There’s a day you wake up and find yourself in your mid fifties. It’s a day of reckoning – a day stained with regret – a day that is repeated over and over. Each time it revisits, an army of defenses are called upon to justify, rationalize, beat the fuck up, sob wildly about and finally, at some point, to simply get on with your day. Because really, it’s pretty much always about just getting through the day. And somehow you do. If that day proves a bit more encouraging than the last day, the next morning has a better chance of being free of this drama. I’m not sure what happens when you wake up one morning and realize that you are in your mid-sixties. I am hoping that knowing that I will have a sense of Security – SOCIAL security – a check coming in every month, a tiny pension from the state of New Jersey for my 20 years of service to the state, and Medicare. I will have health care for the remainder of my life. Or will I?
I have been an Adjunct Professor of Fine Art for the better part of my adult life. That pretty much means that if you work really really hard wherever you are, you have no job security, the faculty will try to suck you dry and then just hire someone outside the college for that full time position when it becomes available. But I never did allow the faculty to suck me dry. I couldn’t. I was way too busy being a Mother and running a business as well as Teaching. I did not have the time to do all those extra things that would put me in good favor at the schools. I simply taught my classes. I taught as well as I could. Sometimes better than other times. And I went home. I had to tend to my children. I had to tend to my business. I had to pick up the house after my husband watched the kids.
I got divorced.
I am now one of those people between 50 and 65 who will be asked to pay 5x as much for health insurance as a 25 year old.
I was listening to Terry Gross interviewing Francis Ford Coppola about the GodFather a few weeks ago. He was the director of the GodFather, in case you are too young to remember that. Anyway, he hired a lot of unknown young actors to play the roles of the mafia kids, the mafia kids wives, husbands, etc… but when it came to hiring the actor that played the GodFather, he knew that he had to hire an actor that was already established. And here is what he said about why he had to do that. Because if someone was in their mid-fifties, and did not have a successful career, what have they been doing all these years?
Right. What have I been doing all these years? Those of us that are not at the pinnacle of our careers, not earning 100K or more by the time we are in our fifties deserve this TRUMPcare.
So basically, this is what I hear in my head:
“You are over fifty and you cant afford health insurance? Really, you don’t have a job that pays for your health insurance? Really? You are that much of a failure that you cant afford this? Well then.. You should really just not have any access to health care. If you have an illness, it will simply kill you and you wont be a burden on the already burdened Social Security system and you wont suck the life out of Medicare. Because You will be dead. And your failures will die with you.”
But, that’s on a bad day.
On a GOOD day, I know that everything is ephemeral, and that I am not a leach on society, that I try my hardest, and that I give back where I can, and that I have the best stuff this life can offer. Ultimately, I know that I am basically in charge of my own health. That the better I take care of me, the less I am a burden on society.
So, there it is. Being in charge of myself. And that’s the way it should be, the way it needs to be.
It’s just sad that right now we as a nation are simply in survival mode as opposed to striving for excellence, for Art, for Music, to saving the beauty that is this planet and to share the wealth. It’s as if our frontal lobes are collectively shrinking. It’s a sad time. Although – because I am hellbent on making this good day – I will revel in the fact that this planet is filled with like minded individuals. And that the powers that are running our planet currently with greed and narrow mindedness propelling their agenda, will not prevail.
Val Sivilli 