Coming to Terms With It - Or Maybe Not

In February my employer of sixteen years – the CIGNA insurance company – eliminated my position. This event was hardly a surprise. Sixteen years is a good run at a place like CIGNA. As an executive told me shortly after I was hired, "Well, Bill, you've got the job. Now let's see if you can hold on to it." And so, as I joke to friends, I spent the next sixteen years playing Beat the Reaper, and doing a little work on the side.

So it wasn't a surprise when my number came up and I found myself tossed into that great metaphorical sausage machine called severance. Still it was a shock. I found that I wasn't angry, and I wasn't sad. Occasionally I had twinges of anxiety about the future. But mainly I was just at loose ends. Work had been the main thing in my life (large corporations demand this), and now there was a void on center.

Because I'd been at CIGNA for quite a while, I got a nice severance package – pay continuation for several months, subsidized medical coverage, even a seat at an outplacement agency, where I met people who were angry, sad, and sometimes just in a state of disbelief.

Gradually I began to come to terms with the tectonic shift in my existence, and I even began to discern the outlines of a new life. A rather pleasant life, actually. My retirement savings will be substantially short of plan, and my wife and I are definitely not buying a house in the south of France, but she still has her job. Is it possible that the Great Recession doesn't look like the Great Depression because of the two-income family? After all, lose one job, you still have one left. Just don't lose the second one.

I do want to get a job. I like to work, and we could use the money. The outplacement agency gave us classes, and I enthusiastically threw myself into the job hunt, but gradually, as the weather got warmer this spring, it became clear that I wasn't going to get a job anytime soon. This recognition came slowly, and I had time to come to terms with it. I keep looking, and I think one day I may fall into something.

In the meantime, I've discovered that there's plenty of work in the world, as long as you don't ask to be paid. I started my volunteering back in the winter, working on Michael Turner's campaign for district attorney in Philadelphia. Michael lost in the May primary, but my volunteer career continued to flourish. I became a volunteer runner at Back on My Feet, a running and rehabilitation program for people who live in homeless shelters. Billy, one of our members, recently completed the Philadelphia Marathon. I tutor at Mighty Writers, an after-school program for young students in South Philly.

And, after an interesting internal evolution, I started working for healthcare reform. I was helped in this process by Wendell Potter, an old friend and former chief corporate spokesperson at CIGNA, who started speaking out on healthcare reform in the middle of the year.

It's not easy to say that you spent sixteen years working at something, and that the result was failure. But that was the conclusion I came to. It may be hard for outsiders to understand how strongly we were focused on trying to control costs in health care. Let's face it: We failed. Time for another approach. I came to terms with it.

Still, to paraphrase The Godfather, it was nothing personal; just business. As I said before, I wasn't angry. Then the letter came. Because of my age, when CIGNA eliminated my position it also effectively made me a retiree. So, after a few months on COBRA (COBRA is health insurance for fired people, and the COBRA subsidy was one of the smartest ideas in the stimulus package), I signed up for CIGNA's retiree medical program. It is the only connection that I still have with my former employer.

CIGNA subsidizes a retiree's coverage through a complicated formula. The price was higher than I expected, but much better than the prices on the open market. I came to terms with it.

Then I got the letter. As of January 1, CIGNA is increasing my premium by 48 percent. There's a very complicated explanation for why this is happening. I actually ran the calculation, and it all makes sense, as long as you're living inside that algorithm. I don't live there any more.

I think I'm less annoyed than astonished. And I don't think I'll be coming to terms with this any time soon.

Politics in the Rain

I wrote this back in the spring, shortly after the primary elections in Philadelphia.

On the morning of Sunday, May 3, I was standing on the Marine Parade Ground in Philadelphia’s old Navy Yard. It was raining.

I was handing out political flyers for Michael Turner, who was running for District Attorney. The recipients were among the 23,000 runners who had just completed the Broad Street Run, a ten-miler that starts in the northern part of the city, at Central High School, and runs pretty much in a straight, flat line south on Broad Street, scooting around City Hall about halfway, and finishing in the Navy Yard.

It’s a great race. I’ve run it a bunch of times, and it’s always been a thrill.

After about an hour, I was quite thoroughly wet, and I started to wonder why I was there. I could be at home, dry, eating a nice breakfast cooked by my wife (she likes to do that on weekends), and reading the Sunday paper. I didn’t stay with that thought very long, because right underneath it was what I really wanted to be doing. I wanted to be running the race.

Every time I talked to a runner, this feeling got stronger. I’d approach them as they were crossing the parade ground to go back to their cars, or the subway. They’d already had the chance to eat a little something and recover a bit, but they were still in that marvelous afterglow that lasts until the leg muscles start to stiffen. I’d congratulate them on their run, and be rewarded with the most beatific smiles. Then I’d talk to them a bit about Michael. They didn’t mind the switch. Quite a few of them thanked me for coming out and offering the information. And then they’d be off, some of them already starting to limp, and I’d be on to the next runner.

Afterwards I took the subway to my home stop at Broad and South, and as I came up from the rabbit hole I found myself looking at the Arts Bank. It’s a small, very nice performance space in an old bank building. And I remembered the Russians. A few years ago I had been in almost the same spot when a young man handed me a flyer. It was for a performance later that day at the Arts Bank by a troupe of Russian circus artists.

My wife and daughter and I weren’t doing anything else, so we went. The Russians were quite good, and we were a large part of the audience. As I recall, there were more performers than spectators.

Sometimes flyers aren’t enough. On Tuesday, May 19, they weren’t enough. Not only did Michael Turner lose, but the election came close to setting a new record for low turnout in Philadelphia.

Think of it. There are 1.1 million registered voters in Philadelphia. Nearly 900,000 of them are Democrats. The winner in the Democratic primary attracted a little more than 40,000 votes. (There is a general election in November, but it is widely considered to be a formality.)

This is not my idea of majority rule.

My wife and I volunteered on the Obama campaign. We registered voters, made phone calls, handed out flyers, made buttons. And we put up campaign workers in our home. One of them, whom I came to call The Mighty Quinn (not his real name), showed up after the primary, but months before the general election. I have never seen anybody, including my daughter, use a cell phone more.

I had no idea what he was doing, but my wife employed the expedient of conversation and soon knew what was going on. As she put it, “They’re identifying every vote in Pennsylvania, and then figuring out how to get it.”

The Obama campaign has come to be known for its novelties – the use of the Internet for fund raising, the enormous crowds that appeared, seemingly at the drop of a hat. But the real secret was they did it all – from mass communication on TV through one-on-one community organizing. And they were very methodical.

I have two thoughts about all this. First, the Obama people are a lot smarter and tougher than I realized during the presidential campaign. Second, the rest of us have a lot of catching up to do.