Worcester’s Special People

In 1986, I moved from New York City to Worcester, Massachusetts. Beyond the basic necessities of food, housewares and automotive parts, there was not very much to shop for in Worcester. Grafton Street, though, did have a birdbath store.

Worcester now is not the same city that I moved to back then. Let’s just look at spring and summer of 2012.

Great performances by a local break-dancing group were among the many highlights during stART on the Street's 10th Anniversary Fall Edition, held in September 2012 along Park Avenue in Worcester.

There was the stART on the Street art festival along funky Green Street in the Canal District. Thank you Tina Zlody and her stART on the Street crew. The next week, two events attracted people came from across the country and around world to Worcester. Paulie Collyer put on Paulie’s NOLA Jazz and Blues Festival, a three-day extravaganza of music, fun and food that attracted a packed crowd. Many more attendees were from outside of Worcester than there were Worcesterites.

Not taking a backseat to any event, Alec Lopez of The Dive Bar, Armsby Abbey and a soon-to-come-artisan bakery), along with world-famous beer importer Will Shelton of Shelton Brothers, attracted brew masters and micro brewers from all over the world to Worcester. What an event and crowd! And just like after stART on the Street, there was no better place to enjoy it than on the patio behind The Dive Bar, with Duncan Arsenault leading the band.

A week earlier, there was Blue Man Group at the beautifully and authentically restored, Hanover Theatre for the Performing Arts. For the Hanover Theatre’s ongoing success in bringing national tours and community support to Worcester, thank you to project developers Ed Madaus and Paul Demoga with an assist from David Forsberg, Craig Blais and the rest of the Worcester Business Development Corp.

That same Thursday evening, 150 or so people ventured to nearby Worcester Common to hear a rock-and-roll band and then watch an outdoor movie. Thank you to Jim McKeag and Eric Kuczarsk of Worcester Film Works.

The weekend after, the Worcester Asian Festival took place at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church, featuring dancers from Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines, India, Laotia, Japan, Korea, China, Nepal, Thailand and Bhutan. Thank you to Sahdev Passey, Thuha Le, Oanh Nguyen and the rest of the folks at the Southeast Asian Coalition.

I also attended the African-American Juneteenth celebration at Institute Park. thank you to organizers Parlee Jones of Abby's House and Keesha LaTulippe of the Henry Lee Willis Center as well as to WPI for the park enhancements. And I went to Byblos Restaurant & Lounge. Thank you to Salim Lahoud for a soul experience inside the beautifully restored Union Station, (Also at Salim's place every third Thursday is Poetry Cove, hosted by Efua Dufu).

Thank you to Allen Fletcher of the now-defunct Union Station Alliance, Congressman Jim McGovern and the Worcester Redevelopment Authority for both the Union Station renovation and the new, fantastic streetscape enhancements in the Canal District. Thanks also go to Lieutenant Governor Tim Murray, Jim McGovern (again) as well as to John Giangregorio, Seth Derderian and Allison Alaimo of the Canal District Alliance for the District's vibrant spirit. Recently, New Orleans-style food came to the Canal District, when Gumbo opened on Water Street. Check out the backroom cave, if you’re suffering from heat or light exhaustion.

The next weekend, I went to a new, stylish Asian restaurant, 7 Nana on Shrewsbury Street. Thank you to owners John Batista and Rob Franco for restoring the former Buick dealership and adjacent building, across Shrewsbury Street from the 111 Chophouse and Via Italian TableIA A big thank you to owners Robb and Madeleine Ahlquist for those two restaurants plus Tthe Sole Proprietor, their one other restaurant on Highland Street. The Sole is so good that it caused Legal Seafood to flee the city because it couldn’t compete with the Ahlquist’ delicious food.

Good place for a social

I started this voyage out and about town from where I live at Bancroft Commons on Franklin Street. Thank you to John McGrail and the rest of the team at the Mayo Group, which developed that project. Thank you as well to the Mayo Group and Paul Morano and Timothy McGourthy of the City of Worcester for developing the nearby Portland Street Lofts. I also considered living in the Canal Lofts, a restored building on Water Street that used to house Chevalier Furniture. Thanks also go to Winn Companies for developing that project.

After eating Middle Eastern food at the recently upgraded Bay State Bakery on Water Street - thank you to owner Ayman Jaber - I went to Third Thursday at the Worcester Art Museum on Salisbury Street - thank you to WAM’s Brigit Straehle. There, I heard Jubilee Gardens, who play once a month at Sahara Restaurant on Highland Street. Thank you to Sahara owner Farid Aoude for a good place to have a social life for those who are no longer in their 20s but too young to feel comfortable with an older crowd often found at Maxwell Silverman’s Toolhouse at Lincoln Square.

Thank you to owner Gus Giordano for both Maxwell Silverman’s and Luciano’s Restaurant in Union Station. Thanks to the John family for the mixed-aged crowd at The Boynton Restaurant & Spirits on Highland Street. And thanks to Irish immigrants Brendon and Claire O’Connor, who so long ago brought us Worcester’s other great pub, O’Connors Restaurant & Barand on West Boylston Street, that we forget they weren’t born and raised in Worcester.

Earlier that same week, I ate terrific food at the monthly Flamenco Night at Bocados Tapas Wine Bar on Winter Street, in the Canal District, and had the greatest guacamole ever at Mezcal Tequila Cantina on Shrewsbury Street. Thank you to owners Mike Covino and Mike LaRusso at the Niche Hospitality Group.

The guacamole at Plaza Aztecas on Lincoln Street can’t compete with Mezcal. But at both Plaza Aztecas and Cantina Bar & Grill on Main Street, you can dance to Latina music on Friday and Saturday nights. Thank you to Grace Carvajal, who owns Cantina.

For even more Latino music and food, you can attend the Latin American Festival, held every August behind or in front of City Hall in downtown Worcester. thank you to organizer Dolly Vasquez and her team at Centro Las Americas. Thank you as well to Allen Fletcher and the Fletcher Foundation, which helps to fund the Festival.

Multiple times, I have also attended the Live At Sunset weekly summer music series at the EcoTarium on Harrington Way. There, I’ve heard great rhythm and blues as well as zydeco music from New Orleans.

Weeks earlier, I attended the wonderfully famous St. Spyridon Grecian Festival at Spyridon Greek Orthodox Cathedral on Russell Street, near Elm Park. Thank you to organizers Sideris Angelou, Chris Liazos, former owner of The Webster House, Christina Andrianopoulos and Worcester’s entire Greek community. This bi-yearly festival alternates with the Albanian Festival, held at the nearby St. Mary’s Assumption Albanian Orthodox Church on Salisbury Street.

I also heard jazz that Thursday night at the high-end Ceres Bistro, located at the Beechwood Hotel on Plantation Street. Thank you to owner Charles Birbara, chanteuse Niki Luparelli & the Gold Diggers and, again, the Niche Hospitality Group, which manages Ceres Bistro. And I attended the Summer Stolztice party at Worcester Fitness on Grove Street. Thank you Hank Stolz and Sherman Whitman of WCRN 830 AM News & Talkradio for organizing the event. 

Afterwards, Hank and Patty Stolz and I went to Vincent’s Bar on Suffolk Street which is great, but no more so than Ralph’s Rock Diner on Grove Street and especially Nick’s Bar & Restaurant on Millbury Street. Thank you owner Vincent Hemmeter and manager Nicole Watson of Vincent’s Bar, who help define cool in Worcester. As do singer Helen Beaumont and singer/songwriter Bob Jordan, who played a Bob Dylan tribute at Beatnik’s on Park Avenue, and thanks to owner Niki Brouillette and her former husband and good friend, Josh Dolittle.

On the Fourth of July, the Massachusetts Worcester Symphony Orchestra performed at Cristoforo Colombo Park (a.k.a. East Park) on Shrewsbury Street. Thank you Paul Levenson of the Mass. Symphony Orchestra, and thank you to Bob Moscoffian for having his New England Summer Nationals car extravaganza roar into town again at Green Hill Park.

Especially, thank you to Erin Williams of the Worcester Cultural Coalition and Ellen Dunlap of American Antiquarian Society for creating and adding to the Coalition. And thanks to Troy Thompson of Social Web for keeping us informed of what’s going on year around in Worcester.

Every Friday during the summer at lunchtime, you can attend the free Out To Lunch Summer Concert Series on Worcester Common, behind City Hall. Thanks again to Erin Williams, City Manager Mike O’Brien, and concert hosts Sherman Whitman and Hank Stolz of WCRN 830 AM.

Not the same as 26 years ago

Unbelievably, all of this happened in Worcester only during the late spring and early summer of 2012. This is not the same Worcester that I moved to, 26 years ago.

Late that same summer, I bought a bike at Barney’s Bicycle on Chandler Street (after also looking at Bicycle Alley at Webster Square), to ride in the city and on the Route 146 Blackstone River Bikeway. Thank you again to Congressman Jim McGovern for securing federal funding for the bikeway.

After joining a running club at the YMCA Central Community Branch on Main Street, to break up my usual routine of doing Zumba at World Gym on Neponset Street, I am soon going to start tango lessons at both the Y and Poise, Style & Motion at Webster Square. (I’m doing this only because I struggled with salsa in spite of the best efforts of Salsa Storm on Harrison Street, to which my Anglo spirit , or non-spirit, didn’t respond.) Thank you to Poise, Style & Motion’s Ray Gonzalez, Annette Montanez and Jackie Alvarado, my dance instructor.

Just outside the city limits, don’t forget about the great music and picturesque settings of Tower Hill Botanical Garden in Boylston. There’s also the Summer Concert Series at Indian Ranchmusic in Webster -- where you can learn how to pronounce “Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg,” the original name of Webster Lake. And there’s the Worcester Chamber Music Society Summer Concert Series at Anna Maria College in Paxton.

Until a few years ago, for those who liked a quieter style of engagement, there was Stanley Kunitz, a Worcester native and former Poet Laureate of the United States, He had a reading every Sunday night at his childhood home on Woodford Street, until he died in 2006.

You can also hear Worcester’s original poetry slam at WCUW 91.3 FM on Main Street, near Clark University, thanks to General Manager Troy Tyree and the WCUW Board of Directors. And thanks to co-host Alex Charalambides for the Dirty Gerund poetry slam at Ralph’s Rock Diner.

And thank you to Bill and Suey MacMillian for beginning the Worcester Poetry Slam Team. Thanks also go to Bill for all the cool events, from fencing to riding replicas of medieval horses, at the Higgins Armory Museum on Barber Avenue.

If you like summer Shakespeare, you’d now need to travel only a few miles south of Worcester. Mel Cobb (a.k.a. Othello) has moved his Worcester Shakespeare Company from Worcester’s own Green Hill Park to the Mill at Whitinsville in Northbridge.

Becoming a pretty good place

During the winter months in Worcester, there are plenty of ways to cure yourself of cabin fever. Clark University on Main Street, the College of the Holy Cross on College Hill, the Worcester Regional Chamber of Commerce and the Worcester Economic Club all bring great speakers to our city.

Lastly, I‘m now going to eat at Sweet T Southern Kitchen on Blackstone River Road, in the newly restored Quinsigamond Village area. It’s located behind the new Walmart on Tobias Boland Way, named after Irish pioneer Tobias Boland.

Worcester is becoming a pretty good place to live, work, play and raise a family. One more large step, and we’ll become a great place to raise an adult, not just a child.

Every Friday at noon during the summer of 2012, hundreds of people gathered on Worcester Common, behind City Hall,  for the Out to Lunch Summer Concert Series.

Here are great links, to find out what’s going on in and around Worcester: 

• InCity Times (thanks to Publisher Rosalie Tirella)
• Pulse Magazine (thanks to Publisher Paul Giorgio)
• Social Web (thanks to Developer Troy Thompson)
• Telegram & Gazette (thanks to Publisher Bruce Gaultney)
• Vocero Hispano (thanks to Publisher Sergio Rivera)
• Worcester Cultural Coalition (thanks yet again to Chief Cultural Officer Erin Williams) 
• Worcester Business Journal (thanks to Publisher Peter Stanton) 
• Worcester Magazine (thanks to Publisher Kathy Real)

The Color Barrier

This past weekend I visited the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee.

The Lorraine Hotel is the place where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968. Martin Luther King had come to Memphis to lead a march of sanitation workers protesting against low wages and working conditions. All the sanitations workers were people of color- all were African American.

Dr. King, who was a minister, was shot in the neck as he stood on the hotel balcony. He was shot by a white man. Dr. King, unlike Malcolm X, who competed with him for leadership of the civil rights movement, stood for non-violence, peaceful civil disobedience, and integration with the mainstream white developed culture that predominates in the United States.

When I was at the adjacent National Civil Rights Museum, next to the Lorraine Hotel, a hotel that just a few short years earlier had ignored the segregation laws of Tennessee to allow blacks to stay there, I looked at the exhibits showing the struggle of black people in the U.S. to obtain civil rights and equality with whites.

I was born in 1958. My earliest childhood memory is the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. I remember being sent home from school. I remember the whole nation, every American, watching the funeral of the President of the United States- the elected leader of our people; us Americans.

I also remember the night Martin Luther King was assassinated. It was 10 years later. That night, for the second time, there were riots in the street in the city I am from, Peekskill, New York. The windows in my father’s clothing store were broken. The black woman who worked for my family and who helped raise me, Mrs. Hull, told my parents that if our family felt threatened in our home, we could come stay with her and her family, that they would ensure our safety. But the riots, as usual, never made it to the suburbs, we were safe. It was the downtown, were black people lived that was in peril, that’s where it was dangerous- as it always could be.

The museum’s exhibits to me were not historical in the sense of reading about someone else’s history, from some distant time. I was delving into my own personal history. It was like psychotherapy. I was acknowledging that the person who I am, what I live for, what I believe, the job I chose, who I married, what my children look like and believe- all came from Dr. Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement and their call for justice, equality, decency and humanity.

I taught in Harlem because of Dr. Martin Luther King and the influence of the civil rights movement.

I lived in Harlem because of Dr. Martin Luther King.

I traveled through Africa for one year because of Dr. Martin Luther King.

I married a woman of color because of Dr. Martin Luther King.

What my children look like is due to the influence Dr. Martin Luther King.

I went to law school because of Dr. Martin Luther King.

I became an immigration lawyer because of Dr. Martin Luther King.

I am on the radio, TV, and the Web because of Dr. Martin Luther King

I am very dissatisfied with my life because I could not make any contribution to the world nearly as worthy as Dr. Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement.

I then thought that my children, or perhaps anyone born after 1965, could never understand how history and one’s own life march on together, how growing up and sharing consciousness with a historical period could occur. My personal consciousness and social consciousness of what transpired all around me were one. No one born into the more stable historical period that followed could ever understand how history and yourself can share a day- in fact many days, together; how one actually lives and breathes the history going on all around them. Most people don’t feel this truth; that the onward march of history includes all of our individual lives- that we are all a part of history.

Often people today do not feel the idealism and the attempt to kill that idealism that we felt. We saw an unjust world, we believed, like Martin Luther King Jr, that black and white people were deciding for or against equality and fairness, believing that we must make the world right. We spent, or at least I spent, the rest of my life believing that idealism and justice (along with the love of family) are the only things worth pursuing and living for, the only things that are eternal.

I also realized why I love government. In spite of all the failed attempts at social engineering to help poor black people that have unfortunately proved a failure, a failure of both government and the people themselves, it was the government, and specifically the federal government- certainly not the states- that fought for and brought equality and justice to the races and to poor people. For this reason I will always believe in the federal government of the United States of America, in a way younger people and people of less good-will may never understand.

Teacher Teacher on the Wall, Who is the fairest of them all?

Close your eyes and think for a minute about the teachers you’ve had in your life who affected you profoundly, perhaps even changed the direction of your life?

Brings a lovely smile to your face….doesn’t it?

Now with your eyes open, think of all the teachers in your life who you have spent many hours with; probably more hours than anyone else in your life who you’re not related to, and how little effect they've had upon you?

Both a few great teachers and many mediocre teachers are part of the reality and the problem of education in America today.

The lack of great teachers still falls far short of the lack of sufficiently motivated students and parents as the biggest problem with education in the US today, but improved teachers would help considerably. 

We have a dearth of great teachers. Research shows that 93% of our top students say they don’t think of teaching as a career choice. Of the 7% that do go into teaching, half leave within the first five years. 

College teaching programs are apparently attracting students from the bottom twenty percent to bottom third of their academic class, depending upon who you believe. Suffice if to say highly motivated students are not choosing teaching as a career. 

Minorities are also not going into teaching. Male Hispanic and African American teachers are each only 1.7% of the teachers in the US. Much higher percentages of these groups are in jail than are teachers. 

Worcester Public School students are 38% Hispanic and 14% African-American. Yet the percentage of teachers in Worcester is only 5.5% Hispanic and 3.6% African-American. 

There is also a lack of teachers for English language learners, special education, science and math. 20% of teachers in urban areas quit every year. Half of all teachers quit before their fifth year. 

One wonders why an overwhelming number of students who have been through our school systems do not chose teaching as a career. Is it because teaching 20-30 students with varying degrees of motivation is just too hard? Or is it that the schooling experience was so dulling to them when they were students that no one can bear the thought of voluntarily being in it for any more years?

Why do the best and brightest not go into teaching? What is it about the environment within schools which encourages so many teachers to quit their profession? How do we recruit, reward and retain great teachers?

We generally know why people want to become teachers: number one, love of children; number two, love of the subject matter they teach. Most teachers do think of teaching as a calling.

Teachers are a vital part of the education system. We also need to change the American education system if America is to succeed. To improve the lives of the high percentage of Americans caught in our current economic downward spiral, a decline that unfortunately may not be temporary, we need to find a way to recruit and retain teachers who can inspire and instruct students in the education and training they need. 

Gone is the era where a high school degree and hard work with one’s hands (and sometimes back) can bring one’s family security and prosperity. It now all comes down to education and training. If one is not sufficiently educated, one will not generally live a life of economic opportunity. Three million job postings in the US are unfilled because people lack the qualifications for those jobs. Out of 34 countries ranked by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the U.S. ranked 14^th in reading, 17^th in science, and 25^th in math.

An increase in teacher salaries, coupled with serious teacher evaluation and review, along with the end of tenure and promotion by seniority, are all required. The average starting salary for a starting teacher nationally is $39,000; the average salary is $67,000. In Worcester, the average teaching salary, according to Worcester Public Schools, is approximately at $71,153.  Financially rewarding teachers by performance instead of by the level of higher education degree they achieve would directly benefit students instead of the colleges that offer the courses.

For America to prosper we must improve our educational system. Getting the best people possible to go into teaching is an important component. Getting more of us inspired to learn has never been more vital for our students, teachers, parents, and country.  

Worcester's Beauty Is On The Inside

A look around Worcester’s budding architectural style would make you believe you’re in a Midwestern city.

City Square, Mechanics Tower, the old Flagship Bank which is now People’s United Bank, as well as the new Unum building going up, all have a solid, clean look, but don’t have much going on in the way of creative styling or ornamentation. From the outside, the same could be said of the Hanover Theater or the old Thom McCan Building on Millbrook Street, which is now called the Worcester Business Center.

These buildings stand in stark contrast to the truly riveting beauty of Union Station and City Hall, especially the staircase in front of City Hall, which resembles a pair of welcoming arms. The 70’s glass Shawmut Tower, now Sovereign Tower, is also a stylish thing of beauty due to the reflecting glass that it utilized. Some of Massachusetts College Pharmacy and Health Science buildings retain enough of their old buildings history to breathe some life into their modern exteriors.

The new buildings at UMass are this same modern, non-discript architectural style. An interesting upgrade from this corporate-clean style is the same kind of building structures, but built with brick, as was used in the new courthouse on Main Street, some of the Gateway Park buildings, the new state mental health hospital, and the science building at Worcester State University.

Yet none of these buildings compare on the outside to the older buildings they replaced, such as the old Worcester State Hospital or the old Courthouse further down on Main Street at Lincoln Square.

It’s the interiors, however, of some of the new or renovated buildings that are breathtakingly beautiful. The interior of Union Station is the most beautiful interior space in Worcester, the new Courthouse on Main Street’s interior shows the astounding aesthetic beauty of wasted space, looking like a place where the ancient pharos of Egypt could be approached or even buried in a modern day pyramid. Hanover Theater’s interior is so exquisitely tasteful as to be enchanting, as is Tuckerman Hall on a smaller, quieter scale.

Perhaps Worcester has reverted to pre-Gothic, Christian Romanesque-style thinking, which tried to make a statement about human existence through its architectural choices: in their case with small, yet overwhelmingly vast, mosaic depictions of old and new testament scenes completely covering the interior of churches – like at St. Mark’s in Venice, Raveena and Sicily, Italy;

Saying through their buildings: that true, meaningful and enduring beauty is on the inside.

As we further build and develop Worcester’s new buildings, let’s not forget that we should reflect that we are a 290 year old place of continuous development, not that we began our existence this decade.

The Supreme Court has a lot on its Plate

The Constitutionality of the Health Care law is before the Supreme Court today.

Today is a day –like few others –where law and belief will merge to define who we are as a people –as Americans.

The extension of health care to roughly 32 million people – our fellow countrymen and women –raises the question of how we define ourselves as human beings – what existence means to us, what life requires of us or grants us, what our inalienable rights are and are not, and what the U.S. Constitution grants the federal government power to regulate or require of us.

The question to be answered by the Supreme Court is not, however, ultimately and exclusively one of right and wrong, morality or justice. It is instead: whether the U.S. Constitution gives the right to regulate the health care of individuals to the federal government or whether this right is given by the Constitution to individual states.

Philosophically, the issue as addressed by Congress and the President when they passed the health care law was: Is our individual autonomy and personal liberty – the ability to be free from an obligation to other Americans – stronger and more important under the Constitution –even sacrosanct – than the federal government’s ability under the Constitution to make laws for our general welfare. Underpinning the interpretation of the Constitution’s requirements, by the nine Supreme Court Justices, five Republican nominated and four Democratic, are the sometimes conflicting principles of responsibility and freedom. When does one have a responsibility to others, when only to oneself ?

Let’s first acknowledge the courts limited role in answering this question. Courts don’t make laws directly, only indirectly, by interpreting what the legislative and executive branches, and the federal or state constitutions mean. Yet, matters of interpretation are seldom absolutely clear. One’s subjective experience, personal, philosophical and political orientation often contributes to one’s interpretation, as very few difficult cases can be decided solely by logical analysis alone. Where one starts the analysis, or weights a case’s significant factors, is infused with one’s own personal experience. Further, what latitude or judicial restraint the Supreme Court must exercise, given that a democratically elected Congress passed the health care law with solid majorities and a democratically elected President of the United States signed the bill into law, is something the Court must consider.

Broadly defined, the questions are: Is the health care law’s requirement to force individuals to purchase insurance or fine them if they don’t an allowable exercise of federal authority? Does the Constitution give the federal government the same right as state governments to make laws for the general welfare of the people? As it is often put metaphorically, can the Federal government make you buy broccoli because broccoli is good for you, or do only states have the right to make you buy broccoli just because it’s good for you?

The ultimate legal question is: Does the law’s mandate that we all have to purchase health care – with taxpayer subsidy if we cannot afford the price –fall under an enumerated clause in the U.S Constitution –since the Constitution –unlike individual states’ rights –does not have a general welfare provision to allow the Federal government to improve people’s general welfare whenever and however the Federal government wants to define “general welfare”? Secondly, does the Constitution’s commerce clause regulating interstate commerce or general taxation provisions provide a basis for the federal government to regulate health care?

Democrats generally reason this way: because all of us experience health as an issue, and because health care and how each of us pay or don’t pay for our own health care affects each other and 17 percent of the national economy, our own individual health care necessarily affects interstate commerce and is governed by the Constitution’s commerce clause or taxation provisions.

Requiring one to buy insurance as a young healthy person, for instance, makes the pool of insurance payers larger, making insurance affordable for someone with diabetes or heart disease. The requirement of forcing one to obtain health insurance for the good of expanding the pool of insurance payers, is just like the obligation to pay taxes, where part of the money will fund a service you may never use, like the “Head Start” early childhood program for instance. Not buying broccoli doesn’t affect others, not having health insurance and having other people pay for your health care when you become sick does affect others nationwide. Further, people not buying health insurance, unlike broccoli, makes the cost of health care unaffordable and thus unavailable to others. Expanding the pool of insured to include those not too sick or sick at all is the only way to keep the premiums down and affordable to others– absent government set price controls or government-run nationalized health care.

It should also be remembered that if the government-run insurance option, that was initially proposed by the Democrats stayed in the bill that eventually passed, people could have chosen to insure themselves by choosing a Medicare like government option – making the individual mandate to purchase private insurance not as necessary. But the Republicans uniformly did not want a government option. Years ago, Republicans wanted an individual mandate to make people buy private insurance instead of government insurance, that was before President Obama and the Democrats wanted it. Then they didn’t want it anymore. Instead, they wanted to defeat President Obama and Democrats generally.

Further, the government is not making you eat broccoli or have any particularly medical procedure done, it is only making you buy it. When we American’s stop viewing the value of our money as being very similar to the value of ourselves as human beings – we will determine sharing more of our wealth and money for the good of others and our society does not diminish us, it enhances us. Making one pay for health insurance is not the same as making one accept a medical treatment –it is only money –it is not your or my own dignity that the government is forcing you to sacrifice.

Being required to purchase health insurance, with a subsidy if one’s income is insufficient, so that insurance can be more affordable for all of us, is like paying taxes generally for things we don’t agree with, which we all must do. It’s a sacrifice –but a necessary sacrifice to live in a large, organized society that addresses many disparate needs.

Oh yeah, today’s Supreme Court decision might also decide who is the next President for our country.

Today is quite a day.

This is Randy Feldman on WCRN’s Midday Report.