Dear Ohio,

Once again, I write to you because you are the bellwether election state.  In that sense, you are a critical part of the vetting process for presidential candidates.

In my last letter, I confided how bewildered I was that you had chosen a president so unlike my friends, Don and Ilene, who both grew up in Canton, Ohio.  Everyone who knew these folks looked up to them, and some of us even tried to be more like them.  They were people who invested their whole lives in the premise that everyone deserves to be treated with compassion, fairness and respect.

The house my friend Ilene grew up in still stands on 24th Street in Canton.  Her father built it pretty much with his own hands.  She remembered it as a place of love and understanding where she felt cherished.  She said he was the kind of man who made her want to be good in his eyes.  She remembered how he explained to her that quite often, it wasn’t the fault of his clients that they couldn’t pay their bills.  Times were tough back then, and even spare change was hard to come by in some households.

You know, dear Ohio, when you don’t live in a state and you just meet people who once lived there, you have a tendency to think that everyone in that state is like the people you know.  So, for a long time now, I have thought most Ohioans were like Don and Ilene – examples of compassion, understanding, respect and decency.  I still cling to that belief.

But I noticed in the paper the other day that the president has figured out a way to dump people off the rolls of Medicaid, the federally supported health insurance program for the poor.  He will now allow states to impose work requirements as a condition of receiving Medicaid.  And two of the states racing to get federal permission to implement such a plan are Ohio and its neighbor, Kentucky.

That brings to mind a little story about my friend Ilene.    [Read more…]