Mama needs Obama
My 60-year-old mother is complaining about the excruciating pain in her leg. She’s been in mounting pain for months, and on and off for years. A woman loathe to take pain medication on top of her daily prescriptions to control hypertension, diabetes, and high cholesterol, she recently took over a week’s supply of Vicodin. She went to the emergency room because of the pain. Her doctor had told her to take Alleve, but (as she put it), that did “jack shit” to help. She sounded more genuinely scared than I’ve heard her in decades when she worried out loud that she would run out of Vicodin or that the doctor wouldn’t renew the prescription.
My mom has never had health insurance. Ever since I can remember, she has worked part-time in jobs that pay minimum wage or slightly more. My brother and I grew up with no health insurance. The first time I saw a doctor for low cost was in college, and my first experience being insured was when I got a full-time job a year after I graduated from college.
Did I mention that my mother is a lifelong Republican, someone so devoted to the GOP that she is not only voting for McCain but also likely going to put a yard sign up for the McCain-Palin ticket?
Periodically the collections department from the clinic my mother goes to calls her to see when they can expect the next installment on her ever-increasing balance. She stopped seeing a dietician for her diabetes, since that it was an expensive (yet preventative) luxury. She forgoes expensive diagnostics like angiograms and MRI’s, even when they are heavily recommended. Her recent ER visit was a last resort. The last time anyone in our family went to the ER, it was 1985, and my mother was paying the $900 bill for years.
If I sound frustrated, it’s because this is only the most screaming example of how my mother and others like her, the sub-middle class, have overlooked their own interests in order to sign up for the club that doesn’t really want them yet has tailored their political messages so as to appear to speak for them. I would almost understand if my mother were an evangelical Christian, or someone who defined herself as a believer than life begins at conception, or an avid hunter. But she is none of these things. She’s a middle-of-the road Christian. She believes that abortion should be a last resort, but legal. She hasn’t touched a gun since the last time she moved my late grandfather’s rifle.
I know that part of my mother’s partisan affiliation is her way of being loyal to her father, who used his rifles only to control the rabbits and woodchucks that threatened his cats and garden at his farm. I don’t know exactly why my grandfather thought the GOP was where he belonged, but I think it had to do with what he perceived to be the party of respectability and integrity. Neither my mother nor her parents were overtly racist. My mother was non-racist enough to marry a Chinese man and have two children with him. But her politics have something to do with a vague sense that our immigration policy is wrong-headed, that it’s both allowing lazy native-born Americans not to work and taking away the jobs that they would have been forced to take if there weren’t a cheap source of labor.
And yet, I know that in reality, policy and voting records play little role in the voting choices that my mother makes.
When I see John McCain chuckle and utter sarcastically that Barack Obama is an “eloquent speaker” in a way that suggests that this trait is both shamefully nerdy and way too “negro”, my mother sees a straight-talker who believes in action above words.
If I sound like I’ve given up, I have. Sometime during the reign of Bush I, my mother mentioned both her donations to Planned Parenthood and to the Republican Party. I was still at an age when I thought people like my mother could be reasoned with. So I pointed out that she may as well just choose one of those organizations, since her donations were effectively cancelling each other out. She agreed, and I am pretty sure she no longer sends in any money to Planned Parenthood. Apparently feminism, a woman’s right to choose, and affordable birth control were no match for the charms of invading Iraq.
The saddest part of all of this for me is that my mother is the one who instilled in me the idea that if she, a single woman below the poverty level could succeed at raising two children on her own, then there were no limits on what I could achieve in my life. She was a big fan of Helen Reddy and even took me as a child to hear her in concert. When Helen Reddy sang “You and Me Against the World” I know that we both thought of that as our anthem. My mother loved the accoutrements of the tumultuous 1960s, when she had come of age. She loved Peter Paul and Mary and Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and other peace-loving musicians. She even went along with the zeitgeist and married a person of color and gave birth to two biracial children.
I think the revelation to be drawn from this is that, for my mother, culture is more important than ideas. She was always the paradoxical Republican, struggling regardless of recession or boom, but these days her affiliation, and her pride in it, is as puzzling to me as the Log Cabin Republicans. Actually more so, since at least those guys are usually highly successful fiscal conservatives rather than divorced women living without health insurance.
All signs indicate that Obama will be the winner of the election. I know that my mother will never vote for him, not now and probably not in the future. But I hope that he will help make life better for her by making health insurance available, even if she doesn’t appreciate it. That’s the kind of trickle-down economic idea I can live with.
