“23 million people. That’s like three Chicago’s! All of them loosing health care.
“Oh no,” said the guy in the grey raincoat, blending into the Friday morning windy drizzle rush hour throng walking east on Randolph in downtown Chicago. “That 23 million. That’s just the libs counting. And you know how they count. George Soros probably made up that number. It can’t be that bad.”
“I don’t know. Sounds pretty bad. They took away pretty much everything. If you get sick. You’re screwed.”
“Oh don’t worry. It can’t be that bad. It’ll cost less. And you still have pre-existing condition coverage,” said the grey raincoat guy.
“Actually that’s a lie. They lie a lot now. Oh, and they cut Medicaid too.”
“Hmm. That’s not what they said on Fox. But either way, everything will be fine.”
“How do you know? There is nothing anywhere that says how much this will cost.”
“You know,” said grey raincoat, “I gotta tell you what I really think. And I wouldn’t say this to anybody cause you know, it’s not politically correct, but I think that if these people want the insurance, they should have to pay for it.”
Walking behind these two, I heard grey raincoat say “These people should have to pay for it” and I thought about how easy it would be to sucker punch grey raincoat in the kidneys. Sucker punch him hard. So it hurt. How good it would feel to watch him fold down to the sidewalk and stop talking. Because if he didn’t know that we were all ‘these people,’ if he didn’t see this wasn’t about politics—this was about stepping on the throats of the vulnerable and playing with their very lives, this was about pure power. And it he didn’t know that then how would I explain it?
But then I remembered another Dialogue. My favorite song. Starts out, with one guy, guy named Terry Kath, singing,
“Are you optimistic bout the way that things are going?
And then another voice answers,
“No, I never, never think of it at all.”
And the song gave me strength for the fight to come.