Outrage

Now I'm good and mad. Really, really furious. While the euphoria over Obama's victory on Tuesday is still widespread and apparently keeping most of the world on a high, the degree of the challenge he and his administration face domestically couldn't be more starkly illustrated than by this article from the Washington Post highlighting the lack of medical care in the poorest communities. It's beyond outrageous. There are more difficult problems in the world, more serious decisions that need to be made about the wars we are fighting and their horrible cost in lives around the world, but this is indicative of the callousness with so many people have been treated within America while the Republicans played political power games with wealthy health care donors. Why should they care about rural Afghans or refugee Iraqis when they have so little interest in their own?

Over the summer for the past nine years, an organisation called the Remote Area Medical Volunteer Corps has set up a giant field station for dentistry, eye clinics and other medical care for three days a year in Appalachia, Virginia, trying to treat the thousands of people who drive and sleep all night in their cars to get treatment they and their families cannot otherwise afford. They were set up to work in Africa and South America, but have extended to rural America. Read the article and then watch the videos. The statistics on diabetes are terrifying, while people go to the three day event for cancer screening, unable to get scans in any other way. Think about it: your only chance to afford treatment, screening, dental work, glasses for you or your children is three days a year with thousands of other people. It is upsetting and disgraceful and enraging that in the eight years of the Bush administration, any attempt to provide some kind of state health care has been greeted with the kind of 'socialist' label thrown at Obama in the closing stages of the campaign when he dared to mention that perhaps some redistribution of the spoils in America might be necessary.

In this acceptance speech he said that Americans need to look after each other. The people volunteering in Virginia do the best they can. But it's a disgrace that a single mother can't get her own teeth treated because by making sure that her daughter has her teeth done first and gets the glasses she needs for school means there isn't time to treat her too. Virginia is not in the Third World. But you wouldn't know it. That a little boy of two has potentially life-threatening abcesses in his mouth that would not otherwise have been diagnosed, less than a few hours drive from the Capitol, should shame everyone in power. I am so enraged for these people. They may not have even voted for Obama, but if he has the courage to take on some powerful interests, then he may be their only hope for a decent, better life.