91-year-old veteran brings audience to tears as he explains the importance of National Health Care
Go NHS!! Maybe one day we'll get universal health care.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/03/25/1373229/-91-year-old-veteran-brings-audience-to-tears-as-he-explains-the-importance-of-National-Health-Care
No one in our community was safe from poor health, sickness and disease. In our home, TB came for my oldest sister, Marion, who was the apple of my dad’s eye. Her sickness and his inability to pay for medicine broke his heart.
Tuberculosis tortured my sister and left her an invalid that had to be restrained with ropes tied to her bed. My parents did everything in their power to keep Marion alive and comfortable but they just didn’t have the dosh to get her to the best clinics, doctors or medicines.
Instead she wasted away before our eyes until my mother could no longer handle her care and she was dispatched to our workhouse infirmary where she died 87 years ago. Mum and dad couldn’t afford to bury their darling daughter. So like the rest of our country’s indigent, she was dumped nameless into a pauper’s pit.
My family’s story isn’t unique. Rampant poverty and no health care were the norm for the Britain of my youth. That injustice galvanized my generation to become, after the Second World War, the tide that raised all boats.
In 1945, at the age of 22, still in the RAF after a long hard Great Depression and a savage and brutal war, I voted for the first time.
Election Day 1945 was one of the proudest days in my life. I felt that I was finally getting a chance to grab destiny by the shirt collar and that is why I voted for Labour and for the creation of the NHS.
Today my heart is with all of those people from my generation who didn’t make it past childhood, didn’t get an education, didn’t grow as individuals, didn’t marry, didn’t raise a family and didn’t enjoy the fruits of retirement. They died needlessly and too early. But my heart is also with the people of the present, who are struggling once more to make ends meet, and whose futures I fear for.
Today, we must be vigilant. We must be vocal. We must demand that the NHS will always remain an
nstitution for the people and by the people.
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And don't think we didn't have similar institutions here in the US....we had poor farms and orphanages.
My husband's sharp as a tack 94 yo grandmother was trying to tell the 20 somethings in the family about them and they thought she was joking.
"Rags to riches and back to rags in three generations" also means knowledge, imo.
