So President Barak Obama has reopened the health care debate, and not a minute too soon.
We all know that American health care system is WAY BEYOND FUCKED UP... consider that over 40% of all personal bankruptcies are the result of medical bills; medical bills that some managed care network refused to pay-up on a good portion of the treatment that was need to extend someone's life. Let alone fully improve one's health condition.
I'm in a boat like that myself, all though it's not catastrophic yet. I was living in an apartment where the Jackass Landlord Steve Ringel had a building that was build in the 1920s and had black mold in the units, but he was a typical slumlord and decided to cover up the bio-hazard and the rent the unit(s) anyway. I started getting these migraine headaches that kept me out of work for a good two weeks in total... and I racked up at $4000 medical bill at UCLA (doing all sorts of tests that didn't track down the cause, just pinpointed that I was having a severe allergic reaction to some substance... they didn't know what though, so even after all those cash outlay I had no answers).
I was watching TV a little bit this week and the talk about socialized health care was popping up, because President Obama wants the mess fixed while he's vacationing, so when he comes back in the Fall it's the big debate/issue that's going to consume all his time and expend a huge amount of his political capital.
Today, I just so happened to catch Michael Moore's SICKO (2007) on Starz; now I have never seen this film, before but it was extremely eye-opening and made me not what to continue living in the US of A... I mean the country is teetering on bankruptcy anyway and will be for the foreseeable. So why stick around, ya know?
Aside from all the appalling shit that goes on in the denial of care because people have to get permission from those insurance fuckers to get treatment, I was particularly interested in the trips to Canada, the UK and France that Moore took to see out other countries deal with the health care issue. There was an interesting bit in SICKO were Moore is kickin' it in Paris, and he's having dinner with a group of Ex-Pats, and this black woman points out that in France the government is actually afraid of the people, afraid that they might riot -- and they have a history of the people rising up and slaughtering the government (Robspierre and the Rein of Terror)... 'cause you always hear about how the French are protesting some shit about wages in the news. Now, the woman pointed out that the difference in the US of A is, the people are
AFRAID of the government.
This fear of the government is the complete antithesis of democracy, but it's continually propagated in the United States. And it's a shame, because people are either afraid to talk out of turn or get labeled as a troublemaker. For large part of the 20th Century civil unrest and protest (violent or non-violent) was a big part of the American way of life, of demanding social change.
Although, Americans don't engage in group civil unrest and agitation. You have to think about the last time the American Public was really out to protest the bullshit that the government is doing -- on a wide spread level. Outside of the African-American dominated, Million Man March from the mid 90s, it was the 1960s, but the Protest Gene was basically stamped out of the American Public Psyche by the Kent State University Shootings. Because prior to that, the government was up here shooting and beating and water-cannoning black people - when they had limited civil rights -- and the occasional whites, those whites who were poor and had nothing to lose. But in the 60s, middle class and lower upper class whites joined the protest bandwagon and were instrumental in achieving change in the fabric of society.
However, the Nixon Administration -- which was doing socialist shit itself by practicing Price Fixed regarding Gasoline -- was so against the social disorder that was part of the 60s ethos, that when the students at Kent State were bucked down like animals in the forrest... white people recognized that their sons and daughters could get slaughtered just like niggas in the South. That the taxpayers' progeny were endangered -- because they threatened the military industrial complex's stranglehold on the American People -- made these happy-go-lucky white people recognize that they've been cowed into an existence that was basically this: keep your nose to the grindstone, work your ass of, rack up as much consumer debt as you can't even afford (as you'll notice the modern credit card, which existed prior to the 70s, began to have an expanded reach since the mid 70s) and be afraid, be very afraid of what the government can, but more importantly will, do to you if you seriously step out of line.
Shit, not even seriously out of line, just step out of line a little bit and you'll have an FBI file opened on you (as I know there is one on my 'cause of this blog and the previous blog).
When I hear these GOP/Confederates sons of bitches rage on and on about we're being seduced by the Socialists or that Barak Obama is a Socialists. I mean come the fuck on, yeah, come the fuck on!
It makes you wonder what the health care industry is really about. sure, people are supposed to make a buck in this country - drug makers, physicians and all that, but do you, Kaiser, Cigna, Humana, Blue Cross, need to rip your paying customers a new asshole if they happen to need some sort of medical care?
Deluge the GOP congressmen and women with letters and emails, demanding them to quit acting like bitches on this health care debate.
But mark my words -- The Kent State shootings were a true watershed in the destruction of democracy in the United States.
