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Monday, December 14, 2009
Me You Don't Even Hear What I'm
In the context of the national healthcare and insurance debacle, some terrible truths about real life horror and love disappear into smoky political horsetrading and policy gaps. This video arrived in email today from my friend, poet and a photographer Dwyer Jones, whose personal story kicks the shit out of most people's. Please watch this performance by Laurence Cantor of Dwyer's Caregiver's Resume. Please listen. Please overlook the filmmaker's kind of adorable errors.
Dwyer's wife, a painter and poet in her own right, is notably absent here in story form. We who have the accidental privilege of good health and relative stability can imagine a sudden bad break for ourselves - a car accident, a shadow on the X-ray - but we can't follow a chain of events starting with someone else's misfortune that ends with the loss of everything we have and are. As long as health care is a shell game with clear financial winners and broken losers, catastrophic illness or injury anywhere around us threatens each of us and there's no protecting ourselves from it. We think we can by tut-tutting when our cousin smokes or when Uncle orders a steak or when Mama pours herself a scotch, but clucking doesn't help. Clicking your seat belt won't prevent the semi from missing the exit ramp. Some suffering is random; it is without meaning and that's all there is to it. The best we can do is provide health care for all people so the suffering doesn't spread.
And when suffering does spread, it is the duty of an enlightened society to refuse to make it worse.
Crossposted at Poor Impulse Control.
Dwyer's wife, a painter and poet in her own right, is notably absent here in story form. We who have the accidental privilege of good health and relative stability can imagine a sudden bad break for ourselves - a car accident, a shadow on the X-ray - but we can't follow a chain of events starting with someone else's misfortune that ends with the loss of everything we have and are. As long as health care is a shell game with clear financial winners and broken losers, catastrophic illness or injury anywhere around us threatens each of us and there's no protecting ourselves from it. We think we can by tut-tutting when our cousin smokes or when Uncle orders a steak or when Mama pours herself a scotch, but clucking doesn't help. Clicking your seat belt won't prevent the semi from missing the exit ramp. Some suffering is random; it is without meaning and that's all there is to it. The best we can do is provide health care for all people so the suffering doesn't spread.
And when suffering does spread, it is the duty of an enlightened society to refuse to make it worse.
Crossposted at Poor Impulse Control.
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Considering I recorded it in 45 minutes with a single cheapo Panasonic with an actor who was in the middle of two other theater productions, I think it's actually pretty miraculous how well it came out.