America, Welcome to Socialism!

Reprinted from The Faster Times — This is a bit old now, from March 24, a few days after Obama’s health care reform passed the Congress.  But I just like to show all my socialism love here in Daddyland.

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If you have doubts about the new health care legislation, just relax.  Yes, just like Joe Biden said, “This is a big f—- deal.”  But you are going to love socialism!

I live in Sweden, which is not actually a socialist country, but, for the sake of my good friends in the tea parties, we can call it socialist.  I mean, c’mon, I am on nine months of paid parental leave.  My kid gets subsidized child care.  I am taxed at one of the highest rates in the world.

Then there is the health care.  Oh, the health care.

Actually, I hardly ever think about the health care here.

And that is the point.  I hardly ever think about the health care (and my family is not lacking medical issues).  It is just there.  I can fuss with choice and private doctors if I choose.  Or I can go the old school neighborhood clinic route.

Pssst, here is the secret.  Even with all the taxes, my family still does fine.  We have more stuff than we want.  You should see all the yachts around Stockholm.  And cars are outrageously expensive, but everyone has one! (except me)

You could say I am addicted to socialism.

Prominent conservative and former Bush advisor David Frum even more or less says that Americans will soon be addicted, in this widely quoted “Waterloo” piece for CNN:

More relevantly: Do Republicans write a one-sentence bill declaring that the whole thing is repealed? Will they vote to reopen the “doughnut” hole for prescription drugs for seniors? To allow health insurers to deny coverage to people with pre-existing conditions? To kick millions of people off Medicaid?

It’s unimaginable, impossible.

Safety nets are good.  People you know need the safety net.  America was built on community as much as any pull up your bootstrap individualism. I’d love to see how many tea party people will turn down Medicare when they hit 65.

I know the Republicans are still frothing about socialism and Obamacare and all that.  This will go on for a good while.  More from Frum:

I’ve been on a soapbox for months now about the harm that our overheated talk is doing to us. Yes, it mobilizes supporters — but by mobilizing them with hysterical accusations and pseudo-information, overheated talk has made it impossible for representatives to represent and elected leaders to lead.

Now the overheated talk is about to get worse. Over the past 48 hours, I’ve heard conservatives compare the House bill to the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 — a decisive step on the path to the Civil War. Conservatives have whipped themselves into spasms of outrage and despair that block all strategic thinking.

Eric Zorn at the Chicago Tribune also compiled some real winning quotes from Republicans on the socialist menace.

As for me, I’ll be waiting out the end of winter up here in the great socialist north, not listening to crazy Republican talk and not thinking about health care.

And if you were wondering, despite the recession, Sweden is doing just fine economically, thank you, with the world’s fourth most competitive economy and low debt levels and budget deficits.  Plus all that socialist cradle to grave welfare stuff.

Now take a deep breath, and repeat after me, “Socialism is not evil.  Socialism is not evil …”

health care reform: it’s about community, stupid

My latest HuffPo piece …

“About 80 percent of Americans are happy with their health insurance,” I said to my Swedish wife over coffee, the baby squealing with glee as his sister danced around him. “So, you see, it can be a hard sell to actually create change.”

I was proud. This was it, the reasonable explanation for Americans’ completely unreasonable failure to fight for health care reform. People say they like the President. They say they want health care reform. They even say they support the public option. But they seem willing to let the wacko minority scare them with paranoid brooding and crazy talk.

Maybe this is a weakness of the internet passion that got Obama elected – it ran wide but not deep. Now no one will follow him into a tough spot.

But this explanation was better. Surely my wife would understand that such a great majority would have trouble sacrificing for a minority (20 percent of the US population is what, only 60 million people? Just the population of Italy … no biggie.)

She stared at me.

“So that 20 percent includes all the people uninsured?”

“Probably. Who would be happy being uninsured?”

She turned back to cracking her hard-boiled egg. Not another word.

Here in Sweden, forsaking your neighbor is the unforgivable sin. Even if you let the state do the caring, even if you never smile at them, you do not forsake them. It is part of a wider northern European sense of consensus and community, one that leads to the world’s leading welfare states, where no child would ever be left without medical care.

This is clearly not the case in the good old U S of A, according to The Gaggle over at Newsweek:

But, as pollster Bill McInturff, who along with Peter Hart conducted the most recent NBC/ Wall Street Journal poll, told reporters in a round table discussion last week, most Americans are convinced that covering the uninsured will require some sort of sacrifice on their behalf, and most people simply aren’t prepared to give up anything to ensure that everyone has access.

A couple weeks ago, I read a Swedish newspaper story about a town hall meeting. It ended with a guy turning to a woman and asking, “Why should I pay taxes for your daughter?” Standard stuff at your local Little League field, I am sure. Taxes bad. We are becoming Russia. Blah, blah, blah.

I can’t wait to see these people turn down socialized Medicaid when they hit 65. Somehow, I think they will swallow their pride and take my tax dollars.

Suckers.

But here is my answer to that tax question.

You pay taxes because communities, and on a larger level, societies, benefit when they care for their members basic needs. It is why we have socialized schools and socialized national defense and socialized pensions.

And America is as much about community as any think tank-produced creed of craven capitalist individualism. Pick an era, any era. You got the Pilgrims and the Continental Army huddled together to endure hard winters. You got settlers (or invaders, if you like) bound together on wagon trains through deserts and attacks.

The American tradition of community is about the government lending a helping hand in the Depression and the nation sacrificing almost everything in the depths of World War II. It is about the spirit of the 1960s, maybe America’s greatest moment of communal expression, if not action. Just because the baby boomers lost their momentum and nerve does not taint that spirit.

We do better when we take care of our brother. It is both a practical and moral imperative, not to mention an economic one.

Obama is clearly not a street fighter, at least on this topic, or he is playing too subtle a game for me to understand. I hope he comes out with unexpected clarity and strength in his address to Congress.

He needs to fire up the crowd. For there are monied special interests spreading lies, and more people believe them every day, and the people who are supposed to fight for health care reform (yes, I mean you) are just standing by.

If you are an Obama supporter, you have to do more than agree that Obama is groovy and feel good about your vote. You need to step up and insist on this reform. You need to convince your neighbor, argue with the guy at the Little League field.

We cannot leave our fellow citizens behind. We can never forget that America is built on a community coming together to grant its members freedom, on a nation of immigrants coming together to provide a foundation for liberty.

But you cannot have the liberty without the foundation, and the foundation will not hold unless we reform our health care mess.

reading American books to my American daughter

In my sudden almost nationalistic quest to ensure that my daughter is culturally American, I am making her pretend she is in a town hall session and then scream things like, “This is not the America I grew up in!” and “The public option means death panels!”

Or not.

But I have had second thoughts on my approach to something far more serious than health care reform – bedtime stories. I have been groovily multicultural so far. We read some Dr. Seuss, we read some book in three languages about a Somali village, I translate a Swedish book. The books about Somali villages and Islamic art get old, to be honest, though I keep plugging away because the libraries are full of them.

But the Swedish books are good, for Sweden has this rich tradition of really cool children’s literature. And we have barely approached the limitless Astrid Lindgren catalog in any real way yet.

Here in Sweden you got Benny the pig, Boo and Baa, Knock Knock, and the immortal Alfons Åberg, five, six and then seven years old, just to name a few favorites.

Just as a funny note, Alfons Åberg becomes Alfie Atkins in English and Willi Wiberg in German and Ifan Bifan in, of all things, Welsh. Benny, on the other hand, seems to remain forever Benny, though it is hard to beat a name like Ifan Bifan.

Anyway, now I do not want to read about Benny, though Benny and his adventures with Little Oink are hilarious.  No, I want my daughter to be reading American books for American kids.

So I did a search on Amazon (the American one) and found both the current bestsellers and the classic bestsellers.

Dr. Seuss. Check.   Got him.

Sandra Boyton. Check. Got plenty of her.

Eric Carle.  Check.

Richard Scarry.  Check.

Goodnight Moon, The Mitten, Pat the Bunny, Olivia.  Check, check, check, check.

Nursery rhymes.  Oh, please, three times over.  And they are all English, as in from England, anyway (when did you last see a muffin man coming down your lane?)  Same with Beatrix Potter.

I even found Peek-a Who? on the used book table at my job.  Turns out it is a best seller of the past decade.

And then I realized the problem.  We read too much, 5, 10, 15 books at night.  We read on the train.  We read new books immediately, over and over and over.  She reads to herself out loud in her own language, though she then says she can not read English out loud, only Swedish.

So I got no worries it seems.  I did order some more Dr. Seuss from the library, as well as Where the Wild Things Are, since she can probably handle that now.

But the pressure is off.  Now I can save this blog entry, check on my sleeping daughter, and go curl up with “Oink, Oink Benny” and “Benny’s Had Enough!” and laugh a little.

Good stuff.

when your toddler is a superhero

The doctor leaned in to my three-year-old girl and said, “It was an honor to treat you.” He turned to me.

“I have never seen a braver toddler that age.”

Dramatic words, and perhaps a bit overdone, but still, it turns out my baby girl has the pain tolerance of a … well, let’s just say that she can take more than you can.

It started in the playhouse in the country. NK smashed her thumb in the door … twice in two days. I was sitting inside the playhouse holding the baby the second time. She cried and screamed, and I struggled to get both kids outside where E could pick up NK and hold our sobbing daughter.

Fifteen minutes later, everything was fine, the night a stream of running and bubbles and laughing with her cousin. Three days later, NK got a fever and stopped eating. Four days later, her thumb swelled up to three times its normal size, and puss started leaking out from under the nail.

This is when a car would be nice. But with no car, we left a day early and rushed to a late train. NK and I took a taxi to the hospital (this journey has been recounted countless times since then, usually with Daddy injured in his leg). A nurse took NK’s temperature and a doctor examined her within minutes.

“I need to check under this nail, stat!” he said, except calmly and without saying “stat!” NK would get a local anesthetic, he said, but the needles to do that would hurt, a lot.

He bent down and spoke a little sternly to her. It was OK to scream, he said. It was not OK to hit the doctor.

So he stuck in the needle, and NK winced. I was reading her an Angelina Ballerina book and paused. She turned and said tersely, “Read.”

The doctor stuck three different needles into her thumb. He twisted them. Her lips curled.

Only after, when the pain was over, did NK grimace and need an ice cream. Then the doctor returned and cut off her thumb nail. NK watched the whole time. I was still stuck reading the book. I paused as the doctor showed me the wound and the puss under the nail.

“Daddy, read.”

Both the nurse and the doctor acted truly shocked by all this … and charmed. After his little speech of honor, NK and I took the bus home. Two days later, E took NK to a nurse to have the wound dressed (all these visits cost us about 18 dollars, by the way). During that painful procedure, NK’s toes curled, nothing else, and the nurse asked E if our daughter was in shock.

No, only tough.

Help! I am addicted to socialism!

My latest Huffington Post blog entry …

Hi.  My name is Nathan.  I am an American living in Sweden. And I am addicted to socialism.

I must admit that I did not come here tonight totally of my own free will, which has been apparently sapped by the Swedish welfare state.  For I thought I was quite happy.  I thought I did not mind paying high taxes to support the system, both for my benefit and those around me.  I thought Sweden was actually not socialist, but, as the CIA World Factbook puts it, “a mixed system of high-tech capitalism and extensive welfare benefits.”

But I was wrong.  I see that my life has become unmanageable.

Or maybe too manageable.

I was living in the Matrix or on that cruise ship from Wall-E, my mind and spirit dulled by ease.  I understand now, I do, even if it took an intervention by Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity to show me (See their wisdom here and here respectively).  I owe them so much.  They showed me what a pernicious drug this “socialism” is, draining your life of that low-level anxiety about your family’s well-being, easing you into a low level happiness, a stability, a sense that while the winters are soul-killing and life remains hard and unsure, you will be caught if you fall.

What a nightmare.  To think I fell prey to “socialism” after all those years as a “liberal.”

Though I must confess, I have already slipped.  Yes, I did watch the Daily Show segment from Sweden, the one inspired by O’Reilly and his profound truthy truths about America’s slippery slope towards Swedishness.  I watched Wyatt Cenac trade on outdated and sexist stereotypes to make a deceptively evil, yes, evil, point – that if you give up three of your five blondes in taxes, you get one back in health care savings alone.

Just those 10 or so minutes put me on the road towards relapse, memories of my six months of paid parental leave swirling in my head.  I could not stop thinking about how close I got to my daughter, how much I appreciated the chance to stay home without a massive family sacrifice or career suicide.  I could not stop thinking about cheap high-quality daycare and the comprehensive child health care.  I could not stop thinking that Sweden has introduced flexibility into its health care system, that it has some of the most competitive companies in the world, that its government actually refused to bail out a failing car company, Saab.  I could not stop …

Luckily, my bluegrass saviors, Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, and Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Kentucky, slapped me across the face.  The free market is dying, Bunning said.  Don’t become “Europeanized,” shouted McConnell, waterboarding me for the third time.  They reminded me what America stands for, at least for the well-off politician I could be some day – rugged individualism and cheap gas, McMansions and low taxes, conspicuous consumption and the military-industrial complex.

American is not about community, they said.  Never was.  Not in the colonies, not on wagon trains in the Old West, not during the Depression, not even during World War II.  In America, they reminded me, it is every man, woman and child for themselves, a nation of pure individuals.

I made a searching a fearless moral inventory, and I realized the hardest truth of them all.  I am scared.  One day, I hope to move back to America, if only to see the sun in the wintertime, but also to be near my family.  But the thought of navigating health insurance, education for my kids and grinding jobs with no vacation is terrifying, not to mention that when you add up all the little taxes and costs – you know, Social Security, state, local, school, health insurance, to name a few – I get suspiciously near my Swedish tax rate.

But that is letting the socialists win.  And we cannot let “them” win.

I also see that I am to take my message to other sufferers.  But Swedes like their safety net.  They do, even the conservative ones.  Oh my, I need to hear the message again.  Why Sweden is socialist.  Why it is wrong.

It seems so right …

Excuse me, I need to call Rush Limbaugh – he is my sponsor – and get my head straight.

I need to go over this in detail, health care, parental leave, the gas tax, all of it.

So see you next meeting.

circling the stroller parking lot

This picture more or less sums up the daily difference between my life in Sweden and my former life in the New York exurbs.

This is the stroller parking lot at our local children’s clinic.

Here are the differences.

1. We have a local children’s clinic, which we go to for free, and where BT got only one shot for about five vaccines, where in Port Jervis, NK got five shots for the same vaccines.  Less shots are good.

2.  The clinic has a parking area for strollers.

3.  The parking area is full of real, honest-to-god strollers, not a travel system to be seen.

In Orange County, New York, we had two pediatricians.  The first was walkable but he had no room for our stroller (people thought we were either adorable or freaks) and no toys.  The second had a fine waiting room but the offices were essentially in a medical strip mall, accessible only by car, conveniently located at the intersection of two major highways.

I like my current life better.

Addicted to Socialism, Part I

Yesterday, the Swedish state paid me to stay home with my sick daughter.  I had to make a bunch of phone calls and fill out an internet form, but, in the end, I will get paid 80 percent of my normal salary, with no impact on sick time or vacation or anything.

This is why Sweden is such a paradise with small kids.  Paid parental leave.  Stay home with your sick kid. Guaranteed five weeks of vacation.  It’s beautiful.

I realized yesterday, though, that I have no idea what people in the States do now.   I guess just make it work, hoping that one parent has a flexible schedule or lots of sick days or vacation.

And while I now that the work/life balance is an issue at home, I don’t sense an impending revolution.  People, more or less, just suck it up.

Why?

I know that a Swedish system would cause mass resentment.  I just don’t see most suburban Americans paying high taxes so that Joe down the street can stay home with his kid who has the sniffles.

But they should.  There is an America of community, of sticking together, that seems to have been lost in a tidal wave of weird, one-sided individualistic mythology.  You think the Old West wasn’t about your neighbors?  The colonies?  The Depression?  This all got lost along the line, and it doesn’t have to conflict with our freedom, our sense of the individual.  There must be an interplay, giving the individual the base of a strong community to let him or her venture off.

You don’t go wandering in the forest alone.  And you shouldn’t have to squeeze your life to give your child comfort when they are sick.  Don’t do it the Swedish way, fine.  But figure something out.