Maybe Now

Something normal happens to people who are elected to Congress:
they start talking to each other.
They sift through the residue of unemployed office staffs,
and hire the people who seem to know Washington, DC, best.
They sit on the left, or the right, facing the podium, and talk to themselves.

"Well," they say, "what do the Blue Dogs say?"
The Blue Dogs listen to their Red Dog constituents
and say they cannot remember whether they are Red or Blue,
and that things are moving too quickly.

Barack Obama wants to be a healer, not a divider,
which is what George W. said, and that Barack said, too,
and if he he pays hopeless attention to the people
who admit they are going to cut him off at the knees,
he will end his presidency praising his inability to walk.

It is time for Obama, and all the other Democrats
whom we elected last November, to remember what we said.
We said we wanted a complete overhaul of our health care systems.
 We voted for people we hoped were listening to us,
 not just to each other; not to an army of deaf conversationalists.

If the people we elected will not listen to their voters,
then let them listen to a dead man; to Ted Kennedy.
Let them listen to a man who could afford health care,
and who knew that millions of us can only dream of it.

 If Barack Obama, and all those other Democrats whom we elected,
allow another Congress to dribble off into the swamp the city once was,
and seems to want to become, again, we should howl like banshees,
and ask them to stop talking to each other, and to listen
to the tributes to Ted Kennedy who, born into privilege,
 heard those who did not have what he had,
and what every other elected member of Congress has.

What does Barack Obama hope for his presidency?
That history will say he really tried to cozy up to the people
who said they wanted to cripple him? That someday,
after another half-century, we will finally understand
that no nation is healthy that looks away from millions of its citizens
who do not have health care, but who have only emergency rooms?

Obama inherited an economic system as it was wheeled
into the economic emergency room,
and he did what he had to do: he spent the trillions
 that were needed, and said we had to change the system;
that emergency medicine is too expensive to use
as a substitute for regular attention.

Emergency medicine is not health care: it is last gasp.

We have to do better!
We have to come to our senses and have a plan.
We have to be as tenacious as Ted Kennedy was,
and as honest. If Barack Obama wants, some far-away day,
to be remembered as we are now celebrating Ted Kennedy,
he will have to stop listening to the whispers in the Swamp,
and to recall that, last November, the people spoke clearly,
and said they believed he would turn from war as soon as it was possible,
and that he would listen to the people who had quiet and helpless voices.

Maybe Ted Kennedy, now quiet in Arlington,
will find someone to say what he always heard.