Stepping sanely into a new year

   We walk upright. We have a foot up.

   At least that's how it looks on paper.

   In practice, I'm alarmed to report that we act like a bunch of gambusia. And they breathe through gills.

  Also known as mosquito fish, gambusia have a lifespan of two years. A hiccup. No problem for them; they are so busy breeding they pretty much don't care.

  Breeding aside, we do other things to pass the time. Unfortunately, many of those things don't point toward the sumptuous lifespans advertised for those who are upright, have opposing thumbs and expansive cranial regions.

  Consider, for one, the problem with the habitual wearing of ultra-high pumps – high heels. Podiatrists point to crippling conditions, from neuroma (painful thickening of toe joints), to capsulitis (inflamed feet), to hammer toe (what happens when toes are jammed for too long into a too-confining space).

  For these very reasons, The Washington Post reports $3.5 billion is spent each year on women's foot surgeries.

   No need to gang up on the ladies. As a new year begins, most of us examine habits that would make it appear we are racing those tiny, hyper-sexed fish to death's door.

  Those range from the low-hanging fruit of FDA admonitions and Breathalyzer blows, to the fudge rolls around our bellies.

    Probably no stronger evidence exists of a collective death wish than the growing tendency of drivers to obey their smart phones rather than the rules or contours of the road.

   Similarly, we have birthed a generation of pedestrians who can't put one foot in front of the other – that is, unless their smart phones instruct them.  For those people, a collective New Year's resolution: Look up. Look around. Not everyone is going to be looking out for you.

  We seem sentenced to live life faster and faster, with ever more useless information each day. What's the fate of your favorite TV duck- call philosopher, I ask? Oh, and by the way, do you know your neighbors' names?

  This thought leads to some big-picture concerns as the Earth completes another solar revolution.

  I appreciate the sanity implied in Pope Francis' statements that the veneration of profit, held up by our society as the only universal good, isn't so good.

    Some of that message has been contained in President Obama's dogged initiative to conserve energy and find alternatives to Earth-depleting, Earth-spoiling kinds of energy, profitable though their addiction may be.

  The twin imperatives of a profit-driven system are (1) that growth is always good, and (2) bigger is always better. Sorry, folks. That's not so much a philosophy as a pathology.

   As Thom Hartmann writes about the once-great Mesopotamian empire in The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, there's another word for the pathology of hyper consumption: conquest.    

     From commoners to kings, the people of ancient Mesopotamia thought their way of life was superior to all others, writes Hartmann. "But although things looked good for a time, they didn't realize it wasn't sustainable: It only worked as long as they had other people's lands to conquer."

    Of course, conquest takes many forms, whether it applies to multi-national corporations or voracious and militarized nation states. The driving principle in all such cases is one of acquiring power and wealth at others' expense, and at the cost of precious and finite resources. Sometimes that spells war.

    In 2014, let us come to understand that the highest order for each of us is to do that which is sustainable and real.

    To that end, let us find alternatives to habits which endanger us, hurt or diminish others, or make our toes hate us.

   Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

2013: When the conversation changed

  It was a bad year for the president, some would say his worst.

  The nation was divided to the breaking point. It seemed nothing went right for him in 1862.

    And yet, Abraham Lincoln, his proxies being pummeled on the battlefield, rose above it to bring about a fundamental change regarding a most basic human need.

   In Lincoln's case, that need was education. That year he signed the Morrill Act, transforming this from a nation with a permanent have-not class to one in which all could aspire to higher education.

   Reading about what many historians consider Lincoln's worst year, I thought about 2013. Even his friends say it couldn't have been worse for Barack Obama. We know what his critics say.

  However, they don't write history.

  History will show that 2013 was when America's conversation about health care changed. The nation started the excruciating, jarring shift from the status quo —  with a permanent have-not class — to something better.

  Yes, we know Congress had that conversation in 2009 and 2010, passing the Affordable Care Act. But it wasn't until 2013, with the individual mandate kicking in, that the rest of us had that talk.

  Whatever is being said now, even if obscenity-laced, is good for the country, because it's about what the nation needs.

  Want to vent about healthcare.gov? Good. The more outrage, the more quickly its problems will be addressed.

  Want to talk about the fact that some states will deprive millions of Medicaid available in other states? Good. Maybe those millions will vote.

   Want to say the president misled about unintended loss of coverage for many? OK. Say it. Say, "He lied," if you wish. But understand: The ACA is in place for people who lose their coverage. Before 2013, millions lost their insurance each year, with nowhere to turn.

     Back to 1862 and the Morrill Act, which created land-grant colleges in the states: It didn't apply to the Confederacy, which declared it didn't belong to America anymore. After peace reigned, that changed and the former breakaway states benefited as well.

    Right now, in similar fashion, the potential of the ACA is blunted in red-state America, not just on Medicaid expansion, but with states having refused to set up their own health care exchanges to help their citizens shop for coverage.

    But I have two examples from such states that illustrate the ACA is working even in hostile environs.

    Take a woman in Texas who used healthcare.gov to drop her individual health insurer (with premiums slated to go up 27 percent), and ended up with coverage at half of the projected cost, with a lower deductible.

     Easy? No. "It took several tries, and I had help." Now she knows how it works. She knows that if the plan she just purchased is insufficient or gets too costly, she can shop around with many more options than before. To her, "It's the American way."

    Meanwhile, a woman in Florida whose pre-existing condition — breast cancer — made coverage crippling, reported that because of the ACA her premiums went down and and her deductible will be cut by three-fourths.

   "For those who disparage Obamacare," she wrote in a letter to the editor, "do some research and stop believing the naysayers who have insurance and are blessed with good health."

     Sticker shock ahead for some Americans? Absolutely. Disruption of coverage? We've seen it.

     But 1 million Americans have signed up at this point, meaning there's no turning back.

     The conversation has changed. Whereas once America was resolved to the forever-inequitable status quo, it is figuring out how to address a new, fairer, reality.

     And history will show that it happened in Barack Obama's worst year.

    Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Yes, Virginia, Santa Claus is black, and . . .

   What would you expect from this corner but a spirited defense of Megyn Kelly?

   Aside from being blonde, she is paid to convey truth per memo from Fox News management. So when declaring as "verifiable fact" the racial makeup of Santa (and Jesus!) to be white, like Fox News management., she is simply securing her job. Get off her case.

   The person who has no defense: that teacher in Rio Rancho, N.M., who told a dark-skinned student the same thing:

   Get real, kid; Santa Claus doesn't come in your color.

    As for Kelly: Too much attention has been directed at the baselessness of her claim. Truthfulness is a high bar her employer has never deigned to ascend. Why demand it now?

   It's pointless to observe, as Jon Stewart did, that the original St. Nicholas was most likely a Turk, making him closer in appearance to TNT's Charles Barkley than Fox News' agent of mirth Karl Rove.

   But those are facts. And, well, consider the news source.

   What I cannot imagine is a teacher in New Mexico saying Santa is an Anglo.

   Early in my career I ran a newsroom in a lovely place called the San Luis Valley. Though titularly in Southern Colorado, culturally it is an annex of New Mexico. And so it was that the Santa figure to whom my first son gurgled his first-ever Christmas wishes was not Megyn Kelly-tinted.

    Pancho Claus, they called him. His white beard hung low, betraying a hint of black scrabble. His belly was not so round. But he was jolly and elf-like, and brown-skinned. 

   It is sad to scandalous that a teacher in a richly diverse environment such as New Mexico would say what that one did.

   Yes, sad; but as an editor once told a young Virginia O'Hanlon in an editorial in the New York Sun, some people "think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds."

   The most inspiring vision of Santa I've ever seen was in a mall in Waco, Texas. A friend named Melvin Rueffer, who is deaf, clad himself in red suit and white beard for just a few minutes each holiday season. For a specially arranged audience, he subbed for a hearing Santa. Then he and a small procession of deaf children communicated, by hand, the little ones' Christmas wishes heard in sign.

    I've seen a plus-sized woman show up at  a school pageant as Santa. I've seen a 12-year-old (big for his age) in the same role. No one assembled a panel on Fox News to say, "That's not factually correct," or to say, "See? The war on Kris Kringle continues."

    Yes, Virginia, Santa is black. Yes, Virginia, Santa is brown. Santa has slanted eyes. Santa is Cuban. Santa is Filipino. Santa speaks Vietnamese and Cajun.

    (Sorry to alarm anyone, but just like those pernicious ballots that some Fox News viewers believe to be an abomination, Santa is multilingual.)

     Santa bats right, throws left. Santa bats left, throws right. He is a machine worker. He is an attorney. Santa works the docks and the fields, the night shift, the morning shift. He is in the union and in management. Santa is on unemployment. In too many cases, Santa's unemployment has expired.

    Santa is a he. Santa is a she. Santa is a she who used to be a he, and vice versa. 

    Santa is you, me, us. That's what makes Santa such a great concept.

    Santa wasn't invented by Coca Cola. Santa wasn't born on 34th Street. As that sage editorial writer once wrote back to that little girl, Santa is wherever "the heart of childhood" beats.

   And that is as "fact"-based as this debate needs to be.

   Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.