Slinkerwink has put together a quietly eloquent video that cuts through all the bombast and bullnoise surrounding the "health care debate" in this country in a way that no overpaid and overfed K street lobbyist for the insurance companies or big pharma can refute with slick distortions of logic or "compromise solutions".
In case you missed it in its short time on yesterday's rec list, here's the YouTube link
more below the fold
I helped Slink a little with the editing and scoring of this video. I cannot tell you how much it has impacted me.
As I looked at the faces of these people who had taken the time and effort to respond to Slink's call for photos, I realized that I was looking at a microscopically small portrait of the victims of what is truly a holocaust in the United States of America in 2009.
This holocaust does not use gas chambers and guns to kill its victims, nor does it choose its victims on the basis of ethnic or religious purity.
This holocaust is far more sinister and deadly because it has a clean corporate face. No SS stormtroopers here. Instead we have faceless adjusters for the health insurance companies who routinely deny claims.
We have terms like recission and pre-exisiting conditions to choose victims. And few people are spared. Even those with what they think is good insurance coverage find out they are among the damned when they or their loved ones are stricken with a debilitating and deadly disease or health condition.
This holocaust is not led by Nazis, it is led by robots in suits, the executives, lawyers and lobbyists of the health insurance companies and Big Pharma, who funnel untold hundreds of millions of dollars into fighting any meaningful reform that will threaten their money and power.
I changed the title at Slink's request. But I stand by my assertion that the true name of what is going on in this country is a holocaust in its results, if not in name... And that our failure to name this beast by its true name is one of the reasons we face an uphill battle... The comments yesterday said that we should use the term Medicare for All instead of the bland Public Option... I agree...
Until we as progressives are able to fight hyperbolic lies with strong names for truth, we are doomed in the war for the public's attention...
This holocaust is enabled by OUR Congresspeople and Senators, who enjoy the best health coverage in the world, but are willing to delay those who are not economically fortunate enough to have a platinum plan with the same type of coverage.
The holocaust does not take place over the course of ten or twelve years. It has been going on silently for decades, each year killing more and more of us...silently and individually.
White,black,brown,yellow,red...Buddhist,Christian,Jew,Muslim... it is the Grim Reaper cum Lack of Sufficient Coverage... it is far more deadly than any atomic bomb or gas chamber.
The people in this video put a human face on the anonymous tens of millions, probably numbering well above a hundred million of our fellow Americans, who are suffering its effects NOW, TODAY, as I write this.
These portraits of dignified people quietly stating their case for affordable insurance that will allow them access to the health care they need remind me of Walker Evans' portraits of the people who were affected by the Great Depression. People who had been hard working farmers and tradespeople a few years before their portraits of life in despair.
This video needs to be sent to every Congressperson and Senator...
(and for those who will say I have no idea of what the Holocaust under the Nazis was about... I spent a year in Romania and Hungary. I have been to the Budapest Synangogue where Himmler made his headquarters, and the Rumbach Street Synagogue...where thousands of people were held awaiting their fates)
I renamed the diary at Slink's request... but i stand by my use of the term for what is happening in this country today...
People are dying in many ways from lack of healthcare... deaths of a thousands cuts... or lack of preventive treatment when it can help and life saving mdecines and treatments when they become necessary.....
The term Holocaust with a capital H is used to refer to what happened in Europe... not only to the Jewish people, but Roma (gypsies) andanyone else the Nazis and their cohorts deemed to be officially undesireable in the pure Europe they were looking to make.
How is this economic cleansing via denial to healthcare that much different in its final effect?
This holocaust with a lower case h is a holocaust in results in not the strict definition (mass deaths by fire)...
The millions who have died in this officially sanctioned state of affairs have died single and lonely, often painful deaths... but the numbers add up... and they are real