A PERSONAL MATTER — FRUSTRATING AND PAINFUL IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE

By Edwin Cooney

Approximately ten days ago, I developed a toothache so I contacted my dentist who takes my insurance coverage.

She is a very nice person and I like her even today. When I called her office, they agreed to see me immediately — which I had expected.

Her assistant took me into an examining office and put an X-ray device into my face. The consequences were immediately obvious.

My lower left molar was cracked and one of the two roots had dissolved. What my dentist didn't tell me was that my body had been eating the deteriorating root and had been poisoning me. Next came the really bad and painful news.

My dentist tole me that she used to extract teeth but she no longer does. When I walked out of her office, I only had an adequate prescription for pain and for destroying the infection that was present.

She proceeded conscientiously to refer me to a dentist who does remove bad teeth and who would take my insurance coverage. Hence I called the office to make an appointment.

When I called, I selected the wrong department and got the “new patient” receptionist rather than the person who handles appointments for current patients. I was told that they couldn't take a new patient until November. I immediately asked the operator how long she could stand a toothache and she proceeded to scold me for rudeness. I didn't apologize. However, I called the office once more and this time I was connected to the right department. I gave my name and this receptionist said that they had gotten a request that morning from my dentist regarding my need. However, I was still informed that they couldn't remove the tooth until November! I was still incredulous, but I took the November appointment.

A day later, a friend and fellow Lions Club member recommended me to a dentist friend of his who promptly offered to remove the tooth the following morning and that's exactly what he did. Although he doesn't accept my insurance, I agreed to be one of his patient should I need another tooth removed in the future. However, I still have several questions.

Assuming it is legal for doctors to determine what they will or won't do, what are the parameters for emergency medical or dental care? One friend of mine said that if I had walked into an emergency room, I would likely have found a dentist who would have removed the tooth.

However, I consulted my close friend Tom who began by saying that my problem was due to modern healthcare. "You mean Obamacare?" I inquired. No, he told me that it was due to the profit motive. Why, he asked, should a dentist remove a tooth for three or four hundred dollars when a root canal can be performed for a few thousand?

   

Can a heart specialist treat a patient for a heart condition and then let that patient just die on the occasion of a heart attack, I wondered? Are patients who are being treated for stroke prevention subject to the same delays as toothache patients? 

I don't at all mind the cost of an emergency tooth removal. Currently, I can afford an emergency. However, not everyone can.

My closest friend named Steve (I have many friends named Steve!), tells me that years ago as a contractor he was advised that you can't discriminate against a potential customer due to racial or ethnicity, but you can deny service to someone because he or she is an undependable jerk! Didn't the consumer protection agency — or Ralph Nader — tackle this problem many years ago?

My advice is both obvious and  simple!

Find out if and how your personal dentist is prepared to help you with an old-fashioned toothache.

If your doctor equivocates or confirms your fear, drop the doctor like a bad molar!

Bad teeth and bad politicians have a lot in common, don't they?!

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY

SORRY, ARCHIE, WISH YOU’D BEEN RIGHT!

By Edwin Cooney

"Everyone knows," declared Archie Bunker to his son-in-law Michael Stivic, "that capital punishment is a well-known detergent to crime."

Mike shoots back: "Capital punishment has never been a deterrent to crime.”

Of course, Archie was wrong and Mike was right. Three hundred eighty school shootings since the April 20th 1999 tragedy at Columbine High School is ample testimony that too many murderers are willing to give their lives so long as they obliterate the lives of their victims and ruin the lives of their friends and families.

What this does to those of us who have often smugly and righteously ridiculed the Archie Bunkers of this world is to amplify that we are no closer to ending the scourge of murder in our country or in any country in the whole wide world.

Christianity is no solution — just ask the Jews, Muslims, and early Protestants. Judaism is no solution. Just ask Palestinians and Muslims about Judaism's tolerance. Islam is no solution. Ask the Kurds of Eastern Turkey and beyond. 

What turned me around on the usefulness of capital punishment was James McLendon's 1977 novel “Deathwork" in which one of the four inmates about to run into "Old Sparky" observed to the officer about to lead him to his death: “Legal murder is the only permanent solution humankind has come up with to solve its social dilemmas. There is no solution to hunger, racism, unhappiness, disease. The only solution to some death is more death.

"Adolf Hitler believed that humankind is naturally a fighting animal and that Germans must be superior to other nations in fighting and conquering in order to prevail. 

“Never mind," says the Great Satan, whoever he or she may be. "Give me your life and you can have everything else. According to scripture, Satan offered exactly that to Jesus during Jesus's 40 days of temptation.” 

So, what does that tell us about life?

Is absolutely all that we possess of any real value?

Is it ultimately for sale to the highest bidder??

Does it have any meaning once it's over?

If life is only due to a specific mixture of scientific happenstances, what meaning does it have above scientific curiosity?

What governs humankind's capacity for curiosity? I insist that curiosity is spiritual by nature. (Not until the recent development of artificial intelligence has any mechanical device demonstrated a capacity for curiosity!)

Back in the early 1990s, someone went into a San Francisco office building and shot his wife, a couple of her friends and himself. That was the precise moment I realized how pointless and meaningless capital punishment was and is.

So, I was right! All I have to say is: BIG DEAL!

Ultimately, what matters isn't whether we're right or wrong about the political and social issues we are faced with as human beings. What matters is how we use our rightness or wrongness regarding matters of principle. If we use our capacity to be right as a weapon, even as we preach righteousness, we're ultimately wrong.

What human beings all over the world need is a new paradigm regarding life and death. Is death the opposite of life or is life death a continuance of life? I suggest that death is a continuance of life since death cannot exist without life! 

At birth, we're invariably indoctrinated to fear death, yet we've learned about the world as explorers, scientists, astronauts, hikers, and swimmers despite death’s presence as a possibility in these ventures. Death, like any other force, is dangerous when it becomes a weapon. However, death can and has yielded when it is is merely a possibility in essential ventures.

Opposition to capital punishment is not wrong until it's weaponized. However, it may be said to be weaponized when it is used to outlaw the legitimate use of guns which, for the most part, has practical uses. (Note: assault weapons are an exception to the normal classification of a gun.)

Almost all of us defy death until its immediate appearance endangers the lives of those who matter to us the most.

When death threatens the well-being of those we love the most, we endorse death by being willing to wear it forever!

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY  

YOU, ME, UNCLE JOE AND UNCLE DONALD —WE’RE ALL IN DENIAL

By Edwin Cooney

It's fitting that I'm writing this on May 13th, 2023, because on this date, Wednesday, May 13th, 1846, Congress declared war on Mexico which resulted in one of the most devastating situations in American history: specifically, the Civil War. For more than a decade, our presidents and Congress have quarreled over both the accommodation and the lack of accommodation shown toward immigrants. As I see it, we're all ignoring "the root of the matter.”

There's much that can be said about our relations with the countries of Central and South America from the days of the Monroe Doctrine to, more recently, Vice President Kamala Harris's apparent bungling of the immigration issue. (As I see it, Vice President Harris's gaffe is the least of every other bungle!)

Here's the real issue: The governments of Central and South America are mistreating their own citizens and, although we pride ourselves on being the most decent, proper, and moral superpower on earth, we won't do anything about it economically, diplomatically or, most of all, militarily due to the high risks a new idea or plan may cost us.

The ongoing immigration crisis is, without question, an international human rights issue which largely benefits both liberals and conservatives who are well served politically by the issue's appeal to people's fears. For the immigrant, it's a terrible nightmare. To the traditional American nativist, it's a political weapon. To the ethnic-oriented American, immigration is a pathway to the American way.

Just ask yourself: what would cause you to abandon your home, neighbors and family, and walk 600 or 800 miles across two or three international boundaries to get to a nation that neither wants nor welcomes you? How can it be anything else except a reaction to fear for one's well-being and loss of  life? Meanwhile, 21st Century America is politicizing this human rights matter to our own domestic political advantage. Once upon a time, President James Monroe offered military protection to all of the Americas through his 1823 Doctrine; FDR applied the concept of "the good neighbor" to our fellow Americans; right after World War II, Harry Truman launched The Organization of American States to handle social, military and diplomatic issues; a little later, President Kennedy launched his "Alliance for Progress" as a strategy for tackling social and economic issues in Central and South America. However, as we move forward toward 2024, principle automatically becomes political fodder.

What really needs to happen is for the United States government, regardless of who is at the head, to confront the governments and other sources within Central and South America and insist that they cease policies that are clearly injurious to their people. Governments that won't cooperate should be subject to economic and diplomatic sanction, and to international military intervention, if need be.

The bottom line must be to turn this pointless, poisonous and mean   political issue into the international human rights matter it really is!

So come on, whoever today's "Lord Root of the Matter" may be: strut your stuff, please!!!

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY

HISTORY: WHERE IS THE KEY?

By Edwin Cooney

“I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.” So spoke Winston Churchill in the late fall of 1939 when he was Neville Chamberlain's First Lord of the Admiralty.

Although lacking Mr. Churchill's intellect, experience, responsibility, and certainly his knowledge, even I recognize that every nation in the world will strive to act according to what it perceives to be its national interest. The real question is, how accurately do the leaders of nations with nuclear missiles assess reality? Even the richest, most powerful nation, and I hope and believe that it's still us, understands that even if successful at the close of a nuclear war, victory, as President Kennedy once asserted, "would be ashes in our mouths.” China, Russia, India, Pakistan, and North Korea would be overwhelmed with the task of governing a polluted and impoverished planet. They would not have the advantages the United States had in the late 1940s to launch a new Marshall Plan dedicated to cleaning up and restoring international equity and economic stability. 

  

You can be sure that both Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, as well as Hungary's Viktor Orban and Turkey's head of government Recep Tayyip Erdogan have read enough history to know that one of the reasons World War II came about was because Adolf Hitler’s political contemporaries didn't take him seriously even though he made his intentions public.

Beyond the demands of immediate national interest lie the traditions of established culture, society and government. Just this week, a federal jury convicted four Proud Boys of sedition including one who wasn't at the Capitol. As I understand it, that conviction makes the fact that President Trump wasn't at the capitol less significant than many of his defenders believe.

Those of us who regularly advocate for political, social and economic  change face the frustration that significant change in the United States of America can be painfully slow at a cost to the environment and to our very well-being. An example is too much gunplay in our schools.

To study history meaningfully is not to sign on to a political doctrine, although people often do just that. Just as we all have a personal story, history is our national story. Our personal stories often have twists and turns in intentions and justifications. We are seldom consistent in what we believe or in what we do.

For me, May of 1960 marked a turning point in my understanding of what America was all about. However, it doesn’t contradict what I'd prefer America to be! Every nation and every individual is a contradiction to the ideal. However good or bad, constructive or destructive we are, it's almost all on the record.

As the late, great Casey Stengel used to say, "You can look it up!"

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY 

MANY MAYS AGO

By Edwin Cooney

The first of May 1960 began on a Sunday which was only fitting because, at mid month, President Eisenhower, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, and Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev were to be hosted by French President Charles De Gaulle at a peace conference which might well settle serious disputes that were blocking a sense of peace and happiness throughout Europe.

Two days previous, Ike, our beloved president, had approved a final mission conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency to launch one final spy mission over the Soviet Union before the upcoming Paris Peace Conference.

The U2 plane was piloted by 31-year-old Francis Gary Powers of Pound, Virginia. The U2 plane was an odd looking contraption with long spindly legs and a very lightweight shell which enabled it to rise above 12,000 feet, just high enough to avoid the range of Soviet defense missiles. When young Powers didn't land at the C.I.A. base in Sweden, the agency reported it to Eisenhower. Ike, who was golfing in Augusta, Georgia, decided to await developments. However, when none came from either the Soviet government or from search efforts by the C.I.A., Ike approved the issuance of a standard explanation by military aide Andrew Goodpaster stating that we had a weather plane missing which might have accidentally crossed over into Soviet territory.

In the meantime, Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who knew all along that the United States had been spying on his country, was not only presented with the plane and all of its equipment, but with a living pilot whom he planned to display to the world during the annual May Day celebration held at Red Square on Friday, May 6th. As righteously angry as he was, Khrushchev insisted that these flights, which he said had been occurring frequently for the past five years, did not have to mean that no progress could be made at the upcoming Paris Peace negotiations, especially if President Eisenhower would issue a public apology at the outset of the conference. Ike refused to apologize but attended the conference beginning on Monday, May 16th.

Being the cagey international politician he was, Nikita Khrushchev had humiliated Ike's pretense at Camp David the previous fall during the premier's visit to America. He revealed that during that conference, Ike had called him "friend" and had insisted that Khrushchev do the same. Knowing about the U2 flights, Khrushchev said that he had thought to himself: there’s something fishy about this friend of mine.

Beyond the fiery Khrushchev temperament, Americans were forced to consider, almost for the first time, that even the godless Soviets might have genuine cause for concern for their national security brought about by American hostility. The general public knew little about espionage and, insofar as they knew, only our enemies were guilty of espionage. Ike's participation in espionage in Iran, whose government we toppled in 1953, and in Nicaragua, whose dictator we had vanquished in favor of our own in 1954, was not widely known by most Americans by May 1960.

Humiliated at Paris in mid May, Ike's upcoming visit to Japan was at risk by the end the month.

Even more, whether espionage was legitimately a weapon in a peaceful people’s diplomatic arsenal became a political issue, Candidates Nixon and Kennedy privately agreed that espionage was not only a legitimate necessity, but a necessary ploy.

Gone forever was our perception that a free people was always at the summit of international good intentions.

As for the wisdom of Ike's lie regarding a missing weather plane, the fallibility of Ike's presidential task was exposed to history's judgment and, as a fact, on the record for consideration in evaluating America's future.

Today, sixty-three Mays after 1960, we're still grappling over the wisdom or the necessity of presidential lies. Are there good lies and bad lies? Is integrity the most valuable aspect of any individual president's success? Students of history and historians alike are invariably on the lookout for past presidential lies or sleights of hand.

However, until Sunday, May 1st, 1960, presidents might have lied as politicians while seeking office, but in foreign affairs they had brought about a League of Nations (Woodrow Wilson in 1919), the United Nations (Franklin Roosevelt in 1945), NATO (Harry Truman in 1949), Atoms for Peace (Dwight Eisenhower in 1953) and The Spirit of Geneva (Dwight Eisenhower in 1955).

Perhaps truths, lies, deceptions, fears, hopes and the capacity to recover from the worst of these was always true.

However, most vividly, it all became evident between Sunday, May 1st and Tuesday, May 31st, 1960.

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY