I had a change of heart about our current President last week, a small softening after hearing a news piece on NPR about his listening session on opioid addictions. That he, one so prone to bombastic output, should entertain a session where the purpose was to hear, to take in, caught my attention. That it worked, increasing his awareness of one of the problems we little people suffer, also impressed me. Clearly more listening sessions are in order.
Of course, being part of the tawdry
media myself, it was not hard to find something to scoff. After the listening session was over, the
President declared that opioid addiction is a huge problem, “huge,” and that
“no one is talking about it.” Of course,
it’s been in the news frequently for the past year at the very least. TV programs like Frontline and 60 Minutes
have already done programs on it, NPR covers it regularly as does the PBS News
Hour. Perhaps if he watched something
besides Fox News, he’d have heard about it before now. Perhaps if he watched PBS he’d know how
important it is to have public (i.e., non-commercial) support for the media,
like the NEA and NEH. The National
Endowments for the Arts and Humanities are not just about symphonies and art
museums. They’re about keeping truth and
beauty alive.
But when he said “and no one’s
talking about it,” I heard just the tiniest glint of embarrassment in his
voice. It must have been something, hearing the hard
details of how so many people’s lives had been taken to the brink (and some
over the brink) by the accident of over-prescription. Hard to hear the connection between the
proper world of pharmacies and the improper underworld of heroin and the
streets. It must have been hard to
recognize the big hole in his own mind that growing awareness filled. Chalk one up for the Donald.
The next morning I told my mate what
I’d heard. The phrase that came out of
his mouth took my breath away. “He’s
been living so long in the aquarium of wealth and power that he doesn’t know
how the rest of us live,” he said. And
there it was: a perfect lens through
which to view and try to comprehend Donald Trump.
I don’t know much about aquariums
except that they make me uncomfortable.
I think it’s empathy for the fish:
I’d die being on display 24/7.
Some people must glory in it, or learn how tolerate being observed, even
examined, on demand. Learning how to get
attention, which includes making those fish flakes suddenly appear on the
surface of the water and slowly filter down, not to mention keeping the water
aerated and the bottom gravel clean, might not be too hard. Not as long as there’s someone there on the
outside of the tank who’s fascinated by looking through glass at gilled,
contained lives.
What do we do with this
Goldfish-in-Chief who doesn’t even know where his fish flakes come from, much
less whose hands sprinkle little pinches of them into the water twice a
day? I don’t know about you, but I know
that I’ve got to put my jealousy aside, that little knot of envy that tells me
I wish I’d had it as easy as he’s had it, or has it now. I’m not livin’ in no fishbowl. Heck, God might have put him in the
Presidency to help him, not us, just so he’d have some slim chance of getting through
the eye of the needle after all.
I think what we do is keep talking,
keep helping him learn the things he doesn’t know, the things he couldn’t learn
living in his aquarium. And maybe we
keep listening to each other while we talk, so that we can help him figure out
what to do with that knowledge. Heck, I
learned something from that listening session:
heroin is cheaper and easier to get than Oxycodone and Percocet. What does that tell us about the pharmaceutical
industry and the medical establishment?
Maybe it tells us that public support of health care is cheaper in the
long run than supporting all these big fish in their little ponds.
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Trudy
Wischemann is a writer who is grateful to have health care – at long last - thanks
to the ACA. You can send her your
gratitudes c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a
comment below.
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