“…As one of my first actions this Congress, I voted for H.R. 2, which repeals the Affordable Care Act in its entirety. I have cosponsored legislation, signed a discharge petition to repeal the bill, and am working to write a health care bill through the Republican Study Committee (RSC). I will do all I can to prevent the implementation of the president’s health care law and will work to ensure the entire bill is repealed and then replaced with patient-centric reform…”
For veterans, is ‘thank you for your service’ enough?
By Phillip Carter, Published: November 4
I remember the first time I was thanked by a stranger for my military service.
Cassi Creek:
The continued presence of David Phillip Roe in Congress, purportedly representing the citizens of Tennessee’s 1st Congressional District should be brought to an abrupt and complete halt.
Roe bills himself as a conservative, as a physician, and as a veteran. Thus he claims to support the preservation of Tennessee’s natural resources. He claims to want adequate health care for us all, and he claims to support active duty troops and veterans.
Since taking office, he has consistently voted for mountaintop removal, for destroying our mountains, acidifying and silting up our streams, and polluting our air. He has done nothing to support veterans’ needs beyond encouraging people to visit the graves of veterans. As for health care his intention, like all teavangelists, is to demolish Medicare, Medicaid, and all the existing medical safety net we now have. He wants to hand citizens vouchers which the health insurance companies will gobble up but then will refuse to accept for covering the needs of seniors and retirees.
We voters need to end his access to a part-time job that is increasingly financed by lobbyists for Corporate America. We need to vote him out of office. And we need to immediately block his part of the current teavangelist plot to create a Christian theocracy in the United States.
As a VietNam veteran, I’m accustomed to a less than cordial greeting from many of my fellow citizens upon return to civilian life. Let me be very clear, no one spat at or on me, no one threw blood, paint, or any other fluid on me in the San Francisco airport. But other than the waitress in an airport coffee shop who was amused at my 0900 request for a shrimp cocktail with a cheese burger and strawberry shortcake, who’s smile was also in hopes of a decent tip – granted; no one I encountered as I spent 12 hours waiting for a flight eastward had any sort of welcoming words or gestures for me.
When I returned to campus, decidedly Middle American and a genuine cow college filled with students who supported the war while assiduously avoiding any part in it, veterans were not quite treated as lepers, but no one of our fellow students cared to hear our tales. And that bastion of armed conflict, beer, and war stories, The VFW, wanted nothing to do with us when we knocked at their door. We had the problems of all soldiers trying to re-enter civilian life after a war and were then handed the additional handicaps of playing on a losing team, drug use, and being viewed as baby killers and complainers when compared to those veterans of WWII.
It wasn’t until the dedication of the VietNam Veterans’ Wall that the nation began to think about saying. “Welcome home!” Now we’ve become more or less mainstreamed, brought into the community as mentally disabled patients were handled when the Reagan admin chose to empty mental health hospitals onto the streets to save the money their long-term in-patient care was costing the nation. That many of them wound up alone, homeless, and discarded could have been predicted by anyone who thought the action through even briefly. That many VietNam vets wound up on the streets as well only demonstrates the willingness of our politicians to discard the troops they claim to honor.
I get “Thanks for your service” quite often, particularly on campus. I’ve adapted to the point that allows me to say, “Thanks!” and go on about my day without too much thought. That’s progress of sorts.
I’m happy for the men and women coming home these days, pleased that they are at least being welcomed home instead of being ignored. But they’re coming home to a country that has no jobs for them, no work that they can even return to if they held those jobs before shipping overseas. The country is in a serious economic problem that won’t be repaired anytime soon or at all if we don’t eject the teavangelists from office and break the unholy grip of corporate greed and Christian fundamentalism on the nation.
Paragraphs in”bold italic” have been submitted to the Editor of the Johnson City Press as a letter to the editor.
”Rational voters and recognized economists understand that in order to begin paying down our national debt requires both judiciously applied spending reductions along with revamping and implementing our tax codes to increase taxes for the ultra wealthy. That entails political compromise that the teavangelists and GOP are unwilling to agree to. It seems that many of the GOP/teavanagelists have signed a “no tax” pledge demanded by a lobbyist/self-appointed authority named Grover Norquist. David Phillip Roe is among those who have sworn fealty to Norquist. Norquist does not live in Tennessee. However, Roe has chosen to represent Norquist rather than the people of Tennessee’s first District. He’s made it obvious that he serves Norquist’s interests in Congress.
“Very well! This is sufficient reason in and of itself to recall Roe or to vote him out of office at the earliest opportunity. He no longer works for the people who pay the taxes that fund his political career. Let’s vote him out of office and let him ask Norquist for a job.”
Unseating David Phillip Roe and Little Eric Cantor from their current House offices is an excellent place to begin beating the teavangelists. We need to see the halls of Congress emptied of teavangelists in the 2012 election. To save health care in this country the age-old standby of physicians since Hippocrates, a purge, is in order.
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