The Buck and Mike Blog

I should know that at my age I should not be playing LED Frisbee in the dark or tripping over logs in the campground, but old bears never learn. I have a couple scratches from falling into a blackberry bush while leaping to catch a Frisbee and a rather painful bruise where I tripped over a log in the middle of the night.

I caught the Frisbee, but I believe it was the log trip that destroyed my trusty 2+ year-old Samsung Blackjack. No, it is not a flip phone. It just ended up that way. Bent backwards. The AT&T people tried valiantly but couldn’t even extract the SIM card. When I finally did so at home with some pliers, portions were left inside. I lost all data except for a few photos on my removable flash media.

Silver lining: I’ve been such a wonderful customer for over a decade and had the phone so long I qualified for a phone upgrade. I’ve now joined the i-Phone cult.

It was a great campout, however.

I remember when Edward Kennedy first came to the Senate he was called “Teddy” because he was the youngest member of the three-son Kennedy dynasty in Washington. He was a Teddy bear who became the Lion of the Senate. His political career was much longer than that of his brothers, President John F. Kennedy and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, both of whom were assassinated at the height of their careers. Though he came from a background of privilege, he fought his entire life for working class people.

In this video—during which Sen. Kennedy speaks of the need for universal health care—you get a glimpse of why he was the Lion. How ironic that the man who called universal health care “the cause of my life,” who introduced comprehensive legislation over a dozen times during his career, and who believed that everyone should have the same quality of medical insurance as Members of Congress, should die of cancer while that same Congress continues to debate who deserves coverage and who does not.

Edward Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, universal health care

I’ve been wanting to blog about health care reform in the U. S. for some time now. I’m all for reform, because the health care system the United States has now is horribly broken. I’m not sure what the initial health care reform bill should look like, but I don’t think we can wait until we agree on every point before we begin to institute reforms. Our country has never worked that way anyway. The U. S. may celebrate July 4, 1776 as Independence Day, but the U.S. Constitution wasn’t adopted until September 17, 1787, and ratified by the states months later. In between those dates were other attempts to get it right. Our history of beginning major change but then later hammering out the details goes back to the founding of this nation.

I read a piece by Roger Ebert today, and he answers a lot of questions people have. Yes, Roger Ebert, the movie guy. He’s also a genuine American, which makes him as qualified as anyone to discuss health care reform, and he does it quite clearly. Following is an excerpt from his blog entry on the Chicago Sun Times website, and I recommend you click through to that site to read the entire piece.

Excerpt from Roger Ebert’s “I’m safe on board. Pull up the life rope.”

Having read through some 600 comments about universal health care, I now realize I took the wrong approach in my previous blog entry. I discussed the Obama health plan in political, literal, logical terms. Most of my readers replied in the same vein. The comments, as always, have been helpful, informative and for the most part civil. My mistake was writing from the pragmatic side. I should have followed my heart and gone with a more emotional approach. I believe universal health care is, quite simply, right.

It is a moral imperative. I cannot enjoy health coverage and turn to my neighbor and tell him he doesn’t deserve it. A nation is a mutual undertaking. In a democracy, we set out together to do what we believe is good for the commonwealth. That means voluntarily subjecting ourselves to the rule of law, taxation, military service, the guaranteeing of rights to minorities, and so on. That is a cheap price to pay. » Read the rest of this entry »

health care reform, Constitution, Ebert

I’m only posting this because we haven’t blogged in a while, and I thought I should post something, but I don’t have anything to write about. It’s a photo I took of the St. Johns Bridge in North Portland, and I’ve (hopefully) artfully worked on it with image editing software GIMP. Hope you like it.

Our good friend Mike Redford brought his two children, Kyle and Marlee, to our home in Washington, DC, many years ago – too many to remember, exactly. We enjoyed having Kyle and Marlee visit. Their parents, Mike and Karen, had done a good job and both kids were well-mannered, intelligent and inquisitive. Kyle came back with his dad several years later and stayed with us once again. He was older, in his mid-teens, I think, and had only grown brighter and more inquisitive. Thoughtful questioning always impresses me as a sign of a person who sees value in expanding his or her mind, and both Kyle and Marlee expressed that quality abundantly.

Buckley and I didn’t see Kyle or Marlee after that, but we saw their dad, Mike, often and spoke with him on the phone frequently and sent each other postcards, letters and photos. Mike always kept us up to date on how his two children were doing, ever the proud papa, and through the photos we watched the two children grow to adulthood.

Last week, on Tuesday, July 28, Kyle was enjoying riding his skateboard late at night near his home in Reading, Pennsylvania. We don’t know the full details, but at one point Kyle rode the board down a steep street, crashed and struck his head. He suffered traumatic brain injury and never recovered consciousness. He was taken to the nearest hospital and died 24 hours later, on Wednesday, July 29, his parents and his sister by his side. Kyle David Redford was 21 years old. » Read the rest of this entry »

Kyle David Redford