We once had a European friend who opened our eyes to the possibilities of different ways of living. Egon Osterloh was the child of a German father and a Norwegian mother. He grew up in Bremen, Germany in a time just after World War II.
Egon often recounted how his parents purchased a small apartment in the town where they lived after the horrific world war that changed the face of Germany. The went to work for the local telephone company and would spend their work lives there until they finally retired. Each day they used public transportation to get to and from their jobs. In the meantime Egon entered school and was placed in advanced classes learning English along with reading and writing in German. By the time he was ready for college he was fluent in German, English, Norwegian, French, Spanish and Italian. His schooling provided him with two years of college credit at the University of Houston where we met him in the nineteen sixties.
Egon’s uncle was a professor of Sociology at the university and he introduced my husband Mike to his nephew. The friendship between the two students flourished immediately and Egon became the brother that Mike had always dreamed of having. Our lives would become permanently intertwined even after Egon married a beautiful woman from Chicago named Marita. Egon was our source of a worldwide view of life. From him we learned about people and places that would otherwise have been foreign to us. He also opened our minds to possibilities other than those we had learned as American citizens.
Egon spoke of playing in the bombed out ruins of Bremen in his early childhood. Times were tough right after the war and he developed scurvy from a lack of needed vitamins. Nonetheless he experienced a good life with his parents and enjoyed travels to Norway and across Europe with them. With his facility with languages he felt comfortable wherever he traveled and he learned to value every person and place that he encountered. He brought his optimism and insights to the United States and adapted quickly to our ways of living.
There came a time when my mother had grown older and was struggling with a low income and an aging body. One evening Egon contrasted the life of his mother with mine. He noted that his mother had no need of a car because public transportation took her wherever she needed to be while my mother often worried about the expense of having a car to take her on her errands. Much of the anxiety that my mother experienced involved keeping her car in running condition without busting her meager budget while Egon’s mother never had to think of such things.
Egon noted that his mother went regularly to her dentist and doctors without paying a dime while my mother fretted over her copays even when she finally had Medicare. My mother lost a tooth or two because she could not afford the cost of saving them with dental work. Egon’s mother took it for granted that she would always get whatever kind of care she needed.
My mother had to drive a rather long distances from her home to procure the groceries that she needed while Egon’s mother walked a few blocks from her home to shop for food. Somehow her life seemed to be much easier than my mother’s world of constant worry. It made me wonder why our nation which is so rich is reluctant to improve life for all of its citizens.
Many of the arguments about universal healthcare revolve around long waits in countries where everyone visits doctors for free or very low prices. The truth is that those long waits exist here but we have to pay so much for them that citizens of other nations do not incur. The price of health insurance keeps rising along with the costs of medical care that often price many Americans out of the system. It may cost me twenty dollars since I have Medicare and a supplemental insurance but the same procedure might run hundreds or even thousands of dollars for younger folks. Additionally waits for specialists are now running six to nine months which is hardly different from socialized medicine.
Egon never became a citizen of the United States because his mother worried that she would never seen him again if he did so. Each year he returned to Germany to visit with his parents and to get the dental work that he needed. He would joke that the savings in dental procedures more than paid for the trip. He was never able to understand why Americans are willing to pay so much for medical care that was free or low cost in his place of birth.
I suppose that we Americans have been lulled into believing that things like universal healthcare for all is the first step toward becoming a communist nation. Of course such hyperbole is false but as long as people believe such ideas we will continue to pay the horrific price of our stubborn insistence on keeping medicine out of reach for most citizens. We will cling to gasoline and new roads rather than creating system of mass transportation. We will make life difficult for anyone whose financial condition is weak and we will do so to enrich people who are already wealthy simply because they want to horde most of their money rather than sharing it to make lives better.
Egon’s way of seeing things would have provided my mother with a much more worry free life. His was a tale of two cities. In one life was difficult and harsh, in the other essentials were there for the asking. Perhaps one day we will have the good sense to make changes that benefit us all but for now people like my mother will have to fret and worry about getting from one day to the next in a country where wealth seems more important than caring for each other.
All It Takes Is A Little Love 