file clerk. It is growing not only because a recently-expanded staff of caring, talented doctors, but also for reasons that are less sunny and optimistic, I fear—every day that this economy gets worse, every day more people are falling through or coming out of the woodwork or having psychotic breaks. Not only are there more people, but these people's worlds are shrinking, because more times than not our clinic is the only place that they can go in Milwaukee. I learned very recently that it's not uncommon for a victim of sexual assault and the victimizer to have appointments on the same day, and that often times victims will stop coming to the clinic because they feel unsafe in the waiting room. And what happens to these people if John McCain gets elected, if there is a spending freeze on everything except defense and veterans' affairs? What happens if Sarah Palin's wishes about the power of the vice president is expanded, or if she becomes President and abortion becomes outlawed and women have to pay for their own rape kits? What if the fears that my friend has expressed in conversation that there is going to be more competition for grant money in the world of nonprofits regardless of who becomes president and that we can no longer afford to operate as a clinic come true and close down altogether?

There is the school of thought that goes if you think in terms of "what if's" constantly you may as well just stay in bed for the rest of your life. I think the problem with where this country stands right now is that we who did not agree with the policies and actions of the Bush administration got to a point where we felt so beaten down that there was no point in fresh outrage anymore. This is not to say that activism stopped or to diminish the accomplishments of those who did fight for what they believed in—it's just that it felt quieter to me.

    
I can't be quiet anymore. I can't sit around coffee tables anymore and talk about how awful everything is now and will be in January 2009 if the wrong man becomes president and vow again that I am going to move to Canada. I am going to vote for Barack Obama because I actually believe in him, instead of voting for him simply because he has to be better than the alternative. I believe that Barack Obama cares as much about these people whose stories I hear about, who I see in the waiting room, who I see on the bus every day. And I am going to stay and fight.