12 Years A Slave

 

 

 

 

I set aside the day to see “12 Years A Slave”. The story is based on the autobiography of a man who was a free negro living in Sarasota, New York with his family twenty years before the Civil War broke out. He found himself cajoled to work in DC and was kidnapped and sold into slavery and spent twelve grueling years dealing the harsh reality of the deep south.

First of all – take the ENTIRE box of tissue with you to this movie. The theatre is going to be so quiet, all you're gonna hear is other people crying. There were about fifty of us at this screening and we all sat together. I've read “Gone With the Wind” and “Roots” and seen the movies many times each and let me tell you – those were the Disney versions of slavery. This strips away the fallacies and brings up the bright lights on the inhumanity that slavery came to represent. You will leave the movie a changed person.

While it is true that there is a beating, or a lynching in just about every single solitary scene in this movie, there are a couple of scenes that give you hope. By the way, what version of the Bible were they reading? Is there a Slave Owners abomination of the King James that I've never heard of – don't you have to wonder how people became Christians if that's what they heard day in and day out? The main character does something at one point that leaves the biggest and longest cliff hanger of all time – if you ever said “How is he going to get out of this?” in your life, you're going to say it and mean it down to your socks at one point while watching this movie. It's in the middle of the movie and you realize there is much more to tell, but you can't see how this episode will resolve.

The heart of the movie is really about the freeman sold into slavery, the female slave he meets, and the slave master. It's also about money, property, and production quotas. The female slave on the plantation regularly picks 500 pounds of cotton a day. Maybe we needed a wider wide shot, because it's hard to believe that there is 500 pounds of cotton on the plantation at all, much less enough to pick that much and more by yourself everyday. By comparison everyone else is coming up short. The line for whippings gets longer everyday because she is literally a cotton picking machine. She garners the master's favor in many ways because she can do something the others can't. He even tells his wife not to try and come between the two of them, because it's no contest.

The main character starts off in the deep south at a plantation that seems brutal enough, where he deals with wood. His master, however, seems to be relatively kind. Unfortunately, he winds up crossing a line he can't afford to cross and we all get to see how completely alone you are as a slave. There are no options available for you and maybe only one person on the whole plantation is going to help you. After his brief encounter there, he is sold to a cotton plantation down river, where you don't see anything other than brutality, beatings and lynching in every scene. At one point, he is rented out to a sugar plantation, and while sugar is the worse field to work, he does find some solace there.

The brutality and manipulation and deep seated cruelty is what will make it hard to take. You haven't seen a movie with this much brutality since “The Passion of the Christ”, and if you didn't see that, you may not be ready for this. I suggest a long leisurely dinner with friends afterwards as I had, to unwind and decompress. Don't go back into the streets right after watching this – take some time to relax and remind yourself that its a movie.

After many fits and starts, the slave is finally returned to his life. He finds that his children are grown and his wife has been patiently waiting for him all of this time. He lived out the rest of his life helping the abolitionist movement. In fact, that's why the book was written. It was an unimpeachable account of his life in the deep south. After watching that movie, looking at what has been accomplished and what remains left to be done, I think I would have left the country for Canada, but I applaud his decision to remain.

I also watched the TV One Special about the movie and the debate on how old you need ot be to see it. I think it depends on how old you were when you learned about slavery and what you learned about it. I really started learning about it in fourth grade. There were so many specials about that and the civil rights movement and the 10^th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination and the 4^th anniversary of the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination and the RF Kennedy assassination that we covered a lot of material. I recall that even then some people downplayed the role of slavery in building this country and its importance in an economic sense. We went to the State capital in 4^th grade and saw Abraham Lincoln's papers and recreations of the Gettysburg Address and the 2nd Inauguration speech. I think people in my class could have handled it. I'm not sure what children are being taught now about slavery and I don't see those same specials and books.

It's clear that no amount of money or time, or education can every really make up for all that our families have lost. I think that free therapy for the children of the slaves and even the children of the slave owners would be a good start. I also think that it is imperative that ALL organizations that benefited from the slave trade be rooted out and exposed. I realize that most of those organizations went out of business, but I will bet they morphed into something, because slavery was big money, and it had to go in someone's pockets. It's time we all learned the truth because the issue isn't going anywhere.



Why the Affordable Care Act is Important

When I was in college I worked for a company that offered insurance to all employees who worked 35 hours a week or more. This did not include me because I was only working 20 hours a week and I was on my parents insurance at the time. A few months later, the company decided to give the employees a stipend to buy their own single coverage health insurance and let the employees purchase dependent insurance on their own. They decided to only provide a stipend for the employee coverage because if they paid a larger stipend for employees who had dependents, this would #1 – cost more money, and #2- cause the single employees to revolt, and #3 – were concerned that it may be considered discriminatory In my opinion, it was a huge mistake – the majority of the employees didn't purchase insurance coverage at all – not even for themselves! They smoked the money up on stupid stuff. They took a chance that they could buy health insurance next month, or the month after that, or “when I really need it”. Well, this was back in the day before HMO plans, which allow pre-existing condition coverage. Most health plans were just major medical add/or medical visits and prescriptions. So, the day comes when they really need health insurance and either they have nothing in place at all or learn that their condition won't be covered at all by the plan, or they learn that the coverage they bought on their own has so much fine print and exclusions, it barely covers anything other than a hospital stay.

MEMO TO SELF – People have a hard time understanding the benefit of intangibles like health insurance unless they are in need of the coverage right then, and usually that is too late. Don't leave it up to people to buy their own insurance, it's not going to go well.

Now, you may say that those employees are grown and should be able to sink or swim on their own if that's what they decide to do. I would agree with you under normal circumstances, but unfortunately people don't act out of their best interest in some cases. Despite the copious training, the Q&A sessions, and insurance fairs that were held, only 20% of the people used that money to get coverage for themselves and/or their family members. People started leaving the company because they needed a job that offered health coverage for their family members. Employees who neglected to get coverage for themselves disengaged and checked out, literally or figuratively. They started to complain about the “skinflints” who ran the business. Why were they such tightwads that they couldn't afford to give health insurance. Employees started to see first hand why insurance was so important when they encountered health issues. If you took a Libertarian view, that's what freedom is all about. In my opinion, life is too precious to take a chance with.

Eventually, the owners sold the business to another company, and the new company resumed offering health insurance in the traditional manner. Order was restored. I see a wave of this happening in the coming months because a lot of companies do not realize how detrimental it will be to eliminate health insurance coverage or drop employee hours below a certain threshold to forestall compliance with the Affordable Care Act. I've been asked about this issue a few times, but I believe that companies that are committed to remaining in business will continue to offer full coverage insurance. While it's tempting to say I'll just pay the fine the government plans to impose ($2,000 per employee per year) if no coverage or substandard coverage are offered, or I'll just let my employees buy their own coverage. Realistically, there is more to it than just handing out some stipend checks and the phone number to the local Affordable Care Act info center or website. If you or a family member became ill without coverage, I'm pretty you'd want to do everything you could. Unfortunately, in a case where you've done nothing, there is nothing to be done.

For those people who found that their health insurance was cancelled as a result of the enactment of the Affordable Care Act, let me illuminate a fact. The point of healthcare reform was to eliminate health care plans that were substandard. If you had a plan that only covered hospitalization, and didn't cover prescriptions, emergency room visits, or therapy – your insurance plan was not going to be saved anyway. The insurance company can't make money selling a product that is no longer allowed. You shouldn't have called that health insurance anymore than SR-22 auto insurance is quality auto coverage – it's barebones coverage that is lambasted in Allstate commercials. Insurance companies have to offer standard plans that include hospitalization, doctor's visits, therapy sessions, prescriptions, and emergency room visits now. Some people saw their insurance costs increase because the standards have been raised. I don't believe those plans should come back, its time to move on to something substantial.

If you live in a progressive state like Illinois, you have the option of selecting a plan from the State of Illinois offerings and you may even be eligible for a subsidy to pay for a portion or all of the coverage. Having seen the coverage offerings, I would suggest that you take the time to choose wisely for yourself and family. You don't have to make a decision today. As long as you enroll by the end of March, you can participate. If you aren't in a progressive state, there are sure to be some protest rallies to get your state legislature to offer insurance plans that partner with the Fed to help subsidize coverage. Please get out your comfortable shoes and attend a rally. Don't miss the chance to get health insurance coverage for yourself or your family during this historic period. As the Vice President, Joe Biden said “It's a big f___ deal!”