Yes, They Really Are Mad As Hell
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“She had spent her lifetime in the town, and it was
easy to know who everyone was and where everyone
lived.”
— John O’Hara in Ten North Frederick, a novel
about life in small town Pennsylvania
I am not a Nazi
I am not a Mob
I am not a Wacko
How dare you…
Underneath the pink hat shielding her from a hot August sun, the
woman was furious.
Standing in the heat outside Senator Arlen Specter’s town meeting
in the small bucolic Central Pennsylvania town of Lebanon, along
with a crowd estimated at over 1,000 by an astonished local
policeman, she wanted to make certain something else was known.
She held aloft her handmade sign, its message written as above,
her fury directed at the first woman to serve as Speaker of the
House of Representatives. “I’m a wife, mother and a homemaker. I
don’t even know anybody in the insurance business.” Pause, the
obvious sense of indignant wrath searching for expression.
Finally: “I really resent the fact that Nancy Pelosi has deemed
me a mob and a Nazi!”
Another sign bobbed in the crowd, yet another homemade reference
to a Pelosi comment questioning the authenticity of the
opposition to ObamaCare. “If it’s Astroturf why are you trying to
mow it?” Which raised the obvious question.
Was she sent here by someone? “No!” came the emphatic answer
tinged with disgust at the sheer stupidity of the notion. No. She
listened to Glenn Beck and “all of 580″ –local jargon for the
WHP radio affiliate that carries Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Sean
Hannity. Someone else mentioned Mark Levin. But she wasn’t out
here to please a voice on the radio. She was here because she was
mad. This was about her country, her health care, not about Fox
News.
Who, exactly, were these people who had converged in the middle
of Lebanon to protest ObamaCare? Walking through the crowd,
finding them waving signs as they chatted with each other, they
were happy to talk. These were in fact the flesh-and-blood of
John O’Hara’s Pennsylvania world. There was the registered nurse
who was so incensed about the President’s plans she went on the
Internet to find Senator Specter’s list of town meetings — and
drove two hours from her home in Chambersburg only to find the
meeting already filled. She chose to stay, her own sign held high
with a scrawled message on free speech, her feet firmly planted
on the street corner. There was the local small businessman, the
woman who had lost a beloved sister to cancer — teary but deeply
gratified that her sister had health care choices every step
along the way. Her friend, a child of immigrants who arrived in
1924 — “legally” she added with a smile — shyly gave a name but
preferred to think of herself as just “an American patriot.”
Art was there, the self-described “working stiff” who had taken
time off from his job to come and protest the idea that he would
be forced into a health care plan the “elites” (as he heatedly
referred to the President and Members of Congress) refused to
sign up for themselves.
Said the small businessman: “If this is such a great
program….then Mr. Obama, Congress, Senate and all other federal
employees should test drive — should test drive — this program.
If it is so fantastic they should do it first, and then build a
consensus and if it’s that great? Guess what? I’d be glad enough
to pay…”
Who sent him?
“No one sent me,” he replied in the common sense tone of voice
for which the area is famous.
“I took comp time just like everybody else,” said Art the working
stiff, angry at the question again. “No one asked me to come.”
What was he so concerned about? “With this elitist government
pushing things on us…”
“And ignoring us,” came a new voice, this belonging to a woman
who worked with Lebanon’s disabled. The thought of disabled
children left to the mercies of a government bureaucrat intent on
rationing care caused the woman to shudder.
Inside, Arlen Specter was taking 30 questions, most, as befits
the general well-mannered nature of Central Pennsylvanians,
polite if forceful. Only one man invited an invitation to leave,
instantly making himself cable fodder. “You have awakened a
sleeping giant,” said a 35-year old woman captured on camera who
confessed she had not heretofore paid much attention to things
political.
Specter, who is nothing if not a familiar face in Pennsylvania
politics, surely knew this. He has routinely scheduled August
town meetings throughout his record-five terms in the Senate,
frequently lining them up in multiples. This day he was scheduled
to push on north to Lewisburg and Bucknell University for a
repeat performance. The difference this time was that there was
no scurrying of staff to round up attendees. This time,
Pennsylvanians wanted — demanded — to talk. The sleeping giant
was indeed awake.
Outside, the giant was damn angry. Complaints raged about local
Democratic Congressman Tim Holden and the state’s junior Senator,
Bob Casey Jr. Specter, at least, had the “guts” to show up. Where
were Holden and Casey? Their offices, it was said angrily, had
declined to hold town meetings, the implication clear: the two
men were hiding from their own constituents.
Yet it wasn’t just Holden and Casey who seemed oddly silent. Not
everyone protesting on the streets of Lebanon wanted to talk.
“Organizing for America,” referred to by one sarcastic local as
the “rent-a-mob,” had a cluster of people busy digging out
pre-printed signs that were to be carried into the crowd and the
lenses of TV cameras.
Holding up printed signs literally pulled out of a cardboard box
was one thing. Talking about health care was another. “I don’t
want to talk to you,” said the woman pointed to by the others as
the leader of the “Organizing for America” group. I tried again.
If she couldn’t say who sent her, how about a location. Where was
she from? Pause. Tersely. “Harrisburg.” End of conversation.
Further into the crowd another woman holding a pro-ObamaCare sign
and vigorously arguing with a thirtyish man suddenly fell silent
when asked who she was with. “She’s not allowed to say” sniped
the disgusted young man. Her sign went up, hiding her face at the
sight of a video camera. Why? “It’s not the union,” she said,
although no one had asked about “the union.”
With some coaxing, a retired state employee wearing the purple
T-shirt of the SEIU acknowledged that, well, now that the subject
was out there, “Oh no…” he wasn’t sent by the union. Pause. Or at
least not paid by the union. But he was asked to come by the
union? “Yes, I was told to come, some of our people are
inside…but I’m here on my own time.” A nice man who was satisfied
with his own health care, he attributes the controversy to a
“misunderstanding.” He believes that everyone should have good
health care because the United States has “the biggest economy in
the world and certainly can afford to make available affordable
health care.” In saying this he was immediately challenged by a
white-haired man who began reeling off statistics about the
financial status of the Lebanon area hospital. The union man
declined, politely, to get into a debate.
So where is Pennsylvania in all of this? Nicknamed the “Keystone
State” in 1802 in part because of its centrality to the original
thirteen colonies, the term has often enough correctly been used
with reference to its similar importance in everything from the
economy to agriculture to politics. Within the state, the
recognition that Specter is having a tough sell of ObamaCare in
his own Philadelphia, the city he adopted and made his own after
migrating from Russell, Kansas, and the state’s liberal bastion,
is nothing if not a warning bell both to Specter and team Obama.
Outside his town hall meeting were signs that mentioned the “E”
word — euthanasia. But more tellingly was the question inside by
a woman who wanted to know about the survival prospects for a
74-year old man with cancer. Angrily, the 79-year-old Specter,
who has survived a brain tumor and two bouts with cancer,
dismissed the idea of the government sitting in judgment on the
worth of the lives of individual Americans as “a vicious,
malicious rumor.”
But the fact that the question was raised at all — inside the
hall or outside — speaks directly to something not written about
in John O’Hara novels.
That something is a genuine anger — touched by a flash of terror
— that the men and women who have temporary custody of the
government of the United States, a government so carefully
crafted in Philadelphia — a city affectionately still known as
The City of Brotherly Love — are poised to enact health care
policies that are both distinctly un-brotherly and absent of
love. Policies that however well-intended, will ultimately wind
up judging the worth of an American life in Lebanon,
Pennsylvania, as found wanting in the balance, a needed sacrifice
to the God of government- rationed care.
The life of the woman in the pink hat. The woman who lost her
sister to cancer. The child of 1924 immigrants. The small
businessman, the woman who fears for the disabled and, not least
of all, Art the working stiff.
O’Hara’s old novel of life in small town Pennsylvania ends with
this sentence, spoken of the book’s hero.
“And then, when that time was reached when he was placed in the
great past, he went out of the lives of all of the rest of us,
who are awaiting our turn.”
Awaiting our turn we all are.
But if the men and women of Lebanon, Pennsylvania have anything
to say about it, it damn well won’t be the government’s way.
