Letter to Sen Murkowski Prompted by the Death of Sen. Kennedy

Dear Senator Murkowski,

The passing of Senator Kennedy prompts me to write. But the only proper way to mourn him is to honor him with action that helps living Americans.

I once had the privilege of meeting Republican Govs. Jay Hammond and Walter Hickel. These were the representatives of a Republican party I once thought I understood, and could trust to at hold the genuine interests of Alaskans in mind.

I was born in Anchorage in 1964, my mother having been in Turnagain during the earthquake, pregnant with me. Alaska is close to my heart.

At that time, both my parents had good access to medical care, in a small state with little wealth. An artist, I have only intermittently had what has become, in the wake of an idolatry of profiteering over human life, the easily lost privilege of health coverage.

I have been teaching at the college level for nine years, and had insurance for four of those. And in the modern teaching environment, the positions are rarely committed longer that one year, often only a quarter. I have four teaching jobs now, none of which offer health insurance. That I have it now is not particularly dependent on how hard I work or how cleverly. Essentially self-employed, like most artists, it is dumb luck that I have it now.

Recently, I was not able to get a woman I knew well and cared for, who had been knocked off her bike by a car half an hour before, into see a doctor, because she lacked insurance. She called me crying and desperate. We were three blocks away from the massive UW Medical Center, unable to see anyone. At the risk of his job, a worker there gave her a number for a semi-legal medical consultation. It was absurd, wasteful, stupid, maddening, cruel. It is a situation that I will lay at the medical insurance industry, the ultimate example of privatization of benefit for the socialization of cost.

There was a way to game the system to get her into an emergency room, as it turned out later. I have a graduate degree- nothing about this was obvious in the course of the stress of immediate need. She was turned away by phone from three hospitals, knowing, as they did, she would be an expense.

An expense. No doubt. I am very sure a bruised and bleeding woman is an expense.

I am looking for good sense, human decency and honest debate coming from the present Republican party. I am looking for a commitment to the best interests of the people at large. I am looking to a Republican party that was modeled by the Republicans I knew as a young man in Alaska.

I look in vain. The people ruling your party seem intent on destroying the President, and they appear delighted with the thrilling prospect of new era of generations of middle class servitude, dependent on their increasingly unstable jobs for their health, which can mean their lives, and and the lives of their children. Fear grips most Americans now over losing their jobs, which can now, as you well know, become a dire sentence. This fear preys on many of us.

Let me remind you of what American's core ideals were when fighting for in WWII, ideals broadcast to a dying world:

Freedom of Speech and Thought. Freedom of Worship. Freedom from Want. Freedom From Fear.

The desire for basic access to health care is American at its core.

And you are also well aware that our system spends a titanic and unusual proportion of our nation's economy on a system where unaccountable insurance bureaucrats make life and death decisions. Every physician I know detests this system.

But against reform it is money, it is money, it is money, and it is money. The purpose of the United States Senate is not to protect wealth and privilege with indifference to human life except inasmuch as life can produce money. It is to protect and extend the core ideals of the nation, to promote the General Welfare.

It is not a minor point that threats of violence against the President have quadrupled since the election. Many in your party, seeking a political advantage at any cost to good policy and to the vitality of the United States, have indulged again and again a despicable hatred, an essential break with reason.

Here is where your staff will likely stop reading: I am a life-long Democrat. I live in Seattle. My 30 years in Alaska, the quality of the light burned into my memory, the smell of soil and sea, and my profound love of my country and my friends in Alaska and across the country, are I am quite sure of absolutely no interest to many in present Republican party, and are more like subjects for evidence for my soft heart. Peace be upon these fools.

Every time I return to Alaska, I see the growing social divide of new extremes of rich and poor that breaks my soft heart, that spits in the face and experience and ethos of the frontier, which was not mere rugged individualism, but an understanding that our very lives depend on our looking out for each other.

The old Alaska Republicans understood this. Today's selfish, Ayn Rand cultists seem to see it as weakness deserving of exploitation.

My knowledge and my values, old Alaskan values deeply in my soul, drive my endlessly renewed rage at the utterly avoidable injustice and misery caused by this system of medical insurance profiteering.

I dare your party to show us something else, some glimmer of the honor of a Republican party where I once counted many friends. But I do not expect it. What I expect to see is yet another bucket of poison dumped into the well.

I hope to hell I am wrong. In honor of Senator Kennedy, I hope to hell that you prove me wrong.