When I was a kid attending the Marathon County Fair I knew that if I wanted to ride the Ferris wheel I had to have money for a ticket. If I wanted a hot dog I needed a quarter. So I’m a little surprised at the confusion of people who just can’t figure out why we can’t fight two…or is it three?...wars and cut taxes at the same time. Never in the history of our republic have we attempted such an equation. No wonder we’re falling behind the rest of the world in math and science.
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It’s all torches and pitchforks in the national discussion about how we are to be a country. Discussion is hardly what you’d call it, because there is a lot of yelling and absolutely no listening. It’s fine to have government involved when we need to drive someplace, when our house is on fire, when crime threatens our neighborhoods, when we cannot afford private education, when we need to fight a war, when we retire. But when we are sick? When we look and look and cannot find work of any kind? Cheering at debates over state-sanctioned murder, cries to make sick people “pay” for their own misjudgments. How cow! The demonization of the poor is reaching frightening levels. There but for the grace of God…
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To call “Obamacare” a government takeover is like calling the bailouts of Wall Street and the major banks “socialism.” Socialism bailing out Wall Street? Really? How little do we know about economics, history, and political philosophy? Or the fact that Bush actually spearheaded the first bailout before he left office. Damn socialist. This discussion about health care reform also masks the fact that it is probably the biggest gift to private insurers in the history of the country…right up there with “Medicare reform” of a few years back. If we knew enough about our history, about the money trail that makes all this work (money always trumps ideology), and about ourselves we would still be angry. But we’d know who to really be mad at and it ain’t the folks that Rush and Sean and Laura and Sara tell are the villains.