Recently, I learned that my parents’ home is being foreclosed on. This course was set due to illness with both parents — they needed to re-mortgage their home in order to pay their mounting medical bills. My father has worked his entire life as an industrial mechanic, has had insurance, and both parents are eligible for Medicare. Thanks to other factors, however — cancer, a rare genetic cardiovascular anomaly, brain surgery, other illnesses, thousands of dollars in medicines, the massive co-pays, other treatments insurance wouldn’t cover, and a tanked economy that deeply hit my father’s industry — my parents are now losing the home.
My father struggled to preclude this from occurring. Through the physical suffering of disease and the constraints of a 76-year-old body, my father did not retire. With his skill set, even in a bad economy, and in a job that is meant for younger men, he desperately continued to work more than most … but still, it wasn’t enough.
Such is the nightmare of the time and culture in which we live — a financial system built on and collapsed by the greed of those who cared little for the consequence, and an insurance/illness industry pregnant by the profits of sick people. In such a system, good people can work hard, have medical insurance, get sick, and lose their homes. It is no wonder that Jesus said, “…for the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light.” It was not meant as a compliment.
The home has been in our family for about a century. My mother grew up in the home. I spent my early childhood years there. My grandparents and great-grandparents lived there. Its walls have contained almost every important event of our family’s life for the last 100 years. And now, on October 16, if we are unable to slow this process through legal action, it will go to auction. Even if we get a few months reprieve, it still seems certain that my folks will lose their home.
The shock of it all has moved Mom into such a difficult space — almost to a point of total dysfunction. That is the very difficult part of all of this. Likely, it is post-traumatic stress. She weeps and keeps repeating, “They are taking our home. We should have been able to do better.” I try to gently explain that she and Dad did nothing wrong, but simply became sick while living in an insane system created to wreak exactly this destruction. But of course, she can hardly hear it. She still sees it as somehow “their fault.”
I’m so angry about this demonic system, a system that destroys the lives of old folks and then seduces them into believing they are guilty of suicide. More than that, I’m angry at my own past compliance in it, only having moved to call for economic and relational justice during the past 15 years. Worse, it was my local church that taught me that not only was my acceptance of such a system appropriate, the system itself was “Christian.” There is much about which to repent. For me … for us all.
If we can get my parents through this without the damage of literally being put on the street, I think they will adjust. But if my mom can’t find a way to be able to leave, I truly am concerned with how she will respond. If they are forced out by the sheriff, their furniture on the street, the shock will kill them.
This is their reality and the reality of tens of thousands of other Americans. My dad and mom did everything that good Americans do. By society’s standards, they played by all the right rules and made all the right decisions. They paid their taxes, didn’t grouse, worked hard, and voted in every election. And now, they are losing their home because they got sick while living in a construct built on greed.
How can this be? Simply because in America, health care isn’t a right. It is a commodity on which profit is made from people who are at the most vulnerable points of their lives.
Do we need universal health care today? No — we needed it before my parents and tens of thousands of others had lost their homes. We needed universal health care yesterday.
So I ask that you join us in prayer. Mom is especially in deep need of the felt-presence and surety of God. And then, I ask you to act. Call your congressional representative and demand universal health care. Teach a class on how Jesus advocates for and literally lives in “the least of these.” Engage in issues of justice. Welcome the stranger, feed the hungry, care for the sick. If not now, then when? And if not us, then who?
My parents never believed they would be in this position. I bet your parents don’t believe it either. And it is almost always somebody’s parents … or children … or neighbors.
Steve Taylor has been engaged in ministries of peace-making and justice for several years, first as a United Methodist Church and Community Worker, and then on staff at the North Carolina Conference of the United Methodist Church.
To learn more about health-care reform, click here to visit Sojourners’ Health-Care Resources Web page.
