Martial Arts, Med4All, and Fighting for People We Don't Know (Patreon)

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This episode is dedicated to my friend Paul. This isn't Paul the cohost to my podcast, but Paul, an old friend from the grappling media world. Paul recently died on his birthday after more than a decade with cancer. How we even connected was because he probably had the very first strictly BJJ podcast, which launched in the early 2010s. I started an MMA and grappling training blog in the late 90s, which was probably also one of the first of its kind. The culmination of that first blog is what you're listening to now, in the form of Southpaw. There's a nonstop direct throughline from that initial blog to this podcast.

My old training blog is how I even met Paul, my cohost, but also some of my early guests. There are even some current listeners who've been with me since the beginning, and better know my arc as a martial artist.

Though Paul is gone, his journey isn't over because I and everyone listening to this podcast are on the same mission, and we'll keep it going. Paul and I had similar political evolutions through the martial arts. We had different approaches, but he was always challenging reactionaries we knew in the martial arts to be more empathetic, to help your fellow human being, to move towards universal and egalitarian principles. He was always quick to call out injustices he saw in the martial arts community, much to the criticism of many. My approach was to try to get to people before they got indoctrinated, to get to those coins standing on their sides to fall towards justice. So when I started Southpaw, he was super supportive.

But Paul and I also had something else that shaped us, cancer. And that's something people who followed my previous blogs and podcasts know. I had my sister, my father, my mother, and even my dog die of cancer, all in a very short period. And though Paul and I had brief conversations over the years, it was through cancer that we ended up really connecting and having long discussions. And what we talked about was the state of healthcare, the cost of healthcare, the problems of healthcare. We talked about Medicare for All. How could we not?

My sister went bankrupt because of cancer, and my brother-in-law is still in a bad financial situation. He lives with his siblings, but any time it's like that, you're always one fight with your family away from being homeless. Medical costs are still the number one cause of bankruptcy.

People tell themselves homelessness happens because of things like drug abuse or poor work ethic. They make up these excuses to feel better about the world. To excuse the world. That bad things only happen because of self-made decisions and that ultimately the world is just. But the reality is, a lot of people end up homeless for medical reasons. We all eventually die. For the majority of us, it won't happen quickly and abruptly in our sleep. It will drag out. It will be chronic. Then the broad majority of us have health costs still looming. Then how is it not reasonable to believe this is one of the most destructive things to our finances? Especially when most Americans still can't afford a $400 emergency. But that's scary, to think we are that much closer to being homeless, really one emergency away, than we are to the extremely wealthy. But that's real.

And dying not because of illness but due to a possible lack of coverage is also a reality people refuse to think about. According to several studies, 68,000 people a year die because of a lack of proper coverage. I'd say that estimate is too low.

We all die. Most of us have insurance from work. If you're really sick, you can't work. This is a reality for most of us so why do so many people have class solidarity with those who never have to worry about something like this?

Paul and I discussed all of this. From problems with insurance. Lack of money. Trying to get into trials and studies to get treatment. It's like always trying to earn a scholarship to live. A life scholarship. The prize? Living. But that also means there were a lot of people who didn't get the same scholarship and died. It's medical hunger games that lack any human dignity.

A lot of these problems in our healthcare system, people can recognize on their own if they actually sat there and thought about it and worked through it. But it's too painful for some. Lose your job, where's your insurance? Maybe you have insurance through a spouse, but because of the pressures of cancer, you get a divorce, Now what? And that's actually pretty common. I've seen it myself way too many times. And I don't blame anyone for leaving, it's so hard on you. Believe me, I know. All caretakers now. That's why often, the sick person doesn't even begrudge their spouse for leaving.

If you happen to live in a state that gives you the full benefits of the Affordable Care Act, what happens if you work a job that doesn't provide insurance but you don't make enough to buy from the market place? But make too much to get state coverage? Or if you are freelance or work for yourself and also are stuck in a middle area? What if by the time you get covered by the state, you die?

All of these things I mentioned are very common. Illness, homelessness, poverty are not just intertwined, they are often the same problem. If you can't work, if you're on your own, what do you do?

If you live far from work because where you work is too expensive to live, and your car breaks down, that could be the end of your job. Then what? And what if you now get sick because you can't take care of yourself? Then what?

There is no secret answer we are unaware of because it doesn't exist. This is not rocket science, but it is painful to recognize.

What if, instead of cancer, you have undiagnosed bipolar disorder. And one day you have a psychotic break. Let's say you're an adult, an only child. You're single. Both of your parents have either passed or are unable to assist you. What happens to you? What if instead of a psychotic break, it's depression or panic attacks? What if there's no one to intervene on your behalf? That's a lot of us.

What if it's someone with a severe mental disability who's always been taken care of by their parents, but one day the parents don't come home. Maybe something happened to them. Then what happens to that person with the mental disability?

What if you're a young person who either comes out as LGBTQx, or somehow your parents find out, and they disown you. But you were on their insurance. Now what?

What if you come from a history of oppression in this country and have never had private insurance and always had to fight for state coverage? What if you weren't only oppressed, but you were also stigmatized for being on state aid. A "welfare queen" or a moocher. Is this not a double injury? For your oppressors to hurt you, then hurt you again for seeking help from the injury they caused? You can only lose. Oh, but you're in a bad place because you're lazy and on drugs, right? It couldn't be the wielders of power that are the problem...

The marginalized and the oppressed are most in need of health insurance. It's a basic human right. But we make it seem like social justice and Medicare for All are two different things.

People who put them in opposition do so out of political convenience. To separate social justice that is free to support from the social justice that has material costs. One that only costs in virtue signals vs. one that costs in all of us paying our share to help everyone. The arguments that it'll actually save them in overall costs don't move them because it's really about their money going to other people. But whenever you pay for private insurance through work, it's group coverage. It means you're already paying for other members in the group.

Yet the oppressors have again caused double injury, by stigmatizing those who are for social justice programs that have material costs as being the ones who are against social justice. Think about it, any time someone wants justice that has costs, they are automatically the socialists, and somehow anything that has to do with money or economics can't be social justice. Why are the ones who want justice at no costs the true activists? Why is the symbolic the only things that are allowed to be defined as being socially just? Why are the ones who only use words that have no real-world bite the heroes? And the ones who want to actually build a new system with real money, the ones who are anti-social justice? These are oppressive and hypocritical definitions of justice. But who defined these terms? It would never come bottom up. It would never be defined this way from the people who actually need this justice. It could only be defined this way from our oppressors. I mean, who on the bottom only want words? That would never come bottom up. No other country's version of the left defines it in these terms because that's a reactionary perspective. But here in the US, this is accepted as progressive. Rich white liberals get to define what is social justice and it's maddening. But money buys microphones so their definition is what become the default definition. But if we vote with our dollars, which is how the rich have framed things, which candidate is raising the most money from common people? But now that the voting with your dollars idea is backfiring, the rich no longer talk about voting with your dollars. Then they can pretend Sanders raising the most money from the most amount of people isn't meaningful.

And to keep the charade that we don't need any new systems, just symbolic changes, we must then pretend there are all these safety nets that don't exist or ostensibly don't exist. We think bad things only happen to bad people because we don't want to see it happens to innocent people all the time. Every day.

Sometimes the only way you can get medical aid is to literally almost die or actually die and hope somehow you end up in the emergency room. For many, they can only get medical attention right before they die or maybe after they die.

Paul and I discussed how many times he almost died because of these reasons and how he survived this long either through luck or getting into some program at a hospital or because he went to the emergency room, and they HAD to take him. If you have to die to see someone, then it's already too late. If the ER is the only way to get help for a chronic, life-threatening illness, then it's already too late.

If you know someone who survived cancer and they told you the only reason they are alive is because they got into a special program, it means insufficient coverage and funds almost killed them in the richest country in the world. If you know someone who's in a program like that now and they're saying it's what's keeping them alive, it means they are marginally attached to living because the only reason they are living now is because of luck. Because without that program, they have nothing else.

The number one use of crowdsourcing now is healthcare costs. We're already subsidizing others. You don't have to look. The signs are all there. You just have to stop willfully ignoring them. Because we all notice stuff every day, but how come something this dire isn't one of the things we notice? Why is this a pattern?

I had these same situations with my father and mother, trying and pleading to get them into these special programs. Keeping them alive in the meantime via ER visits.

Part of the reason why my father, mother, and sister died is that they got diagnosed too late. Because they were all afraid to go in because of the possible medical bill. That was such a normal response from my family, I didn't recognize how fucked that was until they started dying on me. Avoiding doctors because you fear the bill should not be a thing. That should never have been a thing here. We're just trying to right the boat now but for many, it's already too late.

My very last conversation with Paul, we talked about Medicare for All and how he feared if he didn't get it in time, he might die.

That was his fear. Everyone who is not ultra-rich, who has cancer wants Medicare for All. Everyone who has a life-threatening illness, whether it be physical or psychological, wants Medicare for All. So many of the people smeared as "toxic Bernie Bros" online, look at their Facebook or their Twitter, and you will find that their anger comes from some life-threatening illness. Usually, it's cancer. Maybe to them, maybe to a family member, maybe to a friend. But their stories have been edited and portrayed in a way where it leaves that context out of it. We talk a big game about fake news, but how is that type of misrepresentation not fake news? Why is that allowed? Who gets to control what is considered fake news? Again, who defines all these terms? It's always top-down, never bottom up. We never get to tell our own stories, we just cross our fingers and hope the powerful tell our stories correctly if they do so at all. And we are powerless when they misrepresent us.

In a story I saw about how toxic Bernie Bros are, I saw a quote from someone saying, "Fuck you. If you're not on our team, you're against us. Fuck off."

Having spent a lot of time in cancer wards and in hospice, that type of anger, that type of language, sounded familiar. It's the language of "fuck cancer." It's the war analogies we use with cancer. "It's me vs. cancer." "Team sick person vs. cancer." You'll see this in shirts and hats. You'll see how this creates a healthcare solidarity. How people come together around this battle for lives. To some of you, this will sound really familiar. To some of you, things are making more sense.

So when I found the original tweet, it wasn't a surprise to see that it was a response to someone saying we don't need Medicare for All—our current system is fine. And the angry toxic Bernie Bro wasn't a "bro" but a mother who lost a son to cancer. Her longer thread was about how gut wrenching that was. How insensitive and cruel it is to say everything is fine. But you don't see that context. You just see the anger. And without the context, the anger seems unwarranted. Or out of nowhere, or it could only come from a toxic individual because only toxic people would say such things out of nowhere. But why aren't people asking WHY are people angry? How can people in the media cut this out? Or not report this part of it? Why are they not showing the context for the anger? When so many of them gladly wear the same fuck cancer shirts? How can anyone ignore these human elements and keep pretending it's just anger from bad people? If ignoring these truths don't make you awful, then give me a better explanation?

People think these die-hard emotions come from a cult of personality around Sanders. Let's be real. Have you heard Sanders? He's not a person you build a cult around; otherwise, Larry David would have just as big of a cult status. Actually, every old Brooklyn Jewish guy would be beloved, which is far from the actual anti-Semetic truth.

Sanders is not an Obama. He's not even a Trump. He doesn't have the precision in presidential speaking of either of the Clintons. Bernie still points with his index finger when he talks. That's a no-no for anyone running for president.

There's no cult around Sanders. He's a proxy for Medicare for All. Our anger and our emotions all came from our lived experiences. We didn't know Sanders for 20 or 30 years, but we've had people we've known for 20 to 30 years die because of insufficient coverage.

If you just told someone online that you're dying and that you need coverage and they tell you that you don't need it—or that they oppose it—how do you not take that as someone telling you to die? That IS what they are telling you. They are just not being explicit so they can have plausible deniability. To still make YOU the bad guy for taking it wrong. "Why are you attacking me?"

But if you're not stupid and you understand someone is telling you to die or that you don't deserve to live, why is anger not a proper response? Even to say that's not a proper response is a human indignity. It's cruel, and it's wrong. The whole way sick people's anger, dying people's anger, grieving people's anger have been portrayed is all cruel and wrong. 

What if you are as bad as you've been portrayed by Bernie supporters? Are these sick people the bad guys, or are you the bad guy, and they've been portraying you accurately? But you just don't like how come off. You don't want to believe this about yourself. You don't pretend for us, you pretend you don't know these realities to preserve your own self-image. And to do so, to stay consistent to your self-image, you have to throw everyone else under the bus.

But if this is the wrong assessment, then prove it. Not with your words or intentions but in your actions. Go show you don't want people to die needlessly. That we shouldn't live in hunger games.

Social democracy, anti-capitalism, anti-neoliberalism, socialism, revolution, liberation politics, liberation theology, whatever you want to call it, it's all different ways of saying anti-hunger games. So what are you saying when you oppose all of these ideas or say they are dangerous? What is dangerous? To us, you are what's dangerous.

My friend Paul dying of cancer might have been an eventuality. But his fear was that if he had a shot at living and beating cancer, that not having coverage would be the reason he died. If you die of an illness because it's your time, then that's life. If you die from lack of treatment, that's injustice. That's why the incremental approach to Medicare for All is also unjust. If you've ever dealt with something life-threatening, a delay is the same as a death sentence.

The elections are upon us, and we have a chance to vote for someone who you know will fight for Medicare for All because that's all he's ever talked about since he first ran for office. With everyone else, you hope they'll fight for it. With him, you know he will. It's his unique obsession with this issue that makes him the best champion for it. And that's why some people don't like him because he doesn't budge. He's too obsessive about this one topic. Well, an angry advocate is someone who Paul needed in his corner. It's who my sister needed. Who my father needed. My mother needed. When the consequences are life and death, it's not only a gamble, it's a bad gamble to support someone who might at best argue for a Medicare for All that's incremental and not nearly as robust.

When it's this dire, you want someone obsessed, someone who thinks about this all day, someone who stays up at night thinking about this stuff. Someone who's informed by trauma from this stuff. Because all that energy can have a productive end. Supporting him is our chance to say we care about all this stuff.

Thinking Medicare for all is not that important is a privilege. Because you have never felt this pain and felt this powerless. Thinking it's something you can be casual with and put secondary to non-life or death issues, is a privilege. Because, like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the more privileged you are, the more basic needs have been met for you. Well, good for you. But the rest of us haven't had those needs met. And we can't be so casual with human lives.

For the privileged, they complain about going to doctors who don't want to treat them "holistically" and just want to give them medicine. Well, for many of us, we're dying because we can't see a doctor or get that medicine you're being so nonchalant about. We'd love to have that problem. Because your problem is our blessing.

My family currently has state coverage. The illnesses of my father and mother took huge financial tolls on me. The same with complications with my wife's pregnancy and the birth of my son.

I'd actually prefer someone more radical than Bernie Sanders, a lot of us would. But he's the best we have right now, and he wants to set a basic minimum floor for our human rights. That's a start. But those around me who think he's too radical or complain to me about how he talks rather than about his policies, or talk shit about the angry sick people online who call them out on their callousness, they always say to me "but surely you must get it, right? You get it, right? I don't get why anyone supports Sanders. They're just Bernie Bros." And they don't get it, that's their privilege. They don't get the suffering.

And they keep saying "you get it, right" as if I'm in the same privileged situation they're in, so since everything else has been supposedly met for me, like it has been for them, I must care about the same stuff they do. That's gaslighting. To normalize your privilege to make it seem like everyone else is in the same situation. Because yes, if that were true, and everyone else had it as good as you, then yes, there's no need for Sanders and indeed all these angry people are assholes. That's IF your gaslighting reality were true. But it's not, and you're not representing the real world or our lived experience, only yours. It's a form of supremacy, where you're privileged experience is supreme or more important than the rest of ours.

Are you being practical and everyone else is the asshole, or is everyone else being practical and you're the asshole? Well, let me ask you this, what's your stance on people dying of things like cancer and their ability to get full coverage? What's your stance on the first and biggest advocate of this proposal? And how much or how little does this matter to you? How much do human lives or the ability to save human lives matter to you? Are virtue signals more important to you than actual morals? How much of your politics are informed by things like ethics and morals, or the lessening of human suffering? Or is it the other way, your ethics and morals are informed by your politics, and you prioritize your morals accordingly? Don't fuck with cats, but killing a person of color? Eh, that's kind of bad.

I once asked Paul what he thinks it means to be a martial artist. He said: "Being a martial artist means you are on a path of personal development. This includes self-defense on a physical and technical level and also on a more global scale. A real martial artist works to protect themselves by eating right, caring for the environment, and understanding that our communities are interconnected. If we would stop someone from attacking a person in front of us, shouldn't we do the same if it's happening across the street? Across the state? Across the planet?"

This very much sounds like the question Senator Bernie Sanders recently asked: "Are you willing to fight for that person who you don't even know as much as you're willing to fight for yourself?"

That's the ethos of martial arts. But that's also the ethos of being a good person.

Shouldn't we try to help people if we could? People who are on the camp of "kind of" and "maybe" get mad and confused because they get lumped with the people who say no. These are the people who complain the most about online culture because they feel attacks against them are unwarranted. If it's life or death, then kind of and maybe are the same things as no. This doesn't just apply to healthcare but all left policies. Should suffering people not only domestically but across the world get basic human rights and dignities? Do human lives matter? It's a yes or no question, but cruel cowards will create answers that are neither a yes or a no. But if that's your worldview, then I guess it makes sense why to you, we are the assholes.