Ann Schaer grew up in Cherry Valley, NY, a small town of 600 residents surrounded by farms in the hills between Albany and Syracuse. Growing up, she and her brother had household chores and because she was interested, Ann would sometimes assist her father in his veterinary practice, once even, sewing up a dog. One summer Ann worked cleaning bathtubs at Sharon Springs, a mineral spa that served mostly Orthodox Jews from New York City who were prescribed baths. Some had tattooed numbers on their forearms from the concentration camps. That experience, of witnessing the remnants of Holocaust up close, affected her deeply and is one of the things that she’s set her compass by: helping people. And so, in following summers and throughout every vacation, she worked as a nurse’s aide in the local hospital. She continued in medicine, eventually becoming a physician’s assistant, a job that involves seeing, diagnosing, and treating patients. In 1977 she moved to Waldoboro where her parents had retired and joined a family practice, then to the Sheepscot Valley Health Center where she worked for 21 years.
My parents were both Republicans, my father more conservative than my mother. My dad was a large animal vet, and he was extremely aware of how hard farmers worked to get ahead. And hard work and respect were things he passed down to us kids.
I wasn’t really involved in politics in Cherry Valley. But when I got to college, everything sort of exploded with the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War, and I joined a campus civil rights group. At home, my father would spout off stuff like how he didn’t like hippies, but he could be very open-minded, too. Alan Ginsburg lived in Cherry Valley, and believe it or not, my dad enjoyed talking with him. One-to-one, my father was more open-minded than he was when he was generalizing.
But where I think my views got progressive was when I was studying at Wake Forest in North Carolina to be a physician’s assistant. We had a clinic and many of the patients we saw were very, very poor African Americans in terrible health. They had severe chronic diseases like extreme hyper-tension, uncontrolled diabetes, and various vascular diseases which in some cases led to the loss of a leg or even their eyesight. I wanted to make them better but most of the time I couldn’t. And I knew those conditions were really caused by poverty, that and their inability to get healthcare because they didn’t have the money for transportation and the time to go to a clinic. Not to mention the costs of medication. It was just so unfair.
I guess you could say it’s been my mission to try to fix that. And medicine is what I can do. So, even though it’s not quite so extreme in Maine, I see the same divide between those who can get care and those who can’t.
What keeps me up at night are the divisions between us. I was able to talk to my parents, and we often didn’t agree. But for a while I haven’t been able to talk to people on the other side. I don’t understand their anger. Well, I guess I do, because they’re feeling the same inequalities that I used to see, and still see.
Those disparities break my heart. I hoped the pandemic would bring us together, but it didn’t. People who were in good health, or who didn’t need to die, died. And now things now feel more unequal than ever. This is unacceptable.
Because I’m a Democrat, I feel that people look at me as being elitist and a fan of big spending. But I’m not. I grew up middle class. My family worked very hard. I’m retired now, but I worked hard. I pay taxes, and I pay them as happily as anybody can because I see firsthand how people need the services that clinics and schools give. And like my father, I’ve seen how people can work really hard but never seem to get ahead. He always felt that the very wealthy were not paying their fair share. How is that elitist?
There are so many things we could unite on. Everyone needs good health. Pregnant women need good maternal care to prevent miscarriages. Children need check-ups. Alzheimer’s patients need care and a cure. Science and medicine are discovering so much. I just want the solutions to reach everyone instead of just the very well-off.