Sure!
And so that’s what we did yesterday afternoon.
Setting out, though, we hadn’t seen each other in awhile, so I reminded her that my hearing in a car wasn’t great.
That, as it turned out, was a good thing.
She was sure we were on the same page politically, and had a lot of opinions; while I struggled to keep my eyes on the road but still keep up with what she was saying, she was enjoying her audience. We are quite fond of each other.
She didn’t like how her favored presidential candidate was being treated by the press. I sympathized.
Wasn’t it terrible how Obama was trying to force everybody into one big union?
“Huh!” I said with a smile, delighted I’d heard her that time without having to make her repeat. “That one would grab big headlines. I read the New York Times, the Washington Post, and even our little Merc every day, but somehow I missed that one.”
She went on at length about the healthcare bill. I, blissfully deaf and cheerfully missing the point, got a word in: wasn’t it wonderful that my daughters were going to be able to get health insurance now? When one got turned down for no good reason whatsoever, and the other–well. She’s covered under one of the university micro-plans that the bill is phasing out, meaning that, till then, her maximum allowable coverage for medications is $2,000 a year. Her doctor wanted to put her on a med that costs more than her annual income; she needs that med to treat her ITP, and appealed to the manufacturer because they do sometimes provide a cut rate for those in need, but they turned her down on the grounds that she has insurance.
Which it isn’t, really. But after next year, I think is the time frame, she’ll be able to get covered. Isn’t that wonderful?!
Finally, the woman tapped my arm, smiling, and said, “I think we’re on different sides; let’s talk about something else.”
We had a perfectly lovely time of it all. She got to meet new people with a deep interest in things she’s been wanting to learn about, she got her feeder, she got some seed, she added in a suet cake and wire cage after I got more to refill mine and we talked about how to show the birds the place was worth checking out: hang a stick. Let them perch near it first to get a good look.
And I think she actually heard some of what I had to say: because I was able to avoid the distractions of negative emotions and to concentrate on just enjoying the time I had with her, without letting all that Ailes America rile me up. Who knew that deafness could contribute to maintaining a sense of closeness.
I avoided the temptation (but I won’t here) to stir things up by quoting Thomas Friedman from when he put context around the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators for those who don’t get it:
“Citibank sold a package of toxic mortgage-backed securities to unsuspecting customers — securities that it knew were likely to go bust — and, with the other hand, shorted the same securities — that is, bet millions of dollars that they would go bust.” He quotes the Wall Street Journal as saying, “As a result, about 15 hedge funds, investment managers and other firms that invested in the deal lost hundreds of millions of dollars, while Citigroup made $160 million in fees and trading profits.â€
To women of her age, that could well have been part of her own retirement going poof. It is criminal.
We, yes, we, are the 99%. Heck–I guess we’ve all been put in one really big union, haven’t we?