As is appeared in the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin (Ontario, CA) on September 2, 2009:

My wife and I lost three parents over a surreal 11 months.

It began on my son’s third birthday with the passing of his maternal grandmother from pneumonia that resulted from chemotherapy treatment for cervical cancer. As she lie on her deathbed in a New York hospital, she wrote an urgent note to her family on a tiny piece of paper regarding the ventilator tube that had been placed down her throat:

“Remove.”

The doctors insisted against her wishes and she was re-sedated. Though recovery had long been ruled out, the hospital continued to run tests which led to the discovery of Leukemia.  Despite her weakened state they proposed the family authorize additional chemotherapy to treat it.

Eleven months later my father died in the cardiac ICU of a Virginia hospital.

The level of medical intervention was so great that he was assigned one nurse whose only job during their shift was to care for him. Yet one of those nurses asked her superiors to be transferred from his care because the monitoring and maintenance of over a dozen different machines keeping him alive were too great for her to handle.

My father, who remained alert up until his final hours, made it repeatedly clear through gesturing that he was not in pain. However, doctor after doctor strongly recommended sedation and at one point openly criticized me as a son for not ordering pain drugs against my father’s will.

To maintain a ventilator against the will of the patient, propose chemotherapy on a dying woman, and use pressure sales techniques on a family to give morphine to a man who insists he is not in pain – these incidents seem shocking and unethical.  Yet this is part of the status quo in today’s healthcare system.

Advanced care planning consultation can help to end this nightmare.  Allowing Medicare to reimburse providers for this service can make a change for the better by providing greater access to and awareness regarding the various end-of-life care options.

Planning for end-of-life care and the clear documentation of our choices through an advance directive helps families make tough decisions in the most difficult times. It prevents providers from billing tens of thousands of additional dollars to dying patients’ insurance unnecessarily which impacts the cost of health insurance premiums. But more importantly it gives a dying patient a voice.

Unfortunately, there are political regressives in reformer’s clothing that are poisoning the healthcare debate with tactics designed to exploit our fear of death and our limited understanding of palliative and hospice care, turning them into weapons against progress.

Consider the case of my father-in-law who, moved by his experience at his wife’s bedside, immediately developed an extensive advance directive in the months that followed her death.

On the very day my own father passed away, my father-in-law was rushed unconscious to a Pennsylvania hospital having suffered a severe hemorrhagic stroke. The hospital staff, against his family’s demands, proceeded to place him on life support beginning with the ventilator his wife had made futile attempts to have removed.

It was the presentation of his advanced directive that mollified the hospital’s resistance to these demands as it stated clearly that he did not wish to be placed on any form of medical life support when there was no chance for recovery.

Having a voice in his unconscious state, my father-in-law died peacefully two days later just as he had requested; breathing easily on his own supported only by pain medications.

His family was able to sit by his bedside and mourn the loss of their loved one without having to grieve the process of his passing.

Advanced care planning must become a respected part of the broader healthcare conversation.  It gives us a voice in our most vulnerable hour, and empowers our loved ones to potentially choose whether their final precious moments are spent privately at home surrounded by their families with trained hospice staff providing them care, or in a hospital ICU with the full power and wealth of the medical industry extending their vitality well beyond what their body could produce on its own.  It also provides a context for amendment should a patient’s health dramatically change.

The “death panel” is a regrettable misrepresentation on the part of those desperate to make the public afraid of the healthcare reform bill. But these political pitbulls are barking up the wrong tree.  Death, after all, is non-partisan.  The freedom to choose how we’re cared for during that time shouldn’t be any party’s adversary.

As it appeared in the San Bernardino County Sun on July 30, 2009:

I’ll never forget where I was on the afternoon of October 3, 1995.  I stood in the Campus Center at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va., nervous from the tension around me.  To my left about 25 or so white students huddled near the double doors leading to the outside.  Directly in front of me sat about 40 black students having taken up all the couches and chairs in front of the television.  Every eye in the room was trained on the screen.

“We the jury find the defendant, Orenthal James Simpson….not guilty….”

The reaction was chilling.  Every last white student in the room either cursed loudly or hung their heads.  Some even slammed their fists against the glass doors as they stormed out. The black students on the other hand leapt to their feet, erupting in cheers.  Some wept; many embraced each other.

This nightmare has played over and over since my generation, the first to be born in integrated America, came of age.

From the 1987 Tawana Brawley case in New York to the case against members of the Duke Lacrosse team in North Carolina in 2006 – white and black America has joined forces with an opportunistic media further fortifying racial spite.  Each spectacular incident leaves the American public more divided with many white Americans left to churn over what they see as a black disregard for actual justice while blacks remain convinced that true justice will never be served in what they view as white-run institutions.

This is the status quo in American race relations today.

The latest two-step in this dreadfully monotonous dance includes familiar stock characters.  On the white side of this picket fence; an officer of the police department in Cambridge, Mass., Sgt. James Crowley, who on July 16 arrested prominent African-American Scholar Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a Harvard Professor, at his home after a concerned neighbor called 9-1-1 fearing he may be the perpetrator of an attempted robbery. This after Dr. Gates produced proper identification proving he lived at the residence.

Yet once again, civil rights leaders reveal an antiquated ineptitude in handling the emergence of just such a mass mediated mess.

As though programmed, prominent black figures such as the Reverend Al Sharpton came out and immediately condemned the police department for a racially motivated arrest.  Massachusetts governor, Deval Patrick called it “every black man’s nightmare.” Most disappointing were the words of President Barack Obama who, when asked about the arrest, stated first that he was personally biased toward the professor due to their friendship.  He then went on to say in virtually the same breath, as he acknowledge not knowing the facts, that it was “clear” that the Cambridge police department “acted stupidly.”

In fact all of these men spoke without having any functional grasp on the facts.

If this is activism it’s sloppy activism at best.  We need to change the status quo in American Race relations for the sake of our children.  The political process demands this in order to have effective and productive discussions about difficult issues, such as welfare, abortion, immigration, affirmative action, gay rights, and education.

The movement has to take the moral high ground and not be author of snap judgments with supposed civil rights advocates seeming disinterested in the facts and willing to ignorantly fire hurtful comments at other Americans.

The arrest of Dr. Gates and the subsequent dismissal of charges presented a perfect opportunity to sow seeds for that change where the voices of white Americans and black Americans could speak with one voice about their concern for the truth, beckoning the nation to learn from incident.

Instead this incident, like others before it, threatens to discourage and harden more American hearts regarding the issue of race leading more to dismiss our struggle to heal the wounds of a deeply prejudiced past, becoming convinced that either things will never improve or, worse, that the real racists are civil rights advocates themselves.

As it appeared in the Daily Breeze (Torrance, CA) on January 29, 2009:

On the eve of last week’s historic inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama as the 44th president of the United States, I couldn’t help but pause and reflect. I thought of my experience growing up black in Virginia. I thought of my dad and my mother-in-law, who didn’t get to witness the inauguration from an earthbound presence.

I think of my son Jordan. When I was right around his age, I was getting introduced to “black” by the white community I lived in. I think of the kids whose parents taught them to hold my wrists instead of my hands during circle games in kindergarten – “because you’re black,” they said matter-of-factly. I thought of how the teacher tolerated it.

They knew I was black before I did. They called me black. I called myself brown. As it turned out, they were right. Unlike my kindergarten, Jordan’s preschool is one with kids of all races. His race has never even come up. But around the time I was his age, I was telling my dad that I was being called “nigger” in the sandbox and asking him what that meant.

Godspeed Barack.

I think of high school. I think of the girl who said to me in the lunch room, “Oh Bill! You’re so proper! I hardly remember you’re black!” I think of the guy on my football team who pulled me aside one day and said triumphantly, “Bill, you’re not a nigger. You’re a black man.” I remember how he beamed with pride as he proceeded to explain how another young black man in my class was a (real) nigger. As far as he was concerned, he and I should’ve gone and marched on Washington over his breakthrough.

Godspeed Barack.

I remember a particular Caucasian girlfriend who assured me her father would have no problem with our relationship. Then he found out. She called me crying, having just been berated by him and told, “People will think you’re a slut if they know you’re with (me). Just because he is black.”

Godspeed Barack.

I think of an employee in my college television department who used my skin color to describe how dirty the VCR heads were. I remember one day talking to the president of a major sorority who proceeded to blast black fraternities because she thought they were “the most racist thing ever.” She later found out there was a higher percentage of white folks in black frats than black folks in the white frats on campus.

I remember the guy who worked with me at a local restaurant who insisted that whites should be afraid of blacks because, by his count, “two-thirds of black men in Richmond are in jail.” All I could think is, “Good thing he’s not a cop. Odds are two in three he’d lock me up.”

Godspeed Barack.

I think of the teen in Redondo Beach who drove by yelling “Go back to Inglewood!” to my wife and son, then a baby in her arms. I think of the Middle Eastern man who said to me not long ago that he honestly felt black people are generally lazy, and his reason I wasn’t was because I’m white, essentially. And black people are all still lazy.

Godspeed Barack.

And through it all from the 1970s to the current decade, there are still those who engage me to zealously insist that racism is a thing of the past and all that remains is some colorblind form of classism.

Yet, despite where we’ve been and the personal stories of countless men and women that will never be told, there is still something so powerful to be said about where we’re going – or at least where we can go – together.

Only time will tell what kind of president Barack Hussein Obama will be. Regardless of whom we voted for, his success is in all of our best interest.

On inauguration day, my son got up and saw a new president who looks kind of like Daddy, or Pop, or Grampa, or Uncle LaMarr

And he didn’t even flinch. He just went about his day.

Hmm. Isn’t that something?

Godspeed Barack and good luck.