Welcome to Forgotonia

The following item originally aired as a local commentary on NPR-member station Tri States Public Radio, WIUM/WIUW.

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Earlier this fall Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich signed a measure allowing parents to keep their children on their healthcare policies until their dependent’s 26th birthday. With the national spotlight focused on the presidential election and the bailout plan, Commentator Alison McGaughey says, it seems little has been said about this news item that emerged on the state level in Illinois.

If all goes according to plan, the governor’s new legislation—which will force companies to raise the cut-off age for their employees’ children—will become law in January.

According to the news release from the governor’s office, more than 300,000 people in the state between 19-25 are uninsured. With this new measure, (the news release promises), thousands of young adults will get to keep, or get access to, regular checkups and preventable care.

In other words, no more going to the doctor on what my friend Jane—who worked in a bookstore for several years after college—used to refer to as the Master Card Plan.

It’s easy to empathize with that classic post-graduation purgatory— the No Longer a Student, though Not-yet-Employed.

And, for the record, when it comes time for me to choose a candidate—it’s exactly this kind of stuff: expansion of health care coverage, concern for the underprivileged? This is how I roll.

(Me and several thousands of other young people who voted on November 4.)

But what seems like a wonderful change on the surface has started to make me raise some serious questions.

For one, how much will this measure truly protect the poor in the 19-25 age group—whose parents might not even have health insurance in the first place?

And is there a chance this could only perpetuate an already-prolonged state of privileged adolescence?

According to experts, we’re in an era of so-called “helicopter parents,” moms and dads who hover protectively over their kids more than ever before. Parents who not only pay for their kids’ educations but also might not hesitate to call their kids professors’ for a grade report.

If coverage would’ve been expanded for previous generations, where would today’s young entrepreneurs be today if they hadn’t ventured out into the world when they did?

Most importantly, would Mary and Rhoda ever even have met?

I realize that my qualms with this policy would not be popular with those in their late-late-teens and early-early twenties.

One young woman in particular, I know, would be disgusted with me if she could hear these comments.

That would be me—the me of 10 years ago—who, at age 21, came home from college hoping to spend the summer figuring my life out, figuring out how I was gonna live my dream.

All of which I planned to do from my old room in parents’ house.

My parents, however, had an actual plan—one that resulted in me getting a job within 10 days of graduation.

I was basically forced to go out and work. And the work I did made me miserable.

But it also, I can say now, taught me a lot. And gave me character. And forced me to grow up.

(Naturally, I have refused to thank my parents for this.)

If I’d have had a government-sanctioned reason to stay on my parents’ dime a day longer, believe me, baby, I’d have done it.

And put off becoming an independent, self-sufficient adult for at least another couple of years.

Waiting until age 26 or longer to leave the parental home might mean never knowing the spark of excitement of being out on one’s own in the world. Of throwing one’s hat into the Midwestern wind.

The answer to that quintessential question— “How will you make it own your own?”—is not supposed to be “I won’t have to—I’m covered!”

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Alison McGaughey is a full-time employee and part-time graduate student at WIU.

The following was originally aired as a commentary on Tri States Public Radio, the NPR member station for Macomb, IL (from Nov. 12, 2008)

Earlier this fall Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich signed a measure allowing parents to keep their children on their healthcare policies until their dependent’s 26th birthday. With the national spotlight focused on the presidential election and the bailout plan, Commentator Alison McGaughey says, it seems little has been said about this news item that emerged on the state level in Illinois.
–

If all goes according to plan, the governor’s new legislation—which will force companies to raise the cut-off age for their employees’ children—will become law in January.

According to the news release from the governor’s office, more than 300,000 people in the state between 19-25 are uninsured. With this new measure, (the news release promises), thousands of young adults will get to keep, or get access to, regular checkups and preventable care.

In other words, no more going to the doctor on what my friend Jane—who worked in a bookstore for several years after college—used to refer to as the Master Card Plan.

It’s easy to empathize with that classic post-graduation purgatory— the No Longer a Student, though Not-yet-Employed.

And, for the record, when it comes time for me to choose a candidate— it’s exactly this kind of stuff: expansion of health care coverage, concern for the underprivileged? This is how I roll.

(Me and several thousands of other young people who voted on November 4.)

But what seems like a wonderful change on the surface has started to make me raise some serious questions.

For one, how much will this measure truly protect the poor in the 19-25 age group—whose parents might not even have health insurance in the first place?

And is there a chance this could only perpetuate an already-prolonged state of privileged adolescence?

According to experts, we’re in an era of so-called “helicopter parents,” moms and dads who hover protectively over their kids more than ever before. Parents who not only pay for their kids’ educations but also might not hesitate to call their kids professors’ for a grade report.

If coverage would’ve been expanded for previous generations, where would today’s young entrepreneurs be today if they hadn’t ventured out into the world when they did?

Most importantly, would Mary and Rhoda ever even have met?

I realize that my qualms with this policy would not be popular with those in their late-late-teens and early-early twenties.

One young woman in particular, I know, would be disgusted with me if she could hear these comments.

That would be me—the me of 10 years ago—who, at age 21, came home from college hoping to spend the summer figuring my life out, figuring out how I was gonna live my dream.

All of which I planned to do from my old room in parents’ house.

My parents, however, had an actual plan—one that resulted in me getting a job within 10 days of graduation.

I was basically forced to go out and work. And the work I did made me miserable.

But it also, I can say now, taught me a lot. And gave me character. And forced me to grow up.

(Naturally, I have refused to thank my parents for this.)

If I’d have had a government-sanctioned reason to stay on my parents’ dime a day longer, believe me, baby, I’d have done it.

And put off becoming an independent, self-sufficient adult for at least another couple of years.

Waiting until age 26 or longer to leave the parental home might mean never knowing the spark of excitement of being out on one’s own in the world. Of throwing one’s hat into the Midwestern wind.

The answer to that quintessential question— “How will you make it own your own?”—is not supposed to be “I won’t have to—I’m covered!”

–

Ok so this was supposed to be posted weeks ago, but I never go around to it:

1) This Peoria couple’s story —about how their photographs, which started out as a creative attempt to teach their kids the alphabet, turned into a jillion-dollar enterprise—is so cool and inspiring.

(But Oprah bought some of their artwork as a wedding gift for Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, who just add creepiness to everything they touch, no?)

And the woman featured in the story is from Warren County, which makes it even cooler!

2) Depressing but true: the NAACP came into existence because of some horrible shiz that went down in Springfield: race riots in 1908. Who knew?

Story from NPR here.

3) A little more uplifting, thankfully:

when first-ever African American presidential candidate Barack Obama returned to Springfield a couple of weeks ago to make his VP announcement?

The guy who gave the prayer at the beginning was none other than Glen Vanderkloot, who just happens to be the pastor at my sister’s Springfield church. That would be Faith Lutheran, (where my sister is a substitute organist, choir member, and, you could argue, un-official assistant pastor.)

Since Obama is not a Lutheran, I’m still bugging my sister for the deets on how her pastor got picked for the job. Was there, like, a clergy lottery and he happened to pull the best straw?

I mean, not to knock the guy–from what I’ve seen when visiting my sister, he’s a great orator and I’m sure his prayer and delivery that day were quite remarkable.

But still. They apparently just called him out of the blue and asked if he’d give the invocation! How cool is that?

(By the way, I did ask my sister if, in these weeks since, Pastor Vanderkloot has hung an “OBAMA ’08″ banner on the pulpit, but apparently the decorations remain of the sacred kind.)

Man, what a bad situation. It stresses me out just to have a damp basement. I can’t imagine what these folks are going through. It’s so sad to think of all the homes and crops that are being lost.

My parents’ home and farm is far enough from the Mississippi, thankfully, to stay out of the floodwaters’ reach. But just up the road, Dallas City is suffering.

Hancock County Sheriff John Jefferson is quoted on CNN.com today:

GLADSTONE, Illinois (CNN) — Residents of this small town in Illinois, like many others who live along the banks of the surging Mississippi River, raced against the clock Tuesday to erect a makeshift levee as rising floodwaters threatened.

Bryan Schulte watches over a sandbag levee Tuesday in Burlington, Iowa.

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“I’m not moving, not moving my business,” said Byron Sebastian, a longtime resident of Gladstone, Illinois, who also serves on the city council. “We’ve got a lot of good people here helping to try to save this part of town.”

Gladstone is one of many towns under threat Tuesday after rising waters breached a 300-foot area of a levee near Gulf Port, Illinois, before 5 a.m.

Levees all along the mid-Mississippi were being topped with sandbags Tuesday as the river, fed by its flooded tributaries, continued to rise.

Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich called up 1,100 National Guard members to assist in sandbagging efforts, said Patti Thompson of the Illinois Emergency Management Agency. She also said inmates are helping on the levees and others are bagging sand in correctional institutions.

“We were very, very disappointed that this levee broke today,” said Thompson. “It’s a very powerful river, and it can be hard to harness.”

With the help of the National Guard, Sebastian and his fellow residents hustled Tuesday to build a barrier between Gladstone and the encroaching floodwaters.

Even though Gladstone is about four miles from the banks of the Mississippi, the rising floodwaters have submerged homes and created rivers where crop fields once stood.

The muddy townspeople worked with anxious resolve, cracking the occasional joke, as they filled bags with sand and dirt and loaded them onto ATVs.

On the receiving end were members of the Illinois National Guard, who piled up the sandbags as the tops of cornstalks rose above the waters behind them.

“Threats can happen in all shapes and forms, so we are trying to help out,” said National Guardsman Capt. Lanny Finn, whose unit previously served in Iraq. “We’ll be here for as long as we’re needed.”

Sebastian, who lived through floods in 1993, said he never thought he’d have to experience them again.

“We thought that was bad, but this is a lot worse than it was in ’93,” said Sebastian. “Now we got some lakefront property.”

Elsewhere in Illinois, authorities closed the Great River Bridge on U.S. 34 [They're talking about Burlington here], which connects Illinois to Iowa over the swollen Mississippi, as authorities evacuated about 400 people in Henderson County.

The sheriff of Henderson County, where the Mississippi River borders the entire western edge of the county, said authorities are still concerned about the communities of Gulf Port, Carman, Lomax and Dallas City.

“It’s been an uphill battle from the start, and the levee just broke loose,” he said.

Sheriff John Jefferson of Hancock County, Illinois, said water was “very, very close” to the top of some areas of the county’s two levees.

“We’ve had to evacuate some areas already, but the areas that have not been evacuated yet, we’re just keeping our fingers crossed and hoping that the levee will hold,” he said.

In two of the county’s communities, Rio Vista* and Pontoosuc, power has been shut off in all but 20 residences, a spokeswoman for the sheriff’s office said.

Missouri also began to feel the force of the surging Mississippi Tuesday, as water began to top multiple levees east of Highway 79, forcing authorities to suspend sandbagging efforts at a levee near Foley, officials said Tuesday.

In Northwest Missouri, towns and cities along the Mississippi River were bracing for flooding later this week as swollen waters head downriver.

Communities at high risk of record flooding include Quincy, Illinois, and Hannibal, Missouri, according to National Weather Service modeling. Moderate flooding is possible later in the week in Alton, Illinois, and St. Louis, Missouri.

The floods began heading downriver Monday to Illinois and Missouri, relieving Iowa somewhat after two weeks of natural disasters that killed 17 people, displaced 38,000 and caused more than $1 billion in crop damages.

“The good news is the floodwater is receding in much of the state,” said David Miller, administrator for the Iowa Homeland Security and Emergency Management Division. “The bad news is we’re still in a flood fight.”

President Bush said he and a team will travel to Iowa this week [I'm glad he can find time in his busy golfing schedule.] State and federal officials also plan to meet there this week to decide the best way to house displaced residents, said Bill Vogel, a federal coordinator with the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

In Washington, Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa said the flooding has devastated his state’s corn crop. Floods prompted farm-equipment manufacturer John Deere to idle two plants in Waterloo, Iowa, he said.

“Across eastern Iowa, the flooding rivers have washed out railroad lines; Mississippi barge traffic has come to a halt and [flooding has] closed major roadways,” said Harkin, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee. “Thousands of Iowa businesses, large and small, have been impacted.”

Harkin said Iowans “are a resilient and resourceful people,” but will need “generous federal assistance” to recover.

FEMA has set up six disaster recovery centers in Iowa and has provided nearly $4 million in assistance, state and federal officials reported. So far, 24 counties are under federal disaster declarations, making residents eligible for individual aid, Lt. Gov. Patty Judge reported.

By Tuesday afternoon, residents of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where the Cedar River inundated more than 400 city blocks, were beginning to return home as the rivers lessened, said Lu Barron, a Linn County supervisor.

“We’re doing pretty good,” she said. “People are getting into their businesses, and getting into their homes.” she said.

She estimated that thousands of people had returned to their homes after authorities inspected them to make sure they were safe.

The death of one woman whose body was found in her car Monday was determined unrelated to the floods, said Courtney Greene, a spokeswoman for the governor’s office and the state Emergency Operations Center.

Amtrak service from Chicago, Illinois, to St. Paul, Minnesota, and to Kansas City, Missouri, was disrupted by the flooding.

It’s Super Tuesday, which I think means that not only should we be allowed release time from work to participate in the democratic process, but also be allowed to do other Super things on work time, like:

also get a manicure.

(I’m just saying.)

But seriously folks, I just feel the need to say: this is the first time in my adult, voting life in which I honestly feel a little indecisive about who to vote for. As in, there are actually *plural* positive choices.

How can this be?!?

And–could someone please slap me? I need to be slapped like a hysterical woman always needs to be slapped out of something in a romantic comedy–I actually (shudder) wouldn’t mind if a Republican (John McCain) got elected.

There, it’s out, I said it. Now I need to go cleanse myself off; I feel so dirty.