A recent experience and an article, "Politics and Work Can be a Volatile Mixture", have me thinking this morning how dualistic American political dialogue is in 2008. Blogs and forums are continuous and yet real, nitty-gritty porch conversations and work conversations (about the issues) are hard to come by. I hope I'm not overgeneralizing, but here's the word.
"In politics shared hatreds are almost always the basis of friendships."
--Alexis de Tocqueville
My dentist attempted to convince me that Barack Obama is basically a scoundrel: he will not do anything that he promises. {She digs Hillary Clinton's approach to healthcare, because as she put it, 'I see a lot of people who come in here with no medical insurance' and this justifies voting for a candidate who would require (and penalize) workers to have insurance, and yet she will not usher an age of single-payer healthcare, which baffles me.}
And so when her co-worker and head dentist walked in to check out my molars, the conversation stopped and there was an obvious air of un-comfortability. She didn't, as I assumed would be only right, include him in our conversation for nearly 10 minutes. I sensed that this was not due to my cavities either.
When it seemed her curiosity had taken the best of her, she asked him what he thought of Hillary's healthcare initiative and he responded with what she later said was her assumption about his beliefs. He basically said it was unfair for the government to tell you what to do with yer earnings. And after he had left the room, she said she knew he would say that, "he's rich".
Needless to say, she and I are each what the media would call 'radicals.' We think health is guaranteed in the United States' Commons and an American right; the right to life furthers society. I may get flack for quoting the patriot, Michael Moore, but when he said, you can really judge the merit of a country by the way it treats the people at the bottom, my mind lit up. I don't think anyone has eloquently answered the question--why is the United States' the only country which doesn't offer its citizens universal healthcare?
Somehow the answer--because we are rational, self-interested bastards--doesn't pin the tail on the donkey.
But I digress. By the end of the teeth-work, I encouraged her to pass along a petition around the office in order to put Ralph Nader on the Montana ballot. She offered me a deal: if you floss, I'll ensure that we have more voices and more choices.
I hope my dentist continued the lively topical discussion, although the chances weren't so great to begin with...
