You Have Been Warned

I’ve been here before.  It was 1989.  I stood in Nollen Plaza in Des Moines, the state of capitol of Iowa, and said:

“Terry Branstad (my governor) is a murderer!”

People had a real problem with my saying that, even after I explained I only said it because it's true.  By the end of that year, the death count due to complications from HIV/AIDS would reach nearly 90,000. The first reported case was in 1981, and 618 had died by 1982.  There was no federal or state funding for research or treatment of the disease.  (Contrast this, if you will, to the all-out federal government and CDC response when 34 people had died from Legionnaires Disease a few years earlier in Philadelphia.)

I had a clever friend name named Rick Graf who would, tongue-in-cheek carry around a chart showing AIDS/HIV funding in “thousands of dollars” with a huge “0” next to it.  It killed Rick in 1995.

It was because people hated gay people, and they were okay with letting gay men die.  To object to these deaths was considered “being political” or being supportive of homosexuality.  A position even only a fraction of gay people wanted to take in public then.

But, I’d had it.  I’d begun to lose friends, good men, gifted men, and no one seemed to care.  The red ribbon I wore was problematic at my job.  I was accused of being “disrespectful” and “in your face” of those who thought it was wrong to be gay. 

“But people are dying,” I’d say.

“I know,” they’d say, “but….”

The “buts” were always stupid and thinly veiled in bigotry and self-interest.  It wasn’t as if I was without self-interest.  I didn’t want my friends to die--one in particular, my soul-mate and life’s best friend a gay man named Michael.  I made a secret pact with God, that if I took any sling or arrow thrown my way to stop this travesty, that he would spare Michael.  It killed Michael in 1996.

However, the truth has a way of winning, and justice won’t shut up.  Little by little, by too damned little, people joined the few; and the few became the many.  It took a little boy named Ryan White dying of AIDS to shift the paradigm.  Still, in 1991, when the Ryan White bill was finally passed, my “liberal” Democratic senator Tom Harkin, made a point of announcing that the bill was for those “who didn’t get AIDS on purpose.”

Michael and I went to one of the last showings of the AIDS Quilt in 1992 on the Capitol Mall in Washington, D.C.  He was sick by then and gaunt.  It ripped my heart in ways I can’t talk about much without weeping.  I still hoped he would live, you see.  We joined an Act-Up Demonstration and helped wrap a red ribbon around the White House.  We sat on the wet grass behind the White House on Xeroxed photos of George H.W. Bush.   Bush the first, would lose the election in a few months.  We prayed for that.  We believed Bill Clinton would do everything for gay people.  He didn’t.  He passed laws against us, in fact.

I sometimes sit alone in my living room and become very quiet.  I allow myself to feel the vacuum of the presence of all we lost because of an irrational hatred that is still given too much berth.  I imagine Michael’s clothing designs, Kevin’s musical gifts with children, Kerry’s exquisite talent as a concert pianist, Allan’s magical fiber creations, David’s beautiful baritone voice, Bill’s compositions….  I literally could go on all day.

We have no comprehension of the beauty that was stolen from our world because we let these men die.  It gutted the artistic community in a way that’s never been acknowledged.  Our souls have been irreparably damaged by this, and we don’t know have an inkling as to the totality of that damage.

Still, I survived.  But barely.  I’d struggled with clinical depression my whole life, but I didn’t know it yet.  I self-medicated with booze and a lot of it.  My emotional immune system was so worn down, that even a relatively mild blow would leave me in total darkness.  I didn’t know how to take care of myself and instead let my passion do the driving.  I would dovetail quixotic efforts for justice rather than rest in between.  I was furious with people who wouldn’t help.  I was flattened by good friends who, out of self-interest, would be betray me.  I attempted suicide six times.  It would take a good decade before I was properly diagnosed and received the treatment I needed. 

Then, one day in late 2012, a weird, miraculous drop of grace tickled my soul while I was having a goofy memory about myself, and I fell in love with me.  I’d never loved myself, but suddenly I did.  I became very protective of me in every way.  I became whole enough to know what being whole meant.  Ironically, this dissolved my resentments and left me better able to love and forgive.  Who’d have thought?

I’ve been here before.

Hillary Clinton is a murderer.  So is every member of Congress who is not a co-sponsor of HR676, the Single Payer Bill in Congress, which includes my congressman, Dave Loebsack.  Yes, David, you’re a murderer.  So, is every supporter of Health Insurance companies, an enterprise that every second of every day commits genocide with glee.

Others may not call it murder to let people die when the resources exist to save them, but I do.  So, there you have it.  Why mince words?  I really doubt the insurance companies will close shop or politicians will stop capitulating to them if I ask them nicely.

Only this time it’s poor and low-income people we hate.  I believe Hillary Clinton is of brilliant intellect, and I don’t believe Dave Loebsack is stupid.  They know we can afford Single Payer.  They know, in fact, it would cost us less than how we’re doing it now.  They know that until we have a Single Payer system that guarantees healthcare for everyone that some will suffer and die.  They know it.  God help their souls, they’re just lying about it to protect their own self-interests.  I’m truly sorry if this offends Hillary or Loebsack supporters, but it’s the God-blessed truth, and lives depend on someone telling it.  Imagine holding your dying friend and having some politician say we might get to your problem by 2020.

"Incremental change" or "doing what we can" is a lot hooey for not doing what needs to be done.  Or, at the very least being square with people about the reality of this mess.

Obamacare may have helped a few, but it’s not even a drop in the bucket that needs to be filled.  Don’t worry, the GOP isn’t going to get rid of most of Obamacare, especially the subsidies.  Stop believing the Bullshit Partisan Food Fight Theater.  The empirical evidence of what I’m saying is pretty easily available if you care to look.  The insurance companies want that cash, and their toadies will make sure they get it.  They’ll just increase the premiums and deductibles and the fines for not having insurance until we’re paying hundreds each month to them for nothing.  What a God-forsaken racket.

America hates poor people.  Americans make fun of how they dress, what they eat, how they talk, where they shop, and the music they love.  We’re just not that bothered if they suffer and die.  It’s not as if it’s happening to people who matter.  Admit it.

As I type this, I am keenly aware that there are millions who are suffering and in pain but afraid to go to a doctor. 

“What if I spend that money, and it’s only a virus?”

“I can’t miss work.”

“I wish there were a free or cheap clinic where I live.”

“I can’t spare the $50 to get in at the online clinic right now.”

Most will live.  Some will not.  They’ll have something serious that needed immediate care or an infection will turn to sepsis that a $4.00 antibiotic would have cured if they could afford to see a doctor to write the prescription.  The least consequence they’ll suffer is being terrified (actually terrorized), and feel pain longer than that should have.  That is inhumane and wrong by any standard of decency.

The number who are killed for being poor looks like an afternoon in the park compared to the AIDS/HIV epidemic.  Approximately 26 million Americans can’t afford the healthcare they need.  A little more than 100,000 of them will die this year. I believe these people are human beings who matter.

Therefore, I intend to do all in my power to make a living hell of the lives of anyone who stands in between me and an end to this holocaust.  I survived.  And, I’m much better now at taking care of myself.  And, I’m old now anyway.

Let me be perfectly clear, I want health insurance companies to die, and I’ll do anything I can to make that happen.  They are evil.  It’s past time to call them that.

AIDS taught me something.  If I yell loud enough, long enough, people will start to listen.  Oh, they may hate me.  They may say dumb-ass drivel like, “It’s not what she says, it’s how she says it.”  They may form bullshit committees and project that I’m not allowed to join. I don’t bloody care.

You have been warned.  I’m going to keep screaming my head off until Single Payer is the law of the land.  You know sort of like every other industrialized nation in the world?  As my friend Rick used to say, “Silence=Death.  So, I’ll just keep talking, thank you.”

Mona Shaw is a grandmother of six and a high school graduate who lives in the low-rent district in a small town in Iowa.