Fire it up! Possibly Ready to Go!

Nothing creates quite so steep a learning curve as trying something completely new. Setting up a blog, for me, fits in just exactly that category. Watch words, then, from readers, are tolerance and patience, not to mention forebearance. I'll start this posting with a personal note as to what would induce me to go to the second political campaign event in my life (an Obama campaign organizing meeting at the Bend library, 3/11/08). The first meeting I ever attended was a campaign whistle stop (yes, at a real train station, in Orange County, CA) with Barry Goldwater. Eleven at the time, I was a bit awestruck, especially when I got to shake Goldwater's hand. As far apart as Goldwater and Obama are on some (definitely not all) issues, Goldwater's campaign slogan gives a definite yank on the heartstrings 44 years later: "In Your Heart, You Know He's Right". Strikes me that "Right" is a definite double entendre, but not to detract: I'm interested in Obama because he speaks to both my brain, and my heart.

A short personal political history. As you might infer from the fact that I accompanied my mother to a Goldwater campaign event, I did not start out in life with a progressive point of view. My father detested the civil rights movement, and hated MLK. "Better to be dead than Red" was a frequent utterance in my home. My mother was a tree-hugger that voted Republican for her entire life. The technical term for this is cognitive dissonance. I was what can only be called an orthodox Catholic, at one point enrolled in a Franciscan seminary. As a young physician, I wouldn't write prescriptions for birth control pills, because "they sometimes work by not letting the fertilized egg implant", i.e. a very quiet form of abortion. I read, as a boy, every issue of The National Rifleman (official publication of the NRA), and was far more impressed with the 2nd Amendment than the 1st.

From there.... to an Obama event in Bend, Oregon. How does one make such a journey? Same as any other, first one step, then one foot in front of the other. Train stations along my personal railway journey include Georgetown School of Medicine, whose area of reknown happens to be medical ethics (clever, those Jesuits). Internship and residency in Central California, where there were NO ethnic majorities, only many minorities. Envision sticking to the "no birth control pill" point of view while providing care to migrant worker women who had six children by age 25, and looked as though they were 45. The residency experience, which included working with an influx of 10,000 Hmong refugees (from the Laotion genocide that followed the Vietnam War) into our town of 35,000 over a two year period, was rich in human drama, pathos, and cross-cultural challenge. Some say "what doesn't kill you makes you strong". I'd say it makes you grow.

Next stop: three years on an Indian reservation. Working on a reservation is an intense lesson in history. I love my country. My country's history of working with Native Americans is a crash course in what happens when you hand the reigns of government to people who are not of good will. It was also my first experience of being a despised minority by the local majority. Not uncommon for an Indian (don't ruffle your feathers, on my reservation "Indian" was the preferred word for self description) to introduce him/herself by saying "you should know, I hate white people." It didn't kill me. It did make me grow.

One more train station of note: I became the "go to" doctor if you were a person with AIDS or HIV in my community (Merced, CA) at a time when there was only a single drug for treatment, and the mortality rate for AIDS was over 95%. No better place in history for a homophobic Catholic boy to be. I learned, with time, to enjoy being hugged by my homosexual patients (male and female, for that matter). One also learns, unless you wear blinders 24/7, about the damage done by laws that don't grant protection to same sex partnerships. As my patients died, I grew.

Finally, from my "Father is the head of the household, women should not enter the workplace" upbringing, I've moved to being classified as a Third Wave Feminist (look it up) by my daughter. My daughter (29) feels that the way to pick a life partner is by their qualities, not their gender. My wife is someone that makes gender equality an unquestionable tenet by who she is, and by what she does (middle school teacher extraordinaire).

Which (when will this guy shut up!) circles back to Obama. I'm fatigued by duplicity, by end justifies the means, by a brand of nationalism that gives life to Oscar Wilde's note that "patriotism is the virtue of the vicious". I want a new patriotism that respects many nations and perspectives, not to mention the planet. I don't want governmental positions to be won by a competition of the clever. I want a coalition of people of good will to write a chapter in our nation's history that is just beginning to be imagined. It is we who will write that chapter, and it is Obama that I want to help turn the pages. Let me hear you own stories. Yes, all my further posts will be shorter.