Better, Cheaper, Fairer (and mostly, fairer!)

The most good sense I have heard from anyone talking about the health care issue has come from T. R. Reid, in a program called "Can We Really Fix U.S. Health Care?" We recently saw this program on the LINK television network.

Reid's most recent book (which I will be buying, just so I can vote with my 20 bucks in support of what he is saying) is called The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care.

This is an excerpt from an article he wrote for The Washington Post.

As Americans search for the cure to what ails our health-care system, we've overlooked an invaluable source of ideas and solutions: the rest of the world. All the other industrialized democracies have faced problems like ours, yet they've found ways to cover everybody -- and still spend far less than we do.

I've traveled the world from Oslo to Osaka to see how other developed democracies provide health care. Instead of dismissing these models as "socialist," we could adapt their solutions to fix our problems. To do that, we first have to dispel a few myths about health care abroad:

1. It's all socialized medicine out there.

2. Overseas, care is rationed through limited choices or long lines.

3. Foreign health-care systems are inefficient, bloated bureaucracies.

4. Cost controls stifle innovation.

5. Health insurance has to be cruel.

(gasp!)

Spider Love

This is from Martha Beck's new book, Steering by Starlight, beginning on page 196. I wish there were a way to teach this to people looking for love - I really do.

If you went into your garden, recruited a spider, and asked it, "What do you love most?" the spider might answer, "I love flies." This is true: Spiders enjoy a tasty fly the way I enjoy ice cream. And how does this love cause a spider to behave? Well, it makes a sticky web, catches flies alive, wraps them up to keep them from escaping, and keeps them there, conscious, but helpless. Then, whenever the spider needs a snack, it scurries over to the fly, injects it with venom to dissolve some of its insides, and slurps up some of its life force.

This is the way many people think of "love." They will say, in all honesty, that they love their children, their partners, their friends more than anything in the world. But their love is consumptive, not giving. They need their "loved ones" to feed them emotionally, so they imprison people, trap them in webs of obligation or guilt, paralyze them to keep them from going away. They love other people the way spiders love flies.

Before you set out to lead a relationship where conflict is occurring, remember this: The goal of real love is to set the beloved free. If someone else's "love" requires that you abandon your own soul, it's spider love. If you find yourself trying to control a loved one, you're in the spider's role. Spider love really isn't love at all but a version of fear that creates a perceived need to control.

There are two red flags that will start to wave when real love disappears and spider behavior begins. The first is the deception, by which I mean saying or doing anything at all that is not honest for you. The second is the word make. When you do something even slightly dishonest because you're trying to make someone do or feel something, love is no longer running the show. This is just as true when you're trying to make people feel good and loving as it is when you're trying make them follow your orders. People-pleasing and guilt-inducing are as much control strategies as domination.

If you're on the giving end of spider love, you'll feel grasping, desperate, angry, wounded, or all of the above. If you're on the receiving end, you'll feel a desperate desire to escape, often muted by your own rationalizations. "Mom's just trying to make me happy," you might think. "That's why she's offered me a house if I get gastric bypass surgery." Or "Coach only screams at me because he's trying to make me achieve my potential." Or "Jesse just needs to make sure I deserve his trust; that's why he's tied me to this chair."

If you find yourself repeatedly convincing yourself someone loves you, check yourself for spider glue. If your body and your mood darkens when you think of the person who's trying to "make you happy," listen to it. If you feel wretched and panicky with the need to control someone else, realize you may be playing the spider yourself. Either way, leave the web behind. Detach. Whatever your role in the drama, drop it and begin focusing on real love, the sort that always frees the beloved. You can think of it as Stargazer love, because at the level where you are truly steering by starlight, you'll do it naturally.

Alive, here, now

“To feel today what one felt yesterday isn't to feel -
it's to remember today what was felt yesterday,
to be today's living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost.”

Fernando Pessoa

Pensive

The season is back. The season of pensiveness is back. How contrary and odd to love it so much. Harry Potter used the Pensieve in Dumbledore's office as a way to go into the memories of others -- a sieve for memories -- an admission that what we each see is only what we ourselves can see -- and that each of us has sifted the reality through the sieve of our own vantage point, our own beliefs and perspectives and place in the room at the time of the event. None of us has the whole thing. And if we can enter a collection of these memories, emptied one at a time into the bowl, and revisited each in turn, compiled with all the others we've gathered, we can see a story put together. We can find the threads of the narrative and weave them.

That's what happens to me in the fall of the year. Everything shifts again. Or, rather, there are some more things to pack into the trunks up in my attic. I bring the year's memories and the changes and chances of this mortal life, and I set them in a pile beside the old trunk, and I kneel down and caress the lid. I click the lock open. I lift the lid.

The smell of all the memories of all the other years comes wafting out, and I can't help it - the smell makes my vision blur a bit. I begin to lift out all the old things, to decide what goes and what stays. I begin to notice that I've brought yet one more of those, and how many do I need anyway? And I notice that I've never had one of those other things before. I should keep that.

And so it goes. I caress each piece, and laugh or cry a bit as I remember where it came from and why I have it. Anything confusing goes into the trunk. Sometimes these things make sense next year - or ten years from now - or thirty. Stuff that's started to rot has to be thrown out. And stuff I never thought to have in my hands is carefully wrapped in tissue and stowed where it cannot be hurt or wrinkled much.

That is what the autumn feels like to me. I must perform these rituals. I must clear the year's acquired piles and items, and visit the attic, and open the trunks, and then when I am done, I lower the lid, click the lock closed again for another year, pick up the pile of things I must dispose of, and go back downstairs. Ordinary life must be dusted and vacuumed. I light candles in the evenings during the dark seasons in ordinary life, and I cook inventive meals. I go to work and come home and put wood pellets in the stove. I study and meet deadlines. Along the way, a memento is kept - in a drawer, on a shelf, in a pocket ... on top of the piano.

It's nearing the end of September, and it's time to gather my little armful and go up to the attic.