A Dance to Spring...with apologies

I wanted to get a dancer for this post but it wasn't possible, given the time constraints and the money they wanted. So I had to go with what I had. My sincere apologies to Jules Feiffer for tampering with his vision, and to all the poets who have come before me at this time of year.  I'll try using a real dancer next time. 

                  

A Dance to Spring

 In this dance 

flowers bloom

giant locusts bloom

Hope blooms
 

All things are possible!

In this dance

Tea Party members bloom
gathering their spit

taking aim at John Lewis and calling him the "n" word

A time warp to be sure,

but our man has known enough hate to last a lifetime

Just look at him here at the Edmund Pettus Bridge

 Did he back down then?

Sorry folks you don't win.

Your ruse won't dampen his resolve one iota

To pass the Health Care Bill

All things are possible!

In this dance

Tea Partiers call Barney Frank a faggot
They can't say gay, as in, Oh Happy Day!
No, these people aren't happy in any way.
They're angry angry angry, a million times angry
about the Health Care Bill

The response from GOP leaders is weak
These events are isolated, Boehner says,
followed by Chairman Steele,
They're just stupid, is all he'll admit.
Perhaps they think
name calling is an allergic reaction to spring 
and all we need is an Allegra


Well, all things are possible!

In this dance
Angry people can't get over the fact
That their President is black!
They're still in shock, wondering,
What the hell was the country thinking?
Citizens must have been hypnotized
by the Jews and the Clintons,
so they're back on the streets 
eager to be heard
to stop the Socialist takeover of America!
Has anything changed?
Are we back where we started?
Is Lewis right, a time warp?
No, calm down, we're not back there yet,
Even the die-hards have changed in 60 years
Last night the bill passed

Hallelujah! 

And tomorrow... 
We put our kids—under 27—back into our health plans.


All things are possible!

~~~~

Here's the original cartoon by Feiffer, drawn in 1957, seemingly inspired by the same concerns we have today. I tried to reconfigure the eight poses of the dancers onto this tiny mannequin, although some worked better than others. So, thank you, Mr. Feiffer, and you're right—spring does make me silly.

Channeling Cynthia

Three years ago, almost to the day, I attended a Supreme Court hearing in Washington, DC, lining up at 3:30 a.m. on the coldest day of the year!

Afterward, I had lunch with my new friend Cynthia Dailard, a senior policy analyst at the Guttmacher Institute, a think tank devoted to women's health issues. We'd met earlier in L.A. and liked each other instantly; we'd been emailing back and forth ever since.

We had a great lunch and when we said good-bye I hugged her, and then for no reason, I hugged her again. A few weeks later our family went overseas and when we got back in January, I had a voicemail telling me Cynthia had died of cardiac arrest, caused by a previously undetected heart defect. She was 38, and left behind two small children and her husband of 14 years. To add to the tragedy she died the day before Christmas, Dec. 24, 2006.

As the holidays approach, she's been on my mind a lot.

She'd emailed me about a piece in The New Yorker called, "The Swamp Nurse," by Katerine Boo. Cynthia had covered the same material in a policy review showing how home nurse visits were instrumental in preventing subsequent pregnancies among poor teen moms. She'd put together an amazing array of evidence as to the importance of funding such projects, over the $176 million spent annually on abstinence-only education through the Bush administration. But she felt her piece "paled in comparison" to Boo's, whom she called an incredible writer. At lunch she'd quizzed me about my writing, how I'd started, what I was doing, how one makes it as a freelancer.  She talked about branching out beyond writing policy papers, into something more creative. I didn't exactly come right out and tell her I wasn't making it, although I did tell her it was difficult; but I encouraged her to try because she seemed so darn excited about the possibilities.

When she died Senators Olympia Snowe and Hillary Clinton submitted a Congressional Resolution honoring her work as a women's health advocate.

Their resolution can by found on the Cynthia Dailard memorial website.

It's hard not to read/hear/talk about the health care bill without thinking of Cynthia, knowing she'd be front and center, writing about the importance of decent coverage for everyone, especially, young and poor women. Today the Senate announced they're dropping the kind of equitable public option we'd all prayed for, in lieu of increasing national coverage in the health insurance market. Huh? I'm sorry Cynthia's not here to shed some of her brilliant light on the subject.