The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Well, the days of death panels are quickly coming to a close now that the GOP has set the date for the repeal of Obamacare. Or most of Obamacare. Or at least some of it. And they have even announced a replacement for the Affordable Care Act, the health care law that one third of this country doesn’t realize is the same thing as Obamacare. The good times are on their way again. And Republicans are crowing that the wicked witch is dead.

I don’t know if we should dig the grave just yet. Those folks who want to keep the Affordable Care Act and get rid of Obamacare, they might be disappointed when they learn that ignorance might be bliss, but it’s going to be expensive. And once again, when the sausage of this new health care bill gets ground, the process is going to be on full display. Drop the funding for Planned Parenthood? 65% of us want to keep it funded. Give vouchers for health care? You got tea party Republicans who see that as one more entitlement they can’t afford. Cut off Medicaid to the states who expanded Obamacare? Plenty of governors who are going to scream bloody murder. Drop the requirement that everyone has to get in the pool to drop insurance rates? I’m betting the kids and the healthy aren’t going to sign up. Might as well wait for that first heart attack.

We were just down at the Emergency Room a few nights ago, the mizzus and me. If you’ve only seen that on prime time TV, trust me, it’s an eye-opener on what the guts of health care look like when you need it NOW. Cat scan, x-rays, blood tests, urine analysis, lab work — you aren’t thinking about the cost right then. But you will…. Nearly two million of us will file bankruptcy protection from those bills this coming year. And 56 million of us will struggle to pay those bills. One of the sponsors of the new health care bill said today that folks might have to choose between buying that new I-phone and health insurance. No problem, save a couple hundred dollars and get themselves a …. what kind of policy does he think a few hundred dollars will buy under their new care plan??? At least he didn’t say choose between food and health care. But I suspect that will be the real choice for a large number of us. Compassionate conservatism long ago went out of fashion. It was an oxymoron then and now it’s a bad tweet.

Down at the South End recycling centers we have a tradition of setting our unwanted possessions out beside the highway, no need for even a FREE placard, and by late afternoon or the next morning, whatever was offered to the motoring public will be gone, hauled away, recycled, possibly resold. Couches, TV sets, patio furniture, broken chairs, doesn’t matter, the stuff gets snapped right up.

I like to think our carbon footprint is so small, Trump’s hands would fit inside the tracks out there on the Great Camano Rift. But … it does get me to wondering, where does all this cast-off, broken down, beat up stuff go? And who is hauling it home? Free is always tempting, free is generally preferable to cheap, free is most of the time hard to resist. My neighbor who is moving lock stock and gun barrel to Arizona has been dragging everything from umbrella stands to step ladders out in front of our driveway. He asked me if I wanted to take first grab, but I said, geez, I just cleaned out my shack and the last thing I need to do is fill it back up with new crap. There’s enough Sisyphean ordeal in my life, no point driving to the dump and the Goodwill five times a week.

But someone is snatching up these goodies. I see a pickup stop, back up, pull over to the shoulder, then next thing I know he’s loading up the ladders, maybe the small table, all in a hurry as if the absence of the FREE sign means it’s maybe not. By the time he’s peeled out, along comes a sedan, up pops the trunk, in goes the little screen TV working order or not. The neighbors poke through the roadside displays, but most of it looks like what they got already or have thrown out last week.

Maybe the folks who mow the yards and maintain the lawns of the more well-heeled South Enders, maybe they’re the ones who see these roadside garage sales as an off-season Feliz Navidad. I mean, there are plenty of us South End natives who are poor down here, but we’re talking about the last two miles of a long skinny island, not a huge population of indigents, lately not even percentage wise.

It’s a mystery to me, but I decided I’m okay with that. Saves the neighbors hauling stuff to the dump and saves somebody some money grabbing free goodies. Win-win, as we like to say down here. Beats buying that junk new. Even if some of us apparently did.

I just spent the morning with my friendly dentist. You want to darken your day, this is one way to blot the sun from a morning. Potential gum disease, stress fractured teeth, a ‘hard bite’, old fillings, potential crown work — it’s like having a TV that only plays Fox News’ Sean Hannity, all the negative opinion that’s fit to speak. My mouth has two months to live. I’m regretting I made the appointment, better just to live my final years in blissful ignorance, gumming my soup dinners happy to never floss again.

My buddy Roger tried that avoidance route, mostly because he couldn’t afford dentists. Half his mouth is devoid of teeth now. They rotted to the point the pain got too much for him, then he had them jerked, something the poor tend to do rather than pay for a crown or implants. Teeth are way down on the list when poverty dictates priorities. And even if he’d had health insurance — which he didn’t — dental health isn’t covered, don’t ask me why.

I got a lot of neighbors here on the cavity-prone South End who look like hillbillies without their molars and incisors. One year I was working building a winery for Professor Bob up north when my co-grunt put down his framing hammer and got down on hands and knees searching the plywood floor we were laying.

“Lose a contact?” I asked, getting down with him to search.

“Naw,” Randy replied, “my &^%$#!!tooth.”

It had rotted, literally, right out of his head. The kid was 22 years old. A minute later he found it by a box of 16 penny nails, a brown little molar, horrible there on the gleaming blonde plywood deck. Next day I asked if he’d gotten in to see the dentist. He shook his head no, opened wide to show me the gap in that rotten mouth of his was filled, then he grinned. “Nothing a little SuperGlue can’t fix.”

No brains, no headache, as my neighbor used to intone, philosophically challenged. I decided right then to buy an electric toothbrush and a year’s supply of floss. Saves me a fortune on SuperGlue.

Every morning I get up out of a warm quilted bed ready to face the day ahead … only to find this continuing source of irritation and dread. I suppose I should linger under the covers a lot longer, maybe all day. Or cancel our subscriptions to the newspapers and turn off the news on radio and TV. After all, I’m not going to be consulted on the replacement of Obamacare. Even if I did know it was going to be very complicated.

Politics, like the stock market, is really driven by the mob mentality, not so much data and facts, alternate or otherwise. It’s psychological. Or pathological. Once the money boyz lose faith in the Dow Jones, the bulls lose hope and the bears start stalking. Same with politics. Create a sense of foreboding and fear, then look for remedies. We may have nothing to fear but fear itself, but believe me, fear is plenty. Today, on the heels of the president’s speech to the Congress and the nation, the bulls are running.

Spring supposedly is right around the corner. Snowdrops are blooming by the mailbox and back in the woods. Daffodils are up. The wild currants are showing blossom. So okay, it snowed this morning. But tomorrow is March, coming in, I guess, like a lion. I’ve been spending most of my time, when I’m not torturing myself with the news, cutting firewood in the back 40. The wood is for the year after next, meaning, I have hope that in another year, I’ll still be alive and kicking, that the world will still rotate okay, the sky will not be falling and the nation will survive and us too.

I suppose Global Warming will keep encroaching, the polar bears will starve, the oceans will rise and the health care system will go backward. The rich will get richer and the immigrants will be slowly rounded up and deported. Who knew that immigration reform would be so complicated? Who knew global warming would be too? Who knew life beyond the golf courses and the resorts was so messy?

Today I got band practice. Gonna take my 5 string banjo and join up with the rest of my musical cronies and pound out some lively versions of Celtic and old time and even some rock and roll to get ready for our St. Pat’s day gig at the gnarliest bar in Stanwoodopolis. Something about a banjo. Pete Seeger’s banjo had this written on the drumhead: ‘This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces It to Surrender’ Kind of optimistic, you ask me, but I will say, when I play mine, it’s hard not to feel good about the world. Who knew music would have that kind of power?

The Trump Team, the folks who screamed holy murder about deficits and debt, just announced today they would present a budget for increased defense spending. Let’s see, right now we have 54 percent of all federal discretionary spending going to defense. World military spending totaled more than $1.6 trillion in 2015. The U.S. accounted for 37 percent of the total. U.S. military expenditures are roughly the size of the next seven largest military budgets around the world, combined. U.S. military spending dwarfs the budget of the #2 country – China.

So … I guess we need more rockets maybe. Or another aircraft carrier or two, just in case we take on the REST OF THE WORLD!! Are you kidding me? Last time I looked we had an epidemic of Alzheimers, diabetes, cancers, run down the list and tell the folks who have kin with those that we need to cut back on spending for cures and put it toward more bullets. Somebody explain to me this kind of priority when we’re already spending more than a third of all global military expenditures and we can’t win a war in Iraq or Afghanistan? Shoot me now.

I’m sorry, but this is immoral. Trump states ad nauseumtweet that we need to take care of Americans. So we buy more bombs? We upgrade the nuclear arsenal? We build a new Star Wars defense? Who’s kidding who here? Us Romans just keep piling up the garrisons, extending the empire, menacing the world. The current Commander-in-Chief wants to end Globalization. How about ending the military globalization, pardner?? Trade pacts, not so good. Military bases, great idea. How about 800 of them? More than any empire in history. More than the Romans ever dreamed.

Down the road from me, up in the salmonberry jungles of the interior, my neighbor Ronnie lives in a doublewide pretty much gone to wrack and ruin. His mizzus works upcountry in a hair salon, makes about enough to keep Ronnie in beer and off Medicaid. He’s got a veritable armory in the back bedroom, ammo and pistols, hunting rifles and even an illegal automatic AR-15. “Who you worried about?” I asked him the day he first showed me some of his prized possessions. “I’m worried about the damn Muslims, that’s who. And maybe you too.”

“I’d worry more about me, Ron, than I would those infiltrating, Koran-brainwashed refugees I never seem to run into.” Ron doesn’t have health insurance, says he doesn’t need it, never gets sick. His two year old Ford 150 with the gunrack in the back window probably eats up most of Kari’s salon wages, I’d bet. From our place some nights I can hear him target shooting when the wind is right. Drives the neighbors crazy. They ask if it’s legal to shoot guns out here in the wild wild South End. “Oh, it’s mostly legal,” I have to tell them. “Just part of living rural.” It’s not only the rural yahoos that love to shoot guns and collect more. It’s the whole damn country.