Waltham Words: The government and our health
If you walk the halls of Brandeis University the name Ray Ginger almost never comes up. You can ask certain people about him, and if you catch them at the right time they will say something wistful and trail off. A few of them even worked with him during his tenure at the university from 1960 until his departure in 1966. There is an endowed faculty position in his name, but overall Ray Ginger has become something of a ghost.
His disappearance from collective memory is surprising because Ray Ginger was widely recognized as one of the greatest scholars of American industrial labor of his generation. His monumental work, "The Bending Cross", is still the definitive biography of socialist labor leader and presidential candidate Eugene Debs, nearly half a century after its first publication. But Ray Ginger was a damaged man, and perhaps that is why he is forgotten.
As a child during the Great Depression he suffered extreme poverty alongside millions of other Americans. He later told stories of starvation and living in filthy, cramped housing. He came to believe that the United States needed to provide social structures that would treat people with dignity.
Two decades later as a military veteran and professor at Harvard University he was asked to sign an anti-communist oath to continue teaching. His wife, who was not a university employee, was also required to sign the oath. When they refused and he resigned, Ginger was told that in order to receive two weeks' severance pay, he would have to agree to leave Massachusetts.
Emotionally and financially broken, he moved to New York City, where his marriage fell apart and he quit teaching. He finally returned to Massachusetts in 1960 at the request of Brandeis. By then it was too late. He suffered a precipitous emotional decline over the next fifteen years, ultimately succumbing to the effects of severe alcoholism in 1975.
Late last month, another scholar associated with Brandeis made the news. In July, Aafia Siddiqui, a neuroscientist from Pakistan with a PhD from Brandeis went before a New York court to determine her mental fitness to stand trial for terrorist activities in Afghanistan.
Siddiqui has been charged with turning a gun on FBI agents last year after her arrest outside of the residence of an Afghan governor for suspicious behavior. She is widely known, especially in the Boston area, having been mentioned consistently since 2001 in connection with major Al Qaeda figures.
It ultimately may be true that Siddiqui has been affiliated with terrorist organizations. It may not. But her ordeal since her arrest reminds me of the stories of Ray Ginger's life. Court records contain allegations that she was denied medical care for one week after arriving in America despite having suffered a gunshot wound in Afghanistan. Various other allegations suggest non-treatment and abuse for a variety of significant physical and mental ailments and her family has asserted that she was raped in American custody.
As health care reform takes center stage here at home, the lives of Ray Ginger and Aafia Siddiqui say something unifying about the debate that should make us uncomfortable. Both are examples of people whose health has been tied directly to how our government acts. Look anywhere in America, and a story like these probably exists. They are harrowing accounts and infer why people are afraid of entrusting their health care to a government that almost always deals with citizens through ideology instead of dignity. From our scholars and veterans to our prisoners of war, we have a nasty habit in America of allowing politicians to set single issue debates while they broadly attack our basic rights and liberties.
In short, we have entrusted many of the same legislators who semantically dismantled our commitment to the Geneva Convention with repairing our health care system. Spoken or unspoken, when we realize that the people who set rules allowing prisoners to go untreated for gunshot wounds are responsible for reforming a system to keep us alive and healthy, it makes us fearful. Health care needs to be assimilated into a national discussion that was needlessly abandoned when President Obama took office. That discussion questioned the ability of our elected leaders to provide basic governance in all areas. It was a discussion about competent leadership versus blind, often unnecessary cruelty. It is an old discussion, and one worth returning to. We need only look up the road here in Waltham to see why.
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