Among the dozen women and men gathered at Kelly Madison's South
Pasadena house on Wednesday night, two feelings seemed to compete for
dominance: anger, welling from personal health care horror stories, and hope,
that old familiar friend from the campaign days.
"They're always trying to create this conflict!" Madison
exclaimed as she rifled through the television channels in search of President Barack
Obama's health care address, dissatisfied with the event coverage on FOX and
CNN.
The group of mostly women positioned around the living room on chairs
and sofas unanimously concurred, affirming one another in the spirit of a
daytime talk show or book club gathering.
"It's like the first party I had as a freshman, and the needle on
the record player broke," Madison riffed as she struggled with the remote
control, finally settling on Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow of MSNBC.
Despite the spontaneous vibe, the group was in fact a collection of
mostly strangers, a capacity crowd assembled to support Obama's health care
agenda at one of many area Organizing for America events.
Many, like self-employed web designer and entrepreneur Kate Dee, came
with a quiet fury toward a health insurance system that has failed them.
Dee is a quick study in contradiction: slender and muscular, quiet
but brimming with passion, somber and blonde. She was diagnosed in
February with cervical cancer after a visit to a low-income clinic turned up a
bad pap smear.
Her hysterectomy, which cost $67,000, was covered under Medicaid, but
any follow-up represents an out-of-pocket cost to wring from a tight
budget.
"I tried to go buy health insurance on the open market and found
that any cancer that I'd get from now on in is a pre-existing condition,"
she said, eyes welling with tears, "So what do I buy health care
for?"
She waits for the result of her most recent test, praying for a clear
result and fearing additional medical bills.
"I've explored going to work for Trader Joe's. I'm a web
designer. I designed the first Yellow Pages site. I designed the first
website for Fox Television. My gifts are in web design, but I should go
work checkout at Trader Joe's just for health coverage?"
She smiled.
"It's a lovely place to buy groceries, I'm just not sure it's
driving our economy the way it should."
Kadijah Moss, a pediatric nurse and long-time grassroots activist for
Obama, brought her husband and three young girls to the event.
Moss, who says she has paid into health insurance for 16 years, was
dropped from her family plan when doctors discovered she had fibroids.
Her provider, Health Net, found she had failed to report a visit to a
doctor made during her teenage years. The omission was considered to be a
lie on her health insurance application.
Moss, who said she feels secure financially, is less concerned with her
personal story than with the way the media is covering the health care debate.
"We've had hundreds of rallies in the past month here in L.A.
alone and you don't see any of them on TV. None of them are being
publicized."
Nonetheless, she is optimistic that health care reform will happen on Obama's
watch.
"It's been a slow progression to this," she said, looking
around at the women and men packed into Madison's bungalow, trading stories and
sharing refreshments.
Madison, the event hostess and a professor of media studies and
cultural politics at California State University, Los Angeles, finds the president's
rhetoric a refreshing change from what she considers to be "demonizing,
cynical, irresponsible" talk from conservatives.
"When the other side is [talking like] that, it's like a
contagion and it makes you so angry that you want to..." She trailed
off. "It's so poisonous what they're doing."
"Media here is so biased but it's in such a subtle way. When the left came out and they were
against the war in Iraq, you could barely hear a peep of their voice in the
mainstream corporate media. Here
they are playing these people talking about death panels on a loop."
But like Moss, Madison is also hopeful.
"I'm the kind of person that really feels like we can do it if
you can just reach a critical mass of people with the truth."
She points to her students as an indication of what's to come.
"They're not just relying on what's going on right now, which is
this hyper-capitalist corporate popular culture industry. They're reaching way back. They
seem to be looking for that thing that has the hopeful message, that's not
cynical."
Dee expresses a more cynical vision of hope.
"I mean, what else can you have?" she asked.
The question seemed to echo through the room, as Obama's most faithful
foot soldiers were busy in conversation, picking a new battle, a new
enemy.
