Columns 2009

Just about the same time that Sarah Palin was opining in the Oct. 16 National Review that, “Electric cars might work in Los Angeles, but they don’t work in Alaska, where you can drive hundreds of miles without seeing many people, let alone many electrical sockets,” I was drafting some material for Ilisagvik College in Barrow. Interestingly, part of the background material I received included the fact that an instructor and students at the college celebrated the successful conversion of a car to electric power by driving the car from Ilisagvik to downtown Barrow.

According to the information I received,

Are you like me? Do you feel that trying to follow the booze wars in Bush Alaska is like trying to watch Australian Rules football – it looks like something you should be able to understand; yet you can’t quite figure out what the heck is happening. And just in case you weren’t confused before, you have the spectacle in Bethel of the same group who pushed a vote for going wet now opposing anyone actually getting a liquor license.

Villages can vote to have their communities exist in one of three states:  Wet, which means anything goes from liquor

I became a Letterman fan while living in Barrow back in the day when our network programming came out of Chicago. That meant what was on a 1 AM Chicago time was on at 10 PM in Barrow. Letterman was my primetime viewing.

I remember when Letterman featured the woman who kept the unfortunate diary entries detailing their affair in many on air bits. I find it difficult to believe that anyone wasn’t aware that something was happening given the obvious looks that passed between them. Also, it was painfully clear she hadn’t been chosen because of her sparkling personality.

Given the fact that election season seems to run endlessly, thus subjecting us to annoying, loud and insulting ads for more of our lifetime than should be allowed, I think it’s time we chuck that pesky Free Speech part of our constitution and allow a law that would make it punishable by death to run any political ad for at least a year after the last election.

Should there be any doubt in your mind, let me make clear that this particular rant is being brought to you by the fine, if mysterious, folks running the current energy tax commercial

You don’t hear much about hermits nowadays. I imagine that for many young people brought up amidst the instant and constant “in touch” revolution, the very concept of hermit is more foreign than the concept of a rotary dial. This thought occurred to me about sixty seconds after I narrowly avoided being hit by a woman in a car who was turning while talking on her cell phone. Since that took up one hand, she only had one left for the turn. This made her turn wide, very wide. So wide, in fact, that she came across her two lanes

Here’s what struck me the most about the front page of the paper last Wednesday. Above the fold was a story about a Bethel doctor, Jill Seaman, who earned a MacArthur fellowship genius award for her work in southern Sudan. She first went to Africa in 1984 to help out in famine starved Ethiopia and has been returning to Africa ever since to offer what medical care, solace, compassion and help she could to some of the most needy and wretched populations on earth.

Dr. Seaman never used being a woman as an excuse for doing anything less than heroic

America’s current health care system should really be called our sick care system because health is simply not its primary objective.

Preventive care, which would actually be caring for your health, is all too often not covered. For instance, the state of Alaska’s retiree health insurance plan will not pay for an annual breast exam if you no longer have a uterus. I have never quite understood the connection but the shortsighted nature of this policy is obvious to anyone who looks at the cost of caring for someone with advanced breast cancer as opposed to someone who catches it

I applaud any and all efforts made to help people with substance abuse and mental illness get the assistance they need to be off the streets and safe. So I support the recent proposal to use involuntary commitments as a tool towards getting alcoholics and drug abusers into treatment.

But having spent a lifetime working with people with the dual diagnosis of mental illnesses and addictions, I have to wonder how much help will ever be enough for them.

I trained as a nurse in the late sixties.  It was a time when doors were being flung open on mental

You want to talk about indoctrination? You want to talk about propaganda? I went to sixteen years of Catholic schooling back in the fifties and sixties when even god was afraid to dispute what Sister Angelina said in the classroom. I know about indoctrination.

When I was a senior in high school, I won a Voice of Democracy Award from the VFW for an essay I wrote. The award ceremony was held in a Protestant church. This freaked me out so badly, my parents had to send me next door to the rectory so Monsignor Vincent could assure me that

Here’s a message I would like someone to take back to the Democratic Party in DC. You won. Yep, you really did. You won. I can see where there are simply not enough media platforms in today’s world to get that news through to you.

This means you should stop acting like losers. Stop letting the people who lost the election define the terms of today’s debates, whether it is health care reform or interrogation techniques. But most especially, health care reform.

It should be an embarrassment to any sentient American that this country, the country we like to think