The right of the people peaceably to assemble…
Thursday, June 25 2009
I am back from the HCAN rally in DC, where I joined thousands of people to show our support for real health care reform. I am going to split my report into three separate posts, this first one being more general, with a second post on the labor movement and a third on doctors.
But I know what you really want to see is Edie Falco, so here you go:
Can’t see her? More photos and notes after the jump.
The rally wasn’t the only point of the outing. We also tried to meet with our elected representatives. My group went to our Senators’ offices, but everyone was too busy to talk to us. Oh well; I’m lucky enough to live in a district where my Congresspersons are more or less on board for strong reform. They don’t need a lot of lobbying, so we left them hand-written notes expressing our support for health care reform. They know we were there, but I didn’t get any photos of that.
So here’s a better photo of Ms. Falco. Actually, it’s the same photo, cropped and enhanced a little. She’s standing on the stage, talking about her experience with health care. (In the larger picture, you can also see the top of her head on the screen in the right of the picture, just beneath the white flag.)
I have long believed that one of the reasons Hollywood people seem so dumb is that they take up exotic causes for places most people have never heard of. I know these many of these causes are worthy, but the celebs end up seeming out of touch with the extent of suffering right here in the USA. So it was nice to see Edie Falco talking about health care and sounding authentic and engaged – even if it might be the case that Showtime put her up to it as PR for her new show.
Several thousand people came to the rally. The colored shirts represent different unions and groups; the red shirts are Communications Workers of America. I think you can see some orange shirts in the background of this photo – not sure who they were. About half of the speakers at the rally were union leaders. I’ll have more to say about the unions in my next post, but I definitely felt a little out of place there. Not that union people are particularly weird – just that I was very aware of not being one of them.
There was a significant amount of press, too, so this might be on the news tonight. The woman with the microphone is wearing an NPR hat. She kinda followed a group of us around for a little bit, and for a while was standing next to me looking like she was about to ask a question. If you listen to Morning Edition tomorrow, you might hear me in the background chanting “Health Care Now” with the crowd. I didn’t see her do any actual interviews, so maybe she was there just to capture the ambience. I did talk to another reporter off-record about health-care expenses; he said he might be interested in following up with me later for an interview. I didn’t tell him about the blog.
This guy is hauling away trash. You can’t really tell, but the bag on the right is full of blue boxes from the lunches they were giving out for free. I didn’t get one; I waited until 12:15, and by then they were all gone. In retrospect, I should have walked a few blocks back to the train station, where there were plenty of restaurants. By the end of the day, I was light-headed from lack of food. At least they had plenty of water; it was a hot day, and I was worried about becoming dehydrated.
As I was leaving the rally, I saw gigantic mounds of blue boxes in all corners of the rally site. I don’t envy these guys their clean-up chores – and they’re probably not getting paid for it.
One of the weird things about my illness is that I don’t actually get too hungry – ever. I get hungry, but it’s not an uncomfortable sensation. I can ignore it for fairly long periods of time, even when I’m dizzy from lack of food. And I was fine for a while after I missed my lunch. Until these people sat down upwind of me, and wafted fry fumes towards me. Suddenly, I was ravenous – and I don’t even like McDonald’s.
That said, I am also quite sensitive to appearances – and McDonald’s seemed like a particularly bad choice for a health care rally. I also saw several people smoking, which is even worse than fast food – at least in terms of sending the wrong message at a health care rally. I suppose if you’re okay having these things taxed to heck to pay for health care, it’s not ironic. But it’s still a little ironic.
All in all, this was a totally worthwhile effort. It was great to see so many people from across the country, all committed to real health care reform. I’ll have a couple more posts tomorrow.
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