Last week, I unexpectedly flew to Florida to help my dad through a health ordeal. My life has been on hold—no writing, and I missed this month’s Reach Out Wisconsin forum. But I did have one interaction I can write about in this blog, a small, jarring moment that reminded me of my work in political dialogue.
First, a tangent to give some background on Dad’s situation, because it’s been fairly serious. He was diagnosed with a non-healing peptic ulcer last fall, a precancerous condition. Over the last few months, his health has been deteriorating because of the untreated ulcer. He’s had to take a leave of absence from his museum job and stop caring for his mother, who he’s been living with for years.
Dad is a Vietnam veteran and gets his care from the VA medical system. We suspect that’s why his care has been so slow—his experiences with the VA have never been very impressive, and this ulcer is no different.
Finally, on Valentine’s Day, they removed the ulcer, four months after it was diagnosed. That was a major relief. But he started having a hard time in the hospital—what was supposed to be a few-day stay stretched into a week, and his intestines still weren’t functioning properly post-surgery. Alarmed, I dropped everything last week and flew to Gainesville to help out.
Having me there really did help. Dad had been complaining about his subpar care on the phone, but I didn’t fully understand what he meant till I arrived. He’d been in the hospital eight days but had never been administered meds for his psoriasis, so that when I first saw him, he had horrendous, pus-filled, bloody wounds on both forearms. He’d also been directed to walk by doctors but was not being walked by nurses. And his case manager, whose office was right down the hall, had never bothered to check in on him.
With me there as his “bulldog,” things rapidly improved. I’m still angry, but I’m relieved to see him doing better. He’s almost ready to go home now. Seeing his abysmal care made me even more passionate about politics. We have a lot to fix in this country, including how we treat our veterans.
The incident I wanted to write about doesn’t relate to health care, though. It happened when I was sitting with Dad in his hospital room—where I spent most waking hours last week—and telling him about a documentary I’d watched.
I had discovered a fabulous website called Documentary Heaven. The night before, in my motel room, I’d watched a movie called “The Dark Side of Chocolate”—a disturbing exposé of child slavery in the chocolate industry.
The movie documents West African children who are persuaded to leave their villages in countries such as Mali and Burkina Faso and told they’ll make money if they go south to Cote d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) to work on the cacao plantations there. Sometimes with their parents’ consent and sometimes without it, they travel to the border with “traffickers” and meet Ivoirians who shepherd them to the plantations. But once at the plantations, they’re rarely paid, do not go to school, and are beaten if they stop working or try to escape. The children are male and female, and they’re as young as seven years old.
I related all this to Dad, describing how the documentarians interview one chocolate executive in Abidjan, the capital of Cote d’Ivoire, who first denies there’s any child labor on the plantations. He says he’s been working in the industry his whole life and has never seen a child laborer. But when the filmmakers return with reports that they’ve seen many children on the plantations they visited, he admits this is a widespread problem that his company doesn’t condone and that is being fought by the government.
What a slimebag! And what a tragedy.
As I said all this and Dad listened sympathetically, a custodian came in to clean his room. She was an older white lady, perhaps sixty, slender with gray hair and a pretty smile. I had noticed her the day before. She always smiled when she walked by Dad’s room.
She slowed her cleaning to listen to me describe the movie. She eventually stopped sweeping altogether, joining in our conversation and tsk-tsking with us.
“It makes me want to be really careful what chocolate I buy,” I said to both her and Dad, concluding my tale.
“Me, too!” she said emphatically. She asked what companies were named in the movie; I mentioned that Nestle was one of the culprits.
“You know what else?” she said when I’d finished.
“What?” By now several minutes had passed. I was becoming surprised she was still hanging around, although this wasn’t the first time we’d seen on-the-job apathy from staff here.
“The other day, I heard that a few other companies—let’s see, Home Depot, Starbucks, and…oh—Nike! I heard that those companies are supporters of gay marriage!”
Dad and I blinked at her, carefully keeping poker faces. My sister is gay. We very much support gay marriage.
“I mean, it’s really unbelievable what all these companies are doing,” the custodian continued, oblivious to our sudden silence. “I’ll tell you what—I won’t be buying from those companies, anymore, either!” She seemed to take it for granted that we were all on the same page here.
It boggled my mind that from child slavery, this woman could so easily jump to gay marriage. My mind was reeling.
But she was finally making moves to leave the room. We refrained from pursuing this new thread; by now, both of us understood that we needed to pick our battles here and take some care not to alienate any of Dad’s caregivers, even if they offended us. For the time being, his health was in their hands.
When she was gone, I let out a breath and turned back to Dad. We exchanged a look of mutual, helpless absurdity. “This is the South,” he whispered, eyebrows raised high. “You’re in the middle of the state of Florida.”
“I know.” I laughed ruefully.
But bigotry is everywhere, I thought—not just in the South.
It really is fascinating what comes out of people’s mouths sometimes. What does gay marriage have to do with child slavery? Nothing. Except that to this woman, both are abhorrent practices supported by corporations, and thus worthy of boycotting. And to us, both child slaves and gay people are oppressed.
Hearing this woman’s comment was one of those mind-bending moments that remind you just how differently many of us think from each other. Dad and I had thought we were all on the same page, only to realize we were living in a different universe from the custodian’s.
Sometimes I feel like the gulf between me and those on the “other side” is a very deep, very wide chasm.
But I think when it comes to fighting oppression, we just have to keep marching forward, little by little, victory by victory. Country by country, corporation by corporation, person by person.
And when it comes to political dialogue, we have to keep moving forward too, conversation by conversation. The more we can listen and understand where each other are coming from, the better we’ll be able to make progress on the issues we care about.
Actually, I once read an article where someone said that gay marriage was the new slavery, due to the fact that gay couples have to adopt. Still, she probably just was thinking on the list of things she doesn’t want to support.