Breakfast at Denny's: A Grand Slam meal with Teabags!

Our city councilman's weekly meeting with his constituents featured our Congressman, Silvestre Reyes. It took place in its usual weekly venue, a neighborhood Denny's restaurant. Mrs. Dada received an e-mail yesterday that a group of conservative teabaggers would be there. That sounded pretty exciting to me, so I thought I would tag along with her. With food being served during the meeting, I confess I was secretly hoping a food fight might ensue.

Sadly, that didn't happen. No marmaladed muffins were thrown. Obviously, El Paso Teabaggers lag behind other Teabaggers in rudeness and crudeness so prominently in the news from other parts of the country recently. There was no shouting down of opposing points of view. But there was much of the same disinformation as elsewhere presented.

It was a standing room only crowd of considerable size and those of us for health care reform with government involvement were hugely outnumbered. Afterward, the throng of Teabaggers hung around outside giving interviews to the media. Mrs. Dada, eager to express an alternative viewpoint was asked to step up. She did, interviewing with the local CBS affiliate and El Paso Times.

It was then I was approached by a man whom I thought was eager to speak. He inquired, "So you're for the president's reform." I responded affirmatively with a few grave misgivings, i.e., the suspicion that with private and public options, neither will work efficiently which may result in two messed up alternatives and angrier mobs.

But that aside, we then discussed our differences. One of the most upsetting omissions of the discussion during breakfast inside was the $trillions all of our god-damned wars are costing us. That never comes up when "health care reform we can't afford" is being discussed. I was able to bring that up in my discussion with the man outside.

But when I mentioned, under a public option, if you lose your job you won't lose your insurance, he responded that he had recently lost his job, has a family of four children and had lost his health insurance. I rued the number of under- and uninsured families that have gone bankrupt under similar circumstances. He proudly responded, "I've never declared bankruptcy."

I stared at him incredulously and finally said, "Most likely because you never had a need for major health care during those times."

The conversation just sort of disintegrated after that. I wished him and each member of his family good health until they have insurance again.