Dear Mitt,
Although my parents are not, I am part of the 47% of
the population who will vote for President Obama without considering you for a
split second. Although I do pay taxes (don’t tell Illinois, but I still owe
them a couple hundred for 2011), I am part of a disturbing trend: Like many of
my peers, I am more educated than my parents yet doing much, much worse
financially than they are. When they were my age, my parents had four children
(two of whom were in private school), two cars, a lovely four-bedroom house on
two rolling acres in the exurbs --but just one job and one bachelor’s degree
between the two of them. I have a master’s degree, a 1999 Honda Civic, a part-time
job, and $15,000 in medical and credit card debt. (Children? Oh, I’ll never be
able to afford those. I do have a cat.)
I inherited my dad’s work ethic, sense of humor, and
integrity but not his entrepreneurial spirit. As a kid, I had a Kool-Aid stand,
but it didn’t occur to me to charge for it. I didn’t have it in me to put it
all on the line to make some scratch the way my father did. (And frankly, I
don’t think he would have lent me money to start a business, anyway.) Instead,
I channeled my energy toward education, earning my master’s degree with the idealistic
goal of teaching English for an urban community college. I started at community
college, Mitt, and I believe in them. They’re wonderful places for the 47% who
don’t have the standardized test scores, relatives, or money to secure places
in prestigious universities.
Unfortunately, the United States was not the same
place when I finished grad school in 2002 as it was when I devised my plan in
1999. Now, ten years later, and even with twelve years’ teaching experience and
several publications, I’m still continuously looking for work. I had a full
time job for a while outside of academia, but I was laid off in 2009 after
fourteen months. I collected unemployment for a while, too, Mitt. It wasn’t
nearly what I earned at my job, and I preferred working, but I was able to keep
up with important payments and COBRA, and I’m grateful for that. I’m lucky now
to have health insurance through my domestic partner’s employer, but when I
wasn’t insured, I needed an ankle x-ray that took me nearly three years to pay
off. Can you imagine that, Mitt? I had three jobs at the time. Can you imagine
having three jobs but still not being able to afford health insurance? After putting
two more doctor visits and antibiotic prescriptions on my credit card to cover two
bouts of strep that same winter, I cut off my phone (although, I admit, I still
had a refrigerator) and found an HMO. It
was overpriced, had an enormous deductable, and didn’t cover pre-existing
conditions, gynecological exams, pregnancy, or birth control. In fact, in the
two years I paid for that policy, I never submitted a claim. Luckily, Planned
Parenthood was there for me. Can you imagine waiting for almost five hours in a
crowded waiting room at Planned Parenthood for a pap smear because, of your
city’s almost 600,000 people, a full fourth were living in poverty? Can you
imagine being sent away at 5:00 without ever seeing the doctor, frustrated
because you could have used that time to pick up a shift at one of the
restaurants you work for?
Can you imagine waiting tables with a graduate
degree, Mitt? Scratch that—can you imagine waiting tables?
I’m not sure if you’re capable of empathy, Mitt, but
your actions and words suggest you aren’t. I don’t begrudge anyone for their success.
Your money has nothing to do with why I’m voting for President Obama. I’m
voting for the President because when I hear him speak, I can feel that he
became a lawyer and chose to run for office because he genuinely loves this
country and its people. When I see you speak, I see a man whose first thought
upon waking up is “Me” and whose last thought upon going to sleep is “Me.”
You don’t represent people like me, Mitt, and you
never will.
Sincerely,
Denise Du Vernay
Denise Du Vernay is adjunct professor of English at
St. Xavier University in Chicago. She is the co-author of The Simpsons in the Classroom: Embiggening the Learning Experience with
the Wisdom of Springfield (McFarland, 2010) and has contributed to SpongeBob SquarePants and Philosophy, Breaking Bad and Philosophy, and the forthcoming
anthology Homer Simpson and the Promise
of Politics: Popular Culture as Political Theory (University Press of Kentucky, 2013).
