water from a vineleaf
All politics are local, Tip O'Neil famously said, and nothing is more local than a family member, a loved one (or your own body, as Norbizness succinctly points out): about nine or ten years ago now, I watched my little sister valiantly fight a rare blood cancer while my already highly dysfunctional and twisted family fractured even further from stress. A decade later, after her death, we all carry nasty scars from that time, and I personally still wrestle a whole closet-full of demons I got courtesy that loss, no interest and no money down. And yes, a bit of a bias when it comes to the politics of medicine and illness.
Other people, however, seem more limited in their biases, not to mention imaginations.
There are not words - not polite ones, anyway, befitting a responsible blogger and graduate student - to describe my amazement and yes, furious anger, with George W. Bush's "blunt" opposition to something I'm sure he didn't even know about until some Colorado half-wit or Texas pedophile toting a bible breathlessly laid out that "it's just like abortion."
The man can't even say Abu Ghraib - and suddenly he's a medical ethicist.
Every so often, I hit a ceiling, I bump my figurative head - not against what the political culture is, but what it isn't, what it lacks, and I find myself struck with the depth of calculating cyncism and utter disregard to consider the world outside of their own our supposedly best and brightest lack the capacity for. The first I remember came in the summer of 2003, when the U.S. casualties in Iraq, post-Mission Accomplished, tipped 100. The Spook House-Revival Meeting held in the fall of 2004 in New York - and for Bush voters, New York's just a cesspool of fags and liberals 365 days out of the year, but, much in the same way Christmas and National Prayer Day are 24 hours out of time, every September 11 transforms it into a place "where freedom was attacked" and rich white people died - was the last. Witness today - ceiling number three.
I know I should know better. One hundred thousand times over.
So should the president. But that's between him and God, I guess.
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