Better Make It A Double

home economics

The state of the economy has been hard on a lot of us here lately. If you're not in the U.S., it’s hard to describe what a dramatic change it has been compared to a year ago. Not a week seems to go by without someone in our church announcing they’ve been laid off. Foreclosure and For Sale signs dot the neighborhood, and we’ve had people come by the house looking for work. People are taking the contents of their house outside to sell in “garage sales” that are really desperate attempts to come up with a mortgage payment in time, or selling their wedding rings on company bulletin boards. We’ve been somewhat personally affected as well – we’ve lost tens of thousands in equity in our home (just about everyone has), and it’s been hard to keep a full piano studio, lessons being a luxury that not as many can now afford. I managed to dodge a round of layoffs recently, but not all my colleagues did. The cost of food, gasoline, health care premiums and heat are up dramatically, far beyond yearly wage increases, and unemployment is at a thirty-year high. We are getting by, but times are lean for almost everyone we know.

That said, I’ve been thinking lately about some of the good things that come out of times like these, at least for the ones like us who are still managing to get by. If nothing else, lean times teach good habits, and they also force people to take advantage of collective resources. We’ve actually had a wonderful summer. The libraries and farmer’s markets are bustling. Neighborhood festivals and campgrounds are the place to be this year.

Less people going out of town meant more people out and about in the neighborhood, attending National Night out parties in record numbers and chatting over fences. I no longer feel like an eccentric puttering in my vegetable garden, because everyone seems to be giving it a shot this year, trying to offset skyrocketing food prices. Even chicken permits are exploding.

Picking pound after pound of delicious homegrown vegetables feels like being showered in abundance amidst scarcity.

This summer, we saw no big-screen movies. Like many people, we are driving less and using public transportation more. We didn’t hire babysitters –instead we swapped childcare with friends from church and in the process, got to know the other families with young kids much better. We didn’t go to many restaurants, but we had many lovely picnics and dinners with friends.

We didn’t go to the water parks, but we took full advantage of the parks and kiddie pools we pay for with our tax dollars.

I can’t imagine having enjoyed the past few months more if we’d done things differently – I really can’t. The neighborhood has never felt more like a community.

There are, of course, many people in America who are notgetting by, who are making up the increasing amounts of request for assistance coming through my desk at work, who are losing houses, and going bankrupt, or homeless, or sitting on a street corner with a sign, asking for help from a stranger. Homeless shelters are overflowing, aid and jobs are scarce to non-existent, and times are truly desperate for a lot of people. I see it everywhere I go, and we don’t have much of a safety net in this country. We tend to rely on charitable programs to do that in America, but of course, giving is down in this economy too.

What it comes down to, is that I feel oddly fortunate – fortunate to be able to hone habits that will serve us through lean times and not, but also fortunate not to be among those who are losing homes and dreams and any kind of security. It’s an odd feeling – both sad and hopeful. I’m not sad about the fact that my local thrift store shelves are picked clean –it means that Americans are finally starting to get real about consumerism and its true cost, even some of the ones who have other options. I’m not sad about the fact that the buses and light rail cars are packed – these are habits we must embrace if we are to be realistic about the future. Those high energy costs aren't going anywhere. I'm certainly not sad about the fact that the libraries and parks are full of people enjoying what they have to offer.

But I look down the street at the For Sale signs, and wonder what will happen for the family behind those doors. I wonder what will happen to my city’s tax base, to the schools my kids will attend in a few years, to the people whose unemployment finally runs out. I wonder what will happen when too many people’s credit card bills finally overwhelm their incomes in a formula that applies to many of America’s households and spells a recipe for ruin. I wonder how much longer our country can run on empty, on credit, on deficit spending, on waning reserves of oil. Our own finances are being put more or less in order, but ultimately, we are all in the same boat, even beyond our nation's borders.

 

back to work, mama (part 2)

I've written about this issue in more detail before, but I just took a minute to contact the leading candidates for President using the link below and I hope you will too. According to a new study just released by the U.S. Census Bureau, 49% of American mothers cobble together some sort of paid leave following childbirth by using a combination of sick days, vacation days, disability leave, and employer-provided maternity leave. A full 51% of new mothers lack any paid leave whatsoever-so some take unpaid leave, some quit, some even lose their jobs. I easily could have because I used up all the allowed unpaid leave while I was still pregnant and on bed rest, and was at the mercy of my supportive boss's advocacy for my continued employment. Not one day was paid.

There are women in the U.S who have to choose between going on doctor-recommended bed rest and a roof over their head, between caring for a sick baby or child and being able to buy food. Breastfeeding takes many hours a day in the beginning, and we ought to support policies that help to make sure that the breastfeeding relationship becomes successfully established before mothers have to go back to work.

If you are a U.S. resident, please join me in telling the candidates for President to support and prioritize paid family leave.

To send a quick and easy email to the candidates, just go to: http://www.momsrising.org/Email_the_Candidates

house of cards

Oh, the irony. It would make me laugh if it wasn’t so sad. We are on the cusp of a recession because for almost a decade, the folks in charge, presumably including an economist or two, allowed the U.S. economy to “prosper” on a house of cards. After 9-11, shopping was elevated to a patriotic duty. The housing boom, during which people of modest means were talked into buying (or were allowed to buy) houses they absolutely and predictably could not afford, signing onto mortgages that all but guaranteed future foreclosures, is becoming a housing bust. In our own fair city, houses are actually losing value for the first time in 20 years as foreclosure signs dot the neighborhood. Jobs, and the incomes that accompany them, are being lost at an alarming rate. Today, I heard on the radio that a record number of people are failing to pay even their phone bills without threat of being disconnected. There is nothing left that can't be charged. We are possibly the most unprepared society in modern history to deal with the realities of a real recession. Then today I hear the good news. We're gonna be fine! We just need economic stimulus! In the form of encouraging more consumer spending! All will be well, says George, if Americans will just spend more. This time, it will solve all our problems.

stage two: a river of anger

The Kübler-Ross model of grief says that there are five stages for those grieving– denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I think, as a city, we are well into stage two, and that includes me. Frankly, I’m choking on outrage at the moment – when I think about the fallen bridge and how this possibly could have happened, bile rises to my throat like acid. 

This is a rich country. We spend hundreds of billions on this useless, seemingly endless war, but fail to ensure that all Americans have access to health care and a decent education. We send our young men and women—especially low-income men and women with few other options— to war and fail to treat them fairly and decently when they finally come home. Freedom isn’t the only thing that isn’t free (not that freedom is gained by bombs and guns to begin with). Education isn’t free. Health care isn’t free. Treating veterans decently isn’t free. Infrastructure isn’t free.

My expectations are not all that high. I don’t expect affordable health care here; I don’t expect our inner city schools to be funded adequately. I really, really wish those things were different, but I don’t expect them to be. I did expect, however, that when my fellow Twin Citians and I drove over a bridge, that bridge would hold up every. single. time. The people that died or were injured didn’t willingly gamble their lives when they attempted to cross the Mississippi . That disbelief that echoed around the world this week? I share it entirely.

Certain politicians are claiming that it isn’t helpful to point fingers, but you know what? They don’t get to say that. They don’t have the right to be in charge of our resources and not have fingers pointed in their direction when things go horribly wrong under their leadership. The people of this fine city and state (and country) will damn well point fingers, loudly and insistently, until we have some decent answers and until we have a plan in place that will ensure that this never, ever happens again. It’s going to cost money, and for once it’s the politicians who will claim to want to save us a buck who are going to leave a bad taste in our mouths.I imagine that those who hail from New Orleans probably have a pretty good idea of how we feel. It seems that the people and institutions who may turn out to have had a hand in failing to prevent this tragedy would like for us to move neatly past the anger and right onto acceptance, and in the process to accept their tidy spin on how this happened. No-one I know here is ready to do that.

Most of the victims went to the hospital where I work, and some are still there. We all did what we could to help this week, and the atmosphere was one of quiet resolution, working together to help people heal and get their lives back. There were blessedly few deaths in the end – far fewer than initially expected. There were many heroes that day, including my own SIL (the one who lives with us), who along with her boyfriend, knowingly put her life at risk to help rescue severely injured people just after the collapse.

What people who don’t live here may not entirely understand is that the whole city pretty much feels like it’s cheated death. Almost all of us crossed that bridge regularly – 140,000 a day is almost half the population of Minneapolis , and everywhere I go I hear stories of those who were just ahead of or just behind the tragedy. It could have been almost any of us, and yet it wasn’t.  For many of is, it will be a  long time before we can drive across the  Mississippi River without remembering what was and what could have been.

On Saturday, I drove the boys to the Chi*dren’s Museum in St. Paul. For a weekend morning, traffic was heavy on 94, mostly due to the reroute. As we slowly crossed the river on yet another highway bridge, my boys singing Old MacDonald in the back like any other day, I couldn’t help but imagine the accident, the horrible end to an ordinary stop-and-go commute, a bridge suddenly giving way underneath us.

It was the word accident that most stuck in my mind, though, even more than the terrible images. Bridges don’t just fall down, at least they didn't used to. Whatever the exact cause, this was almost certainly preventable. If we don’t take proper care of our basic infrastructure, if we don’t dare spend the money to do it properly and thoroughly, this will probably happen again. This was a horrible accident, but it was also an opportunity to get some very basic things right. If we don’t, then the now predictable result cannot fairly be called accidental.

An apology

To Ryan and Brianna Morrison, the Minnesota couple who just had (and just lost one of) sextuplets:

I am very sorry. I judged your situation, and implicitly you. In my frustration with the fertility industry and its occasional recklessness, in my frustration with the folks who told me I was “lucky I wasn’t having a litter” (my response: I didn’t put myself in the situation where a litter was remotely possible), I judged unfairly. I’m sure you are going through a more vivid version of hell than most of us will ever know, and I’m sure that people’s ignorance is the last thing you need.

My sincere apologies,

Emmie S.

 

Facts:

This couple used Follistem, and were told that she had two mature eggs that were ready to be released, and two immature eggs that probably weren’t going to be viable. They were told that there was a 25% chance of  having twins, and 3 % chance of having triplets and anything else was laughable. Their clinic (which for all I know, was the some one we used), said they’d never had anything like this happen before. Selective reduction is against this couple’s faith, and while I don’t agree personally that SR is always an unacceptable option, I don’t think it’s a fair thing to judge them for when they had no reason to believe that they'd put themselves in any position to make such a decision.

I sorely hope that the HOM rate goes down, in fact I hope that the twin rate goes down, and dramatically, because down with it will come the rate of preventable prematurity. I also hope that this now grieving couple gets all the love and support they need and deserve. They’re real people. They even have a blog. For anyone who ever did a medicated IUI (even monitored), in this particular case, it could have been you. I know the coverage of this story is often maddening, and obscures many real issues, but let’s save our judgment for that media, and for lack of regulation around fertility treatments, for the fertility cowboys, and for the all-too-many folks who think HOM’s are “cute”. 

an appeal from Michael Moore

Send Me Your Health Care Horror Stories... an appeal from Michael Moore

(the following is mainly relevant to U.S. residents)

Friends,

How would you like to be in my next movie? I know you've probably heard I'm making a documentary about the health care industry (but the HMOs don't know this, so don't tell them — they think I'm making a romantic comedy). If you've followed my work over the years, you know that I keep a pretty low profile while I'm making my movies. I don't give interviews, I don't go on TV and I don't defrost my refrigerator. I do keep my website updated on a daily basis (there's been something like 4,000,000 visitors just this week alone) and the rest of the time I'm... well, I can't tell you what I'm doing, but you can pretty much guess. It gets harder and harder sneaking into corporate headquarters, but I've found that just dying my hair black and wearing a skort really helps.

Back to my invitation to be in my movie. Have you ever found yourself getting ready to file for bankruptcy because you can't pay your kid's hospital bill, and then you say to yourself, "Boy, I sure would like to be in Michael Moore's health care movie!"? Or, after being turned down for the third time by your HMO for an operation they should be paying for, do you ever think to yourself, "Now THIS travesty should be in that 'Sicko' movie!"? Or maybe you've just been told that your father is going to have to just, well, die because he can't afford the drugs he needs to get better – and it's then that you say, "Damn, what did I do with Michael Moore's home number?!"

Ok, here's your chance. As you can imagine, we've got the goods on these bastards. All we need now is to put a few of you in the movie and let the world see what the greatest country ever in the history of the universe does to its own people, simply because they have the misfortune of getting sick. Because getting sick, unless you are rich, is a crime – a crime for which you must pay, sometimes with your own life.

About four hundred years from now, historians will look back at us like we were some sort of barbarians, but for now we're just the laughing stock of the Western world. So, if you'd like me to know what you've been through with your insurance company, or what it's been like to have no insurance at all, or how the hospitals and doctors wouldn't treat you (or if they did, how they sent you into poverty trying to pay their crazy bills) ...if you have been abused in any way by this sick, greedy, grubby system and it has caused you or your loved ones great sorrow and pain, let me know.

Send me a short, factual account of what has happened to you – and what IS happening to you right now if you have been unable to get the health care you need.

Send it to michael@michaelmoore.com. I will read every single one of them (even if I can't respond to or help everyone, I will be able to bring to light a few of your stories). Thank you in advance for sharing them with me and trusting me to try and do something about a very corrupt system that simply has to go.

Oh, and if you happen to work for an HMO or a pharmaceutical company or a profit-making hospital and you have simply seen too much abuse of your fellow human beings and can't take it any longer – and you would like the truth to be told – please write me at michael@michaelmoore.com. I will protect your privacy and I will tell the world what you are unable to tell. I am looking for a few heroes with a conscience. I know you are out there. Thank you, all of you, for your help and your continued support through the years. I promise you that with "Sicko" we will do our best to give you not only a great movie, but a chance to bring down this evil empire, once and for all.

In the meantime, stay well. I hear fruits and vegetables help.

Yours, Michael Moore michael@michaelmoore.com

www.michaelmoore.com

(please pass this on to others, especially anyone you might know who had health problems they couldn't pay for.)

Last chance to give input to FMLA changes

Last chance, folks.

Through Friday, February 16, you can email your comment directly to the department of labor here or if you want to go through its website you can start here.
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Totally unrelated: Thank you so very much for your kind and understanding comments about yesterday's post. Writing it and getting your feedback was very helpful, and I feel much better.

 

Election Eve

Election Day always leaves me unsettled. I am a citizen of the Netherlands, not the U.S. and I can't actually vote here, but I feel very invested in the outcome of any election, perhaps even more so now that I have children who will, God willing, outlive me by decades. Mostly, I am just so unsatisfied with either major party, with the whole deeply flawed two-party system, with the corruption, the power-brokering, hell, with capitalism. Blech. So we may have a Democratic congress. I guess that's better than last time.

On the other hand, perhaps that's easy for me to say. If I were gay, or black, or really poor, or an immigrant from a less desirable country, or really anyone living in another country, I might be more excited that the party that seems hell-bent to shit on the least powerful in every way imaginable might get its due for once. I get that. It's just that I don't have a hell of a lot of faith in the party that will get the reins.

Complicit. That's the word that keeps coming to mind. Democrats have been, in large part, complicit in the illegal invasion of Iraq, in attacks on personal and civil liberties, and in the dismantling of the safety net. I can't even vote, but I'm holding my nose from down the block.

It's not all entirely relative. I will be quite happy if that pin-head, right-wing weasel of a governor of ours

gets turned out on his rear. We have some decent Demoratic democratic candidates in my state, and a lot to lose if they don't win. If I could vote at all, I'd make damn sure to haul my butt down to the booth.

Tonight, J will be doorknocking all afternoon and evening, trying to get out the vote. I'll be home with my boys on a dreary gray day, making dinner, reading Dr. Suess books, listening to NPR, and hoping like hell for a fair election in which the good better guys win.

I don't miss the big black box

10 things I love about not having a TV right now:

1. Hardly ever having to look at this moron's face
2. Or a whole bunch of other morons either.
3. Time to read, time to think
4. Not worrying about what the boys are hearing
5. Not having to absorb the effects of a bajillion commercials a day
6. Not being numb to the the ridiculousness of said commercials on the rare ocasion that I'm exposed to them
7. Not being exposed to the "fear show", as J calls it (local TV news)
8. Listening to NPR and my local Pacifica station and getting all the local news except the crime news
9. Feeling like I might actually have some control over what I'm exposed to, what I put in my mouth, what I do with my time and my money, and what kind of a family I want to be a part of.
10. Not feeling like I'm back on bedrest.

All the crow you can eat, right here.

My friend T is a birth mom. Her firstborn is now about 22, and she regrets everything about the adoption. She was treated horribly, lied to, manipulated, the whole bit. For years, I've tried to tell her that things have changed, that there are "open" adoptions now, agencies like the one my SIL works at where they'll support you even if you decide to parent. Where you can choose your baby's parents, even stay in touch, even see your child. For years, my friend T has tried to chip away at my optimism, optimism that was part of my own struggles with infertility and my options in dealing with it. A lot has happened in the last week. Like more than a few in our little blogging community, I've read every beautiful word coming from Speaking For Myself.  I went back through Kateri's blog and read what happened to an open adoption that looked so promising at the time the choices were made. Little by little, I saw my optimism for what it was: optimism at the expense of someone else. Because while (unlike T) I maintain that an individual adoption could be a good thing for all involved in the end, most, if not all adoptions are the result of a tragedy. That a woman is too poor, has too little family support, is too young (or just thought to be to young), too manipulated into thinking that someone else could raise her own child better than her, well that is a tragedy. Even if one or more of those things are true. And putting a rosy spin on something so horrificly painful is just wrong.

And then there's the tragedy of what can happen, or not happen after the placement. Because those "adoption plans"? They're almost never legally binding. What an unbelievable power imbalance, to know that you can never risk offending or perhaps even inconveniencing your child's parents or they can cut off all contact after finalization. That in order to maintain contact, you may be forced to lie to your biological child, or to hide the fact that he or she has siblings.

I can't cover it all in this post, tonight, but I know what it's like to hold my sleeping child in the dark and think there is nothing, nothing I would rather be doing than this. There is no love I've felt like this, there is nothing I've ever been more afraid of losing. And at the end of my pregnancy, when most birthmoms make their plans, and even in the first few days after the boys were born, I had no idea how strong these feelings would be. No clue.

Some people are good people, and they make the best plans they can, and they follow through, even when it's hard. Some women really cannot or do not choose to raise their biological children. A few shouldn't, but that is not what this post is about. Many more probably could, but lack the support they'd need, support that does not pay the pro-life adoption agency's bills. I do believe that a "good" adoption is possible, but how very sad for all involved that like so much in the U.S., a good outcome hinges on people overcoming such a thoroughly flawed system.

And on a personal note, having dealt with infertility (and it doesn't really ever go away, even if you look just as fertile as can be lugging your twins around), I think that women like me probably have some blinders on when it comes to thinking about "family building options" as the Resolve newsletters so glibly put it. But when it's staring you in the face, you have to listen.

This week I called T and apologized for not having heard her before, and for not understanding the depth of her pain and anger. We don't agree about everything relating to adoption, but I will never again fail to take her pain seriously or pretend that there are easy answers.