Kimberly Emerson

Bear with me, friends.  I came across something today that makes me want to rant my little blogger heart out.  Probably I should calm down before I explain, or I will get a lot of you commenting, “Stop yelling at me!  I didn’t do it!”  So, for a few minutes, I’m going to tell you a story instead.

Years ago, when I was a teenager, my family moved from Northern California to Southern California.  I didn’t enjoy it.  For several months I wallowed in the unhappiness of my fate, doing nothing in particular to lift my own spirits.  Needless to say, drenched in L’Essence de Despair, I had trouble finding anyone with whom I could eat lunch.  My dad, having time mid-day and being a generally good guy, used to drive over to my high school once or twice a week and spring me from campus for half an hour.  Sometimes we’d go down to McDonald’s, but generally, we’d just sit in the car in the parking lot, and I would eat whatever bag lunch I had brought that day.  At some point, the dean called my dad in and informed him that I was only a sophomore, and that they reserved the privilege of leaving school during lunch for juniors and seniors, and that he really needed to quit pulling me out of school so that I would make some friends.  My dad informed her that I was his daughter and he’d pull me out of school whenever he jolly well felt like it, thank you very much.  (Probably not in those exact words, but the idea was the same.)  I heard about this story afterwards.  I got the dean’s point, and I think I tried a little harder to make friends after that. But even so, I really loved my dad for telling the dean to back off, and letting it be my choice to try harder.

I told this story to Ann and Diana this past week.  Ann, who’s met my dad on several occasions, sighed and said, “The thing about your dad is that he would tell them that without even raising his voice, so they couldn’t really say anything in response.  How do you come back at someone who isn’t arguing with you?”

For the rest of this post, I am going to try as hard as I can to channel my dad’s calm energy.  It’s going to take some doing, because I have all the provocation I need to post paragraph upon paragraph of ranting.  I could write in all caps with a lot of exclamation points.  But instead, I will try to say calmly what I want to say.

America, I thought we covered this in kindergarten, but evidently it bears repeating – we must learn to share.

(See?  Wasn’t that calm?  Okay, one little case of italics there at the end, but that was it.)

Now you’d probably like to know what set me off.  Okay, here goes.  I saw a note today from a former theater teacher, advertising an auction.  Why is he having an auction, you might wonder?  To get rid of extra stuff around the house?  To kick-start a vacation fund?  Maybe, since you read the word “theater” up there, you might assume it was to fund a new production he’s working on.  You’d be perfectly reasonable guessing any of these things.  But you’d be wrong.

Some friends of his family put together this auction in order to help out with his one-year-old son’s medical bills.

First, let me give those amazing friends a pat on the back and as big a plug as I can.  You can check out the auction by clicking here or by going on Facebook and looking up Help Charlie Heal.  (Fair warning, some of the stuff up for auction is seriously cute.  Snugglable stuffed lion with scent-pack insert?  Custom tooth fairy pillow? Yoda and Darth Vader cupcakes for your kid’s birthday party?  All there.)  You can bid until midnight, July 3.  In case the auction is closed by the time you read this, you can still donate by logging on to www.charliesfund.blogspot.com.

Okay.  Now I will take another breath of Dad-like mellowness and continue.

Really, America?  Is this who we are?  We sit around and debate whether or not it’s okay to take those tax breaks back – you know, the ones that were always supposed to be temporary – and completely ignore families trying to find a way to pay for their children’s medical care?  This, I should add, is a family with insurance.  You know, that fabulous thing that people across the country were so desperate not to have to give up for socialized medicine?  Sweet baby Charlie – I defy you to look at that face and not smile – has to have surgery in August.  His doctor prescribed weekly injections of a medicine designed to raise his red-blood cell count.  Blue Cross/Blue Shield initially denied payment for it, but after a battle graciously agreed to pay for 70%.  Good.  Now the family only has to come up with 30% while they worry about surgery on their son’s skull.  (And doubtless, how to pay for 30% of that.)

In the 2010 elections, the Tea Party sounded their great rallying cry, “I want my country back.”  Back the way it was at some earlier point, maybe – they never really clarified that.  Well, you know what?  I don’t want my country back the way it was.  I want my country better than it was before.  I want to live in an America that cares about its children.  Not just enough to spout pablum about them on the campaign trail, but enough to put actual dollars towards their well-being.  I want insurance that does its job and pays for crises when they arise, instead of the variety currently available, which spends 30% of its budget on overhead, including finding ways to deny 22% of claims.  (See article here.)

(Sorry about that, Dad.  I’m calming down now.)

I don’t enjoy paying taxes any more than anyone else does.  I wish that all things could, like making friends in high school, be my own choice.  But part of being in a society – great or otherwise – means pooling our resources, so that all of us can live a little better.  It means putting up with the idea that sometimes things happen, and we will not see the benefit of them personally.  But it’s okay, because our society is a better place for it.

My vision for our country is that one day, when a sick one-year-old is brought to a hospital, it gets whatever it needs, no questions asked.  I don’t care whether it has insurance, or where it was born, or how its distress was brought about.  Because the one thing I am absolutely certain of?  Whatever the issues involved, the one-year-old is not to blame.

I know that whenever you try to do something good like this, someone will take advantage of it.  But does that mean we should stop trying to do anything generous, and spend our whole lives watching our back (and our wallets)?  Honestly, I just don’t want to be that kind of person.  I want to try to make the world a better place.  If someone takes advantage, well, that gets added to their bad karma, not mine.  On occasion, I can’t help, and I have to pray that God will take care of the situation I can’t fix.  (Got thunked on the head with that one rather recently.  Maybe I’ll discuss it in a future post – when the emotional goose-egg has had time to heal.)  Shouldn’t the reverse hold true?  If I can fix something, and people take advantage, maybe I can trust God to sort them out, too.

Trust me, I know I’m not thinking perfectly rationally about this.  I often don’t, when children are involved.  (Or animals.  Just want to warn you, in case that comes up in a future post.)  But I keep flashing back to that story with my dad and the dean.  I talked to the dean once that year, that I can remember.  (It was a hi-and-welcome session when my parents first brought me to the school to enroll.  The dean looked at my tall frame and said the school had an excellent girls’ volleyball team – basketball team? something like that.  I wanted to tell her that if they were going to stay excellent, they needed to keep me far away from them, but I believe I refrained.)  The dean knew the rules of the school.  But my dad knew me.  He knew that I just needed time to deal with my own stuff, and I’d find my way.  The insurance company knows procedure, and they know profit.  (In California alone, Blue Cross/Blue Shield made $565 million of profit in 2010.  Not income – profit.)  But they don’t know Charlie.  His doctor does.  BC/BS can check the doctor out, make sure there aren’t any complaints against him, ask to see his books.  That’s their job.  But until they find misdeeds, they should let the doctor make the decisions about this little boy’s care.

I can’t tell Blue Cross/Blue Shield or the many companies within it to give up making a profit.  They’re companies.  It’s what they do.  But this is why I get so irritated with the Supreme Court for telling me that corporations should be treated like people.  Corporations are not people.  They don’t see right and wrong.  They see profit and no-profit.  All they know how to do is take.  People, on the other hand, know how to share.  (Whether they do or not, they know how.)  People should know when it’s time to be happy with $400 million in profit, so that they can give the rest of the money to little kids who need some help to get better.

Forgive me, folks.  (And Dad.)  I’ve ranted here, even though I tried not to.  I realize that there are no magic fixes to our health care system, or to any of the other problems in the world.  But maybe learning to share would be a good place to start.

Look on the bright side.  If we pass the basic Sharing refresher course, maybe we can bring back the other, more fun parts of kindergarten, like Napping, or Milk & Cookies.

Kimberly thanks God for giving her a dad who has advanced degrees in Sharing and Milk & Cookies.  She’s glad God gave Charlie a pretty awesome dad, too.

Tags: altruism, auction, health care, insurance, kindergarten