Mama Might Be Better Off Dead, is an alarming view of the human face of health care. Set in North Lawndale, one of Chicago’s poorest and medically undeserved neighborhoods, this story revolves around the Banes family. An African-American family of four generations. Headed by Jackie Banes, who takes care of her diabetic grandmother, her husband on kidney dialysis, an ailing father and three children, this family suffers a lot of medical crises. The author, Laurie Abraham sympathetically tells their story and in context of the inadequate health care system and how it affected them. The Mountain, is and excerpt from the Exile and Pride : Disability, Queerness and Liberation, by Eli Clare who is a white transexual man (formerly lesbian) with a cerebral palsy. Clare explores the ways in which his body has been abused and stolen and how such …show more content…
exploitation can be prevented in the future by revolutionizing the views of mainstream society and the treatment of those individuals with disabilities. Through this narration, the author gives his audience an informative look at this movement. In 1992, it was noted that the health care policies in the United States needed to be seriously addressed.
With a new presidential elect, this issue was given more priority than before, however, it was the discontent of the middle class that finally pushed healthcare reform to the top of the national agenda (Abraham, p 1). The healthcare institution is set up in a way where some people are given more preference over others. The various social structures within our society that exist, such as race, class, sexuality, socioeconomic status, gender etc cause such systems to create a distinction in society. In the case of the Banes family, it was a combination of their social structures that caused them to suffer medical crises. Being African-American and poor, they faced some unbearable consequences of the unequal health care system. “When people are poor, they become sick easily. When people are sick, their families quickly become poorer. This family was a part of a system that is one of the best in the industrialized world for those who are affluent and well insured and embarrassingly bad for those who are not (Abhraham, p
2). Being amidst poverty affected their jobs, which in turn affected their health insurance and eventually did not even provide them with basic care of medicaid and medicare. Lacking the education or confidence to push doctors and others for the information they needed, members of the Banes family often were in the dark about what was being done to them. And confusion sometimes turned to anger and alienation (Abraham, p 4). Having to deal with these inconsistent policies as well as being a part of an impoverished family not only pushes them to extremes but also adds stress and emotional insecurity into their lives. In The Mountain, Eli Clare makes a distinction between “impairment” and “disability.” Impairment, means physical limitation; something that one cannot do. On the other hand, disability caters more towards society, how society is structured in order to term certain people from not being normal. It is a category society creates for people that have impairments to function. Clare highlights this distinction because he believes that people often fail to realize the difference between these terms. He uses the mountain as a metaphor to discuss not being able to write fast (impairment), yet he is not given extra time by the teacher (disability) as a result his cerebral palsy. Similarly, in Hoops and Wheels, Ronald Berger captures the history and sociology of disability and disability sports. Because disability sports are separated from able-body sports, they are ranked as second-class status, as if only “natural” bodies play natural sports and “unnatural” bodies play unnatural sports. Therefore, it comes down to the way society creates barriers by making such distinctions and their consequences on people.
In his essay, “How Susie Bayer’s T-Shirt Ended up on Yusuf Mama’s Back”, George Packer points out an issue that has often been ignored in the society. People leave their used clothes outside the Salvation Army or church, but they do not know where the clothes will go eventually. George Packer did a lot of interviews and investigation into the used clothes trade. Based on this report, many cutural and gender issues have been raised. George Parker uses convincing data as well, since he followed closely the trail of one T-shirt to its final owner in Uganda.
What would it be like to come to a country and not understand anything about its health care system? To many this would be a very daunting task. Unfortunately, this is the scenario that the Lee family has to deal with in the book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman. The Lee family, and the other thousands of Hmong immigrants, try to understand and navigate the complex and sometimes confusing health care system of the United States. As the book points out, the values and ideals of the Hmong culture and the United States health care system are not always the same and sometimes come into great conflict with each other. Lia Lee was unfortunately the person stuck in the middle of this great conflict.
“A Simple Matter of Hunger” narrates the life of Eleanor Wilson, foster mother to an infant with acquired immune deficiency syndrome. Monitoring Jancey is full-time work, and it involves dealing with insensitive and ignorant people, incompetent healthcare, and consistent bad news. Although the child is not her own and raising her promises never-ending heartbreak and difficult, Eleanor cares for Jancey as well as any mother can.
The mother is a selfish and stubborn woman. Raised a certain way and never falters from it. She neglects help, oppresses education and persuades people to be what she wants or she will cut them out of her life completely. Her own morals out-weight every other family member’s wants and choices. Her influence and discipline brought every member of the family’s future to serious-danger to care to her wants. She is everything a good mother isn’t and is blind with her own morals. Her stubbornness towards change and education caused the families state of desperation. The realization shown through the story is the family would be better off without a mother to anchor them down.
Through the protagonist, Bone's narration, her mother known as Mama is a victim of the bottom class. Her life is cheap and inconspicuous, as the beginning of the novel mentions, "Mama...hated the memory of every day she's ever spent bent over other people's peanuts...while they stood tall and looked at her
Mountains are significant in the writing of Jack Kerouac and Donald Barthelme as symbolic representations of achievement and the isolation of an individual from the masses of the working class in industrialized capitalist American society. The mountains, depicted by Kerouac and Barthelme, rise above the American landscape as majestic entities whose peaks are touched by few enduring and brave souls. The mountains of Kerouac's The Dharma Bums symbolize personal freedom and accomplishment through achieving a connection with nature distant from the constraints of materialism and a polluted industrialized American society. Barthelme's "Glass Mountain," however, envisions a mountain removed from nature as a modern skyscraper office building, an edifice that embodies the degradation of an emerging American society in the 1960s that is in search of "the American Dream" through material or monetary gains. "The Glass Mountain" remarks on the movement of Americans away from nature, religion, and humanity as they look to false golden idols (the golden castle at the top of the mountain) for inspiration to be successful, while Kerouac's The Dharma Bums emphasizes a return to nature and devout religiousness to inspire virtues of charity, kindness, humility, zeal, tranquility, wisdom, and ecstasy (p. 5). The top of the mountain, for both authors, represents a fearful ascent from the masses of the working class huddled in polluted cities in order to achieve a heightened state of knowledge and success, but both explorers fall short of true fulfillment because they are never far removed from human flaws of greed, excess, and materia...
Mama, as a member of an older generation, represents the suffering that has always been a part of this world. She spent her life coexisting with the struggle in some approximation to harmony. Mama knew the futility of trying to escape the pain inherent in living, she knew about "the darkness outside," but she challenged herself to survive proudly despite it all (419). Mama took on the pain in her family in order to strengthen herself as a support for those who could not cope with their own grief. Allowing her husband to cry for his dead brother gave her a strength and purpose that would have been hard to attain outside her family sphere. She was a poor black woman in Harlem, yet she was able to give her husband permission for weakness, a gift that he feared to ask for in others. She gave him the right to a secret, personal bitterness toward the white man that he could not show to anyone else. She allowed him to survive. She marveled at his strength, and acknowledged her part in it, "But if he hadn't had...
In 1988 Gloria Naylor wrote the novel Mama Day in hopes to show the world that one can either accept the hand they are dealt and make it come out to the advantage of themselves and others, or one can hide from their pain and live a life scared of what may come in the future. Mama Day is set on an island off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia that is inhabited by the descendants of a slave population. The main characters in the novel; Ophelia, Abigail and Miranda, also called Mama Day, all experienced a lot of pain in their lives; it is how they chose to deal with their experiences that sets them apart from each other.
When she was younger, she dreamed of being able to live in a decent sized house where she could even have her own small garden. However, the more privileged black neighborhoods were too expensive for her and her family at the time so she could never get the best of what Chicago had to offer. That factor didn’t hinder her from providing for her family and getting what she needed in life though. Mama’s environment formed her into a woman who hopes for the best, but even if that doesn’t happen, she will still make do with what she has. She also is very religious, this enables her to have strength and guidance during troubling times, and find a way when there is none.
The facts bear out the conclusion that the way healthcare in this country is distributed is flawed. It causes us to lose money, productivity, and unjustly leaves too many people struggling for what Thomas Jefferson realized was fundamental. Among industrialized countries, America holds the unique position of not having any form of universal health care. This should lead Americans to ask why the health of its citizens is “less equal” than the health of a European.
Reese, Philip. Public Agenda Foundation. The Health Care Crisis: Containing Costs, Expanding Coverage. New York: McGraw, 2002.
African Americans face a multidimensional health care crisis that affects the young or old, rich or poor. Too many African Americans are uninsured or underinsured. The elderly cannot afford long-term health care leaving the family to care for them. Health care cost is constantly rising and are out of control, reform is the only way out.
Despite the established health care facilities in the United States, most citizens do not have access to proper medical care. We must appreciate from the very onset that a healthy and strong nation must have a proper health care system. Such a health system should be available and affordable to all. The cost of health services is high. In fact, the ...
Mona Counts works in the village of Mt. Morris, Pennsylvania. It is a medically underserved area and a HPSA (health professional shortage area). The town has an extremely poor economic base and majority of Mona’s patient population are poverty level. Mona is not worried about the money and will tell a patient to come in for a check up, regardless of whether or not they have health care. One patient said, “she is old-fashioned, she talks to you and tells you what you nee...
Mama's economic hardships may have killed her dream, but she has not allowed it to kill her. The social inequality which the Younger encounters also does not hinder Mama's compassion. Mr. Lindner temporarily shatters Mama's dream of owning a home when he comes to the Youngers prepared to give them money to move from Clybourne Park. The derogatory use of "you people" by Mr. Lindner has little to no effect on Mama's steadfast decision to move to Clybourne Park.... ...