Vox Pop is no more.

That was the title of the post on our neighborhood blog announcing that Vox Pop had been “seized” had been closed yet again for money owed and not paid.

Which leaves me with a dilemma; I’m a writer, a person who makes a living telling stories, putting complex thoughts and emotions into words, thought and felt by me, and making them relatable to many. So, how to explain to people who have never experienced my local coffee shop, who have never set foot in a place that has become so much a part of my life, so much a part of the life of my neighborhood, an integral, central place, whether you like the place or not – the full freight of that sentence? I use the word “experienced” quite intentionally. Vox Pop wasn’t just a place to get coffee. Vox Pop was the place I went when I had good news to share or bad, when after a day spent alone writing in my tiny kitchen, needing to get out amongst people, but not wanting to talk. It was the place I went to meet up with friends, no need to call or text ahead , knowing they’d show up there eventually. It was the place I went when I had that feeling like the craving one gets for food, when you know you want something particular to eat or drink, but you can’t for life of you figure out what that is. It didn’t matter at Vox Pop, I’d run into someone to have a conversation with, or a game of Scrabble, and only later realize that the craving was gone, the need had been filled.

How to explain the loss I feel when, in our throw away culture, things close all the time, coffee shops and restaurants on the top of the list. How to explain the void that now exists at the end of my block in my neighborhood of Ditmas Park.

It feels impossible. To fully express the loss I would have to tell story after story (all true, no need to embellish), or explain and describe to the point of sounding like a Hallmark Card movie of the week. Or, the other side which means risking not explaining enough.

It’s just a coffee shop after all.

There were many comments to that post on my neighborhood blog. This was mine:

Wow. I won’t go into all of the ways that Vox Pop is important to me, cause who cares but me? I only want to say one thing for now – I love Vox Pop for the same reasons I hate it – it’s community (and trust me I’m not a “community” kumbaya person), it’s family, it’s messy (not DOH messy please). Because people go there and hang out there, you don’t just get the “hey, have a nice day” polite banter, you get real conversations, and real connections, and real people, and real friendships. Vox Pop feels and always has felt like a social experiment. And I hated it, and loved it, and wanted it to change, and didn’t want it to change a thing.

So why are we revisiting the rhetoric of the campaign? Or asked another way, what is it that the American people need to be distracted from now? Here’s my theory – it’s safe to say that the past two years have shown in very concrete terms that our system works really well. Really well for bankers, for insurance companies, for the health care industry. Because the executives in each of those industries are still getting their outrageous paychecks, they are still getting their bonuses; after being bailed out by the tax payers (that would be you and me) they’re doing just fine.

The rest of the American people, not so much. I’m going to show my age here, because I remember when executive bonuses were given as a reward for doing a job well, not for tanking an entire industry. I remember when the terms of agreement for credit cards didn’t contain the clause that the bank that gave you the card reserved the right to change the terms of the agreement (meaning raise your interest rate) at any time for any reason. I remember when there were caps on the amount of interest a bank could charge a customer. I remember when it was difficult, instead of encouraged, to get a home mortgage loan that the borrower clearly could not afford (that would be called predatory lending). I remember when one could get a major medical health insurance policy for less than $100 a month, and medical bankruptcies numbered 300,000 per year (1980) vs. 2,100,000 (2008). I remember when the government didn’t include a branch called Goldman Sachs.

So, who might want to keep us distracted by the shiny things in Oz, instead of paying attention to the man behind the curtain and the scary flying monkeys? Who might not want us to take a good look at the increasing disparity between what they have and what we have? Who might want to make sure that we don’t finally, once and for all, do the math and realize that there are a lot more of us than them?

I have my guess.

But they have an ace in the hole. It’s simple, while they define us and them by the Haves (them) and the Have Not’s (us) we continue to define us and them by Us (people who look like us) and Them (people who don’t). It’s really brilliant when you think about it.

Dear President Obama:

As an American I know that this country was founded by people who insisted on religious freedom. Call me skeptical, but I find it difficult to believe that those who are raising questions about your religion are doing it for any other reason than to distract us from the real issues that are facing our country. They are counting on our willingness to yet again, focus on what we perceive divides us, namely ethnicity – it’s not by chance that the religion they are “accusing” you of lying about being a member of is one whose primary adherents are people of color – instead of what truly divides us, the increasing disparity between the rich and the poor, a quickly disappearing middle class, and a populace willing to close our eyes to the damage being done to the integrity and values that this country was founded on by those whose motivation can be summarized in one word – greed.

Please stop giving them the satisfaction of playing into their hands. I’d like to remind you what Colin Powell said when asked the question of your religious affiliation:

“I’m also troubled by, not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the party say, and it is permitted to be said. Such things as ‘Well you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.’ Well the correct answer is ‘He is not a Muslim, he’s a Christian, he’s always been a Christian.’ But the really right answer is ‘What if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country?”

Dear President Obama,

Please do us all a favor and tell your people to stop explaining, apologizing, justifying, your religious beliefs and practices. I understand the impulse. You want people to have their facts straight; you said you’re a Christian, you are a Christian, and yet a large percentage of the American populace appear incapable not only of thinking critically, but apparently of thinking at all. It must be disheartening how easily people have swallowed the spoon feedings of rabble rousing trouble makers yet again. These trouble makers have a tried and true strategy when they want our attention to move away from something they don’t want us to start asking questions about, and onto something much more enticing, even if it is a lie. When a distraction is needed – make some shit up.

These rabble rousers used the same tactics to sow the seeds of doubt about your name, your ethnicity, your place of birth, your citizenship. And now they want to distract us by raising the specter of Islam and “accusing” you of being Muslim. And those seeds of doubt fall on fertile ground because as much as I hate to admit it – we Americans are short-sighted and easily distracted. I think it would be fair to say we suffer from a big old case of group Attention Deficit Disorder. And just when we seem ready to focus on something we really need to focus on, we get side-tracked by something bright and shiny. Fortunately, because those incidents calling out loudly for our attention these days are becoming more and more egregious, it’s getting a tiny bit easier to keep our attention from straying to that shiny object over there.

Americans – “Why are you throwing our Constitution under the bus by conducting warrantless wire-taps? And by the way, why is our government not only sanctioning torture, but apparently actually torturing people?”

Government – “There are huge threats out there and we can’t tell you about them, but trust us, they’re out there!”

Americans – “Well, I don’t know if I like the fact that we torture people, and isn’t listening to our phone calls without a warrant, kind of, you know, an invasion of privacy?”

Government – “You know, one of those threats we told you about might be really close to home, this new guy running for president? What kind of name is Obama?”

Americans – “But what about the wire tapping doesn’t that…. (ooh shiny object!) Wait, Obama? You know, you’re right, what kind of name is that?”

And before you know it, who cares about warrantless wire taps, who cares about torture? Because the fact that our government may be committing atrocities, the fact that our government might be spying on its own citizens, the fact that we might have handed over the keys to incompetent boobs, all that stuff piled up and we start thinking, this stuff is hard!!!! I don’t have time to figure it all out, and why should I have to anyway? I mean these guys wouldn’t lie to us right? That’s their job to take care of things.

TO BE CONTINUED……

I listen to a story about a woman who was “disappeared”
And tortured
And I can’t quite get it
Why I can’t stay with her

Because my thoughts keep straying from the woman
And how she managed to
Stay alive and more importantly than that
Managed to stay herself

Instead I keep thinking of her torturer
As he walks to her cell
Knowing well ahead what he intends to do
How he intends to play her to get what he wants

They say to gain mastery of something
It helps to imagine yourself doing that thing
Over and over

Is that what torturers do
To prepare for their day?

Angela Welch

In case you aren’t spending the summer in NYC, you might not be aware that it’s been really hot here. Really hot.

Oh indulge me please for a tangent. During a board meeting at my first grown-up job in New York one of the board members asked me where I was planning to “summer.” I was a bit taken aback for two reasons: one, I was “summering” in my fourth floor walk-up in Brooklyn (does that count?), and two, I didn’t know until that moment that summer could be used as a verb.

Here I still am, yet another year of summering in Brooklyn, and perhaps for the first time ever I found myself saying – god I wish this summer was over. This is no small thing; normally I love the summer. Hell I picked my college (University of California, Santa Barbara) in large part because my friend’s older brother sent her a postcard from there that said writing this while studying on the beach. But up until a few days ago we had unrelenting heat for over two weeks, the kind of heat that doesn’t even give you a break in the early morning hours. And for those of us with neurological illnesses, the heat is even harder to bear, turning the intensity of those symptoms up another notch or two. So my love of the summer might end up being the latest thing that I’ve had to give up to Parkinson’s disease. (As a friend, who has Multiple Sclerosis, says thank you MS!) Thank you PD! And when you’re dealing with a degenerative disease, it seems kind of stupid to wish for time to advance any faster than it already is.

One night near the end of the heat wave, not even dunking my feet in the kiddy pool down the block at Vox Pop was enough to cheer me up. It was way too hot, I was way too done in, and I found myself asking – just what is it that I’m doing here? Here being New York, but here also being this lifetime. One never knows when existential questions will decide to say hello. What am I doing here, how much do I have left in me, what is the point of everything? Okay, time to fess up here, because I’m still not very good at admitting this on paper – my real question was – What is it that You want me to do? And it wasn’t a question, it was a prayer.

What is it that you want me to do? Because, honestly, I’m done in. Here’s the thing though with throwing that stuff up to God, because suddenly I go well, yeah I’m really tired then I think, look who I’m talking to. “I’m really tired.” Poor me and my tired old self, while people are dealing with all kinds of stuff I can’t even imagine. Here’s the other thing though, I don’t think it matters so much what you’re praying about – it’s not a suffering contest after all – it’s the fact that you’re having the conversation in the first place and the fact that you’re asking the question – What is it that You want me to do? Because when you frame it that way, it becomes less about you. Think about it, the most likely answer you’re going to get is, I want you to help your brothers and your sisters. Maybe I’m not framing the question in the right way, because so far I’ve never heard anything remotely like – rob a bank (you deserve that money just as much as the next guy!), and hop a plane to Mexico or wherever you can go that serves Margaritas and doesn’t have an extradition agreement with the U.S. (time for a little R&R!).

Hopefully I will at some point get that beach vacation. In the meantime, here’s my best guess (I’m not a perfect listener yet) as to what it is that I’m supposed to do:

Working for Your Life, Managing to Work While Managing a Chronic Illness or Disability, 90 Minute Documentary, By Franklyn Strachan and Angela Welch.

Anyone who has tried to maneuver a middle ground between working full-time in a “traditional” job and complete dependence on public assistance knows that a willingness to work means risking losing all benefits.

More to follow and I do hope you’ll stay tuned.

P.S. Check out (and join!) the FaceBook page for the documentary – Working for Your Life.

This blog post was going to be titled, Despair, because I’m feeling it, and it seems that a lot of other people are feeling it too. The past couple of weeks have been really difficult – the little voice in my head that sends messages along the lines of “things aren’t going to get any better, this is somehow all your fault, life really is ‘nasty, brutish and short’.” Those fun voices, the ones that are so sneaky and insidious, the ones that usually make their presence known around 2 or 3 in the morning, but now are quite regularly making an appearance in the daylight hours as well. It’s understandable, because as much as you tell yourself that the economy isn’t your fault, that there are millions of others going through the same thing, that you are working as hard as you possibly can to cobble some kind of a living together, that little voice doesn’t quite believe it.

And there are other voices as well, voices of the “experts,” the politicians, telling you to work a little harder, be willing to settle for any type of work, that unemployment is just making you lazy and dependent. Uh huh. My neighborhood, as I’ve mentioned in previous posts, is full of freelancers, consultants and such. I’m not sure where the folks who make these generalizations about the unemployed are hanging out, but it isn’t here. The people I know are hanging by a thread. They aren’t banking those unemployment checks, because they’re spending that money on luxury items such as food, rent and perhaps prescription medications. And they are all working hard. I think one of the things that the powers that be, the ones who refuse to vote to approve the extension of emergency unemployment benefits for example, don’t understand is the fear that we are living with every day.

Last night two friends who moved to Florida last fall were in town and holding court in the bar where the male half of the couple had worked before the move. (He also proposed yesterday to the female half of the couple – congrats! On the Brooklyn Bridge – how romantic is that?) I wasn’t going to go, too much to do and I just wasn’t feeling up to it, despair looming large and all. At the last minute though I decided I needed to at least drop in to say hello. There was a great band playing and many of my other friends from the neighborhood were of course there too. The last song of the night was a cover of the Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” Well, that song struck a nerve, and almost everyone who hadn’t been dancing jumped up and hit the dance floor.

“You can’t always get what you want.”

I hope you’ll understand what I mean when I say; I think we all recognized that it was one of those moments. One of those moments when, in the middle of all the “stuff” we all are burdened with, that you’ve just received a little taste of joy, and you look out and you realize that you love these people. Maybe you don’t like some of them so much, maybe you don’t even know some of them very well, but suddenly you see them for who they are. They are your brothers, they are your sisters. They are your family. And I wished that we could somehow bottle that feeling, then we could take it out when we needed to see that the only way we are going to survive is to recognize that we are all family.

“But if you try sometimes, you might find, you get what you need.”

And just for the few moments of that song, you hear another voice, a voice that whispers instead of shouts, because this voice knows that there isn’t any point in shouting, knows that it could shout as loud as possible and you just wouldn’t hear it unless you were ready, that you won’t hear it unless you are paying careful attention.

And this voice says well done, have fun, dance, and let’s just see what happens tomorrow.

I’m working on a story about the high cost of prescription medications and how those of us who aren’t currently covered by health care insurance manage to pay those costs out of pocket. If you fall into this category, I’d love to hear your story.

Please contact me at angela@nadgb.com. You of course have the option of speaking anonymously.

Okay, maybe it’s partly due to the heat, maybe it’s partly lack of sleep, but I have to say – this is absolutely ridiculous, and I have had enough. I’ll be spending the next day or two without medication, and I know some people will be wondering why so just to get it out on the table up front, I’ll tell you why even though that shouldn’t matter at all in the context of this post. I am short because of a combination of things that include – holiday weekend, losing my only two sources of income, my delay in applying for Medicaid (I am only recently eligible), my deep desire to continue to live independently and therefore my refusal to pack up and move in with my mother (no offense intended Mom), the Senate going off on vacation without passing the emergency extension of unemployment benefits, my misfortune in getting Parkinson’s disease, a large number of my fellow Americans who don’t think that everyone in this country is entitled to access to affordable health care, the fact that I live in the only country in the world which ties health care insurance to employment, my procrastination in applying for public assistance, an out of control greedy insurance industry, ditto the pharmaceutical industry, and a really sucky economy.

In my previous blog post I mentioned my friend’s recommendation that whenever we experience something deeply distressing we pray, not for ourselves but for others experiencing the same thing we are. So instead of just hunkering down while bemoaning my fate, I started thinking and then praying for other people who are unable to pay for their medications. And the prayer thing, well I assumed that this particular prayer session would be sad but I really didn’t imagine how angry I’d get. Forget my situation, because I’ll figure things out. But think about people who don’t have the resources I do. I mentioned in the paragraph above that we are the only country in the world that ties health insurance coverage to employment.

I want everyone who reads this to really think about what that means.

I repeat, I want you to really, really think about what that means, not just in practical terms, but also what it says about who we are as a people. It seems pretty clear to me what it means – what it says is this – when you are no longer employed, you are no longer “useful” and therefore what happens to you next is your problem. When you’re employed, when you are a cog in the wheel, when you are making your contribution to the corporate machine, we have laws and regulations to protect you as much as possible – we will require your employer to pay you a minimum wage, we will require your employer to have certain safety regulations in place for your physical protection, we will limit the number of hours your employer can make you work, and enforce break periods and overtime, we will pass laws to ensure that your employer will have a hiring process that is as fair as possible, we will require them to also cover expenses should you become involved in an accident while on the job. We do all these things because we’re beneficent that way. [Shh, no questions.] But, once you are no longer employed or employable, well, then thanks very much for your service to our economy, have a nice whatever (oh, we’re working on eliminating SSI just so you know) and bye-bye.

Once you are no longer employed, you cease to be useful. When you cease to be useful, we honestly don’t care what happens to you. Okay we care just enough to prevent too much guilt on our parts.

Starting to see now why I’m angry? How dare we treat people like garbage just because they are no longer “useful” to our economy. How dare we let the elderly, including people who have worked hard their entire lives, the disabled, the poor, the ANYONE of us have to worry every month about whether they’ll be able to buy medications. Wonder how they will pay for their child’s health care. Know that they are one simple little accident away from bankruptcy because they can’t afford health insurance.

In addition to being cruel, this is simply insane, and it makes no sense economically. No one benefits from millions of Americans who are uninsured. Oh, well, some people benefit.

I want to do two things, first, I want to make sure this is clear for all of the people out there who think people like me, you know people who are sick, just didn’t manage things well. And second, I want to explain why our current system makes no sense. So, we’ll use me as an example. I am no longer able to maintain a traditional job, but I can certainly still work (and believe me I do) I just need to find work that I can do from home. And, if I didn’t have to pay these exorbitant medical costs out of pocket, I could manage financially, it would still be a struggle, you know until fame and fortune discover me, but I could manage. Here’s why I can’t manage:

I don’t currently have health care insurance. Because I have a preexisting condition, and because I had a lapse in coverage (which means that the month I stopped being able to afford COBRA, which was $660 per month, I wasn’t prepared with another plan at the ready that I could afford) insurance companies can refuse my application. And even if they don’t, treatment for my preexisting condition, doctor visits and medications, won’t be covered for a period of one year. My medications currently cost me $550 per month. I can hardly afford those let alone a monthly premium on top of that. So, now – I’m applying for welfare, because it makes more sense for me to get welfare than it does for me to continue to work. Wow.

I don’t want to turn this into a dissection of all that is wrong in this country, we’re all fairly sick of that, and my horror stories are old news. I would rather point out that when we are discussing, debating, arguing any of these topics – whether it’s health insurance, public assistance, whatever, please, I ask you to remember that there are real people behind these discussions. They are real people many of whom are alone and afraid and they need more from us than our disdain. How to help? Maybe just start with a prayer.

Not too long ago a very good friend offered me this advice – when you are in despair, stop and pray. But don’t pray for yourself alone. Pray for others who are experiencing whatever it is that has you in its grip. And pray for yourself last, by the time you get to that part of the prayer, your hardship won’t feel nearly as heavy. Well, the past few weeks or so have been tough for me, and I’ve heard others around me express feelings of distress. One person said that something just feels “off,” another used the word “unsettled.” And it’s not surprising; it’s now a year and a half since the economic meltdown began. People who joked uneasily a year or so ago about being members of the “$405 club” aren’t joking now. In New York $405 per week is the maximum pay out for unemployment. And even though the number of unemployed isn’t much different than when this whole slide began, the U.S. Senate just let a bill to provide another nine week emergency extension of unemployment benefits die. Now we’re “joking” about whether there’s wi fi under the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. Whether this “unsettled” feeling is about our economic situation or some astrological movement of the planets, or something else entirely, I certainly can’t say. But whatever “it” is, it just feels bad.

For lack of anything else I could think of to try, I decided to follow my friend’s advice. Here is the prayer, or poem, or whatever you’d like to call it that I wrote. I hope it helps even a little bit.

As I am weary, please watch over all who are weary. As I am worried about a roof over my head and food on the table, please watch over all who are homeless, or fearing homelessness and those who are hungry.

As I feel alone, please watch over all who feel friendless and alone.

I ask that all who need to feel your love and light around them, be blessed by receiving those gifts.

And especially as I sometimes doubt your love for me, as I doubt even your existence, when my faith falters, I ask that you reach out to all who need a reminder of your presence and that you cover us with the blanket of your love, just as gently as grandma would tuck us in at night underneath her soft and warm quilt, making sure to kiss us tenderly on the forehead and bid us to sleep well.

I was still in elementary school the summer I learned what it felt like to be judged unfairly. My parents had signed me up for two sessions of day camp and it was the first day of the second session – new group of kids, new camp counselors. I was somewhat shy at that age, maybe less shy than hesitant, one of those kids who stands on the sidelines waiting to make sure I understood the rules of a game before joining in. But that first day of that second camp session I felt good. The previous session had been really fun; for some reason I had been a favorite of the counselors, not in a teacher’s pet kind of way, but in a nice, little sister kind of way. But something happened on that first day of session number two; I honestly don’t know what it was. It’s not that I’ve forgotten – I never knew. And that’s what was so awful about it – for some reason at that second camp session, my counselor didn’t like me. It wasn’t that he did or said anything specific to me that I can recall, but I knew in the way you always know about these things that my counselor, and I was pretty sure the others too, didn’t like me and because I didn’t know why, and because I was a little kid and they were adults, there wasn’t anything I could do about it.

In hindsight I probably didn’t do anything or at least anything overtly, horribly wrong. I was for the most part a good kid, a bit of a smart-ass on occasion, but never malicious. But that didn’t matter, all that mattered was the perception that the counselors had of me. Because something about me, combined with something about that counselor, led him to make an assumption about who I was.

We’re all guilty of it – making snap judgments based on assumptions. And I think it’s a natural part of the biology of who we are. Coming upon a large animal, we have to react quickly – our mind takes in the details, large fangs, razor sharp claws – and processes the information to get to a quick directive of run! But when that process involves us late at night on a dark street in a dodgy part of town looking at a person with a different skin color, different clothes, an “otherness” that makes us somehow uncomfortable, afraid even, then it gets a bit murkier. Are we reacting to “good” information or “bad?”

We can forgive the primitive part of ourselves for the inclination to make quick judgments, we can also welcome these judgments because they were, and sometimes still are, essential to our survival. Then the question becomes – what do we do next?

What’s your prejudice, your “ism” – racism, ageism, sexism, elitism, ethnocentrism, anti-Semitism? And what “isms” have you been on the receiving end of? A friend recently forwarded one of those mass emails, this one involving anti-immigration sentiments – “press one for English, press two to disconnect until you learn to speak English” and I brought it up to her telling her that I found it offensive. In her response she was chagrined, noting that she of all people should have known better, her parents didn’t speak English when they came to this country. How quickly and how eagerly we welcome moving out of the “other” category and forgetting what it was like to be the one being judged. I certainly have my own isms, my biggest involving intellectual elitism. And I find myself more often that I care to admit, making assumptions about people’s intelligence when English isn’t their first language, and isn’t flawless.

So what are we to do with it? Well, I’d love to have an answer for that, but everything I think of seems pat and cliché. “Acknowledge our similarities.” “Celebrate our differences.” “Take a moment before making an assumption based on a first impression.”

Where to go from here? I haven’t the foggiest.

Any ideas?