We offered some affordable health care services outside today's Palin/Bachmann rally in Minneapolis

Bjorn Against

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Wed Apr-07-10 04:27 PM
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We offered some affordable health care services outside today's Palin/Bachmann rally in Minneapolis

When we heard that Sarah Palin was coming to Minneapolis to host a rally and fund raiser for Michele Bachmann we knew that we needed to give them both a warm Minnesota welcome. Bachmann was traveling outside her own district in the northern suburbs to spend some time in the Twin Cities and we thought that it was important that we could provide an important service for her while she was away from home.

We wanted to find a way in which we could welcome Palin and Bachmann to Minneapolis and provide them with a much needed service at the same time so we thought about some of the things that Minnesota is known for. While our state is famous for our lakes, the Mall of America, Prince, and our sports franchises none of these things really seemed like something we could use to give an appropriate welcome to Palin and Bachmann. My friend Coleen came up with the perfect Minnesota themed welcome however when she reminded us that Peanuts creator Charles Schulz was born in Minneapolis and grew up right next door in St. Paul.

Because Peanuts has its roots in the Twin Cities the comic strip has long been an important part of Minnesota culture. If you walk around the city of Saint Paul you regularly see statues of Snoopy or Charlie Brown, and until it was bought out by Nickelodeon a few years ago we even had an amusement park centered around Peanuts here at one time. While there is plenty of Peanuts memorabilia around the Twin Cities Coleen realized that we were missing one important thing, to the best of our knowledge there has never been a replica of Lucy's Psychiatric Help booth anywhere in the Twin Cities.

It was the perfect idea, not only would we be able to greet Palin with an iconic Minnesota image but we would be able to provide Bachmann and her supporters with a much needed service as well. We knew what we had to do, we needed to recreate Lucy's psychiatry booth and offer those who went to the rally with psychiatric help for the low cost of five cents. We thought that even though Palin and Bachmann support a health care system in which it costs thousands of dollars to get psychiatric help, even they would appreciate our low cost health care services. It may not have been the single payer system that we would like, but at least Lucy was on the right track towards making health care more affordable.

We set up our psychiatric booth directly across the street from the main entrance to the Minneapolis Convention Center. Because time was limited we were not able to find the best materials for costumes so we had to make Lucy a red head and we had to go without our Charlie Brown, but we did what we could to make a Peanuts themed event. I played Pigpen, and while I was not able to get the cloud of dust to appear around me as it does in the cartoon I did roll around in the mud a bit before the event to make myself dirty. I didn't know if people would get that I was Pigpen, but I made a sign that said �War Makes Me Feel Dirty� so I could at least make sure that rolling around in the mud was worth it.

One Palin/Bachmann supporter said to me �If it wasn't for the war in Iraq you would not have the freedom to hold that sign.� I informed him that the war in Iraq was not fought to protect our free speech rights but he did not want to listen, he started yelling at me �the only opinion that matters to you is your own, you are trying to prevent others from speaking their opinion!� I tried to explain to him that I had no problem with other people speaking their opinion but he insisted I did, I don't think he could quite grasp the irony that he was telling me not to express my opinion while simultaneously insisting that I did not want to hear any opinions different than my own.

Most of the Palin/Bachmann supporters were not eager to obtain our low cost psychiatric care, instead they turned their heads and tried desperately not to look at us. I am guessing they must not be fans of Peanuts.

While we were unable to provide services to many Palin/Bachmann supporters we hope that we at least made them aware that there is help available to them, all they have to do is realize that Lucy had a much better health care plan than Palin or Bachmann would ever allow them to have.