October 23, 2009

• Spend my money first on FIGHTING DEATH!

  “Death is the issue! How can we not be unified against death? I want my government helping my father to fight death! I want my government to spend taxpayer money to help my father fight to live and I want my government to spend taxpayer money to help your father fight to live! I want it to spend my money first on fighting death. Not on war! Not on banks! Not on high speed rail!

  Spend our money, spend my money, first: on the chance to live!”

  
  Full Transcript

  Since I sort of  bashed Keith Olbermann in my last post I think it’s only fair that I also say what I like about him.

  I love some of his special comments. Indeed his latest on Health Care is his best since the hay day of Bush’s great transgressions against human rights. In these he manages to simplify and humanize complex political issues and make them real to people. He gets down to the core of what these things are about.  In this case he humanizes the issue particularly well by describing his own family ordeal. He talks of his own father’s fight with illness and you can see how deeply it effects him.

  You should really watch it. So I’ve included it here.

  Yeah I don’t agree with his using this platform to directly ask people for donations for his favorite charity. And yeah I do have issues in general with Keith Olbermann and with the show Countdown in particular. But for the most part I agree with this. So much of  what he says is true and what people really need to hear that I forgive him his minor transgressions.

  Most importantly I deeply agree with the statement I quoted above. When people raise the argument that we cant afford Health Care reform this is always the thing that comes to mind. We spent money on banks and on war and on other nonsense when what I want, and what I think many many other people want, is for that money to go toward Health Care FIRST. Not as a n after thought. Not just what we can squeeze in without going over budget.  Why is it that we can pass war bill after war bill and bailout after bailout with a single worry over the deficit but when it comes to Health Care, we wrangle for months over nickles and dimes determined not to go a single penny over the remarkably small allotment of money we’ve given for it. 

  Our priorities are all screwed up. Fighting Death ought to priority one. Keeping us healthy. Giving us the means to obtain happiness. That should come first.  It’s ridiculous that it’s taken so long. Absurd that we can’t do this. The people are outraged over the state of Health Care and terrified that our government will fail to anything of any value and make matters worse AGAIN. 

  I have more faith in the government than your average conservative. I think the principle that government can’t do anything is fundamentally flawed. But I can’t begrudge people their fear of governmental failure. How many years has it been since we recognized the Health Care crises? Decades. And yet nothing was done. Anyone who looks at foreign policy with a clear mind can see that so much of our actions abroad do in fact create blowback that makes matters more dangerous for us and our troops. We know our government couldn’t protect us from 9/11, couldn’t protect us from Swine Flu pandemic, couldn’t protect us from Economic Collapse after Economic Collapse, the foreclosure crises, or predatory lending. We face an economic crises on average every three years. And all we see that is done is a bunch of big banks are given trillions of our dollars and nothing gets better.

  Oh no, it’s no surprise at all that people don’t trust the governement. None at all that people are terrified. Our government has seemed to have been on a mission to undermine itself at every turn for decades. Torturing people. Illegal wiretapping. Extraordinary Rendition. Holding people indefinitely without trial. Cutting deals under the table with pharmaceutical companies. Meanwhile stories come back that we don’t even give our veterans proper Health Care. Stories come back like every week of another sex scandal or infidelity with one of our major political figures. Stories come back every few days of bailed out companies receiving huge enormous bonuses and salaries and then having major figures in them being appointed to supposed “fix” the economic problems they caused. 

  And in the mean time you have a town whose water got so polluted that people were literally becoming mutated. Skin falling off. Hair falling out.  In the meantime you have a response to a Hurricane that left a city buried underwater so inept that it is condemned all the world over.

  And people ask, why are Americans so afraid to trust the Government with Health Care reform? 

  I think the reasons are obvious. Americans have every reason to distrust our government. Generations of reasons. Maybe some of this is just the way governments fundamentally are, but that doesn’t matter. We expect and demand more.

  So I forgive people for being afraid, for having doubts, for being uncertain. I understand their terror. It makes sense.

  What I don’t forgive is for people to simply use that as an excuse to simply opt out.  Those who then go from there to then argue that the government should do nothing. Secure in their own finances, happy with their own insurance, those who say they don’t need the Government mucking with their affairs. For that line of reasoning is the equivalent of saying that the government should then simply LET PEOPLE DIE. That non-interference, non-intervention policy is exactly what we’ve had since 1980. And guess what? It’s pretty much precisely what’s caused most of the problems. Government failures yes. But they are as much a result of no action as they are bad actions.

  It’s a pipe dream to believe in somehow dealing with the massive GLOBAL problems we face can be fixed at a State Level. It’s even more ridiculous to assume that businesses and rich people will somehow find themselves out of the goodness of their hearts devoted to our happiness and health. Some will do some good when it is aligned with their interests, but they are neither equipped nor capable of nor incentived to solve huge problems. They simply lack the means and the inclination. The only way to even get them involved, is to have government intervention or popular pressure force their cooperation.

  Nor can simply relying on the goodness of charity to fix the ills of the world work. Charities are so poor and so broke they are barely scrounging by.  And many turn into scams or are run for the interests of the businesses that sponsor them. Charities have their place to be sure. But they are not big enough to solve huge problems like our health care crises.

  No. The only agent big enough to even tackle the problem of Death on a grand scale IS OUR Government.  And note the most important word of that phrase. OUR.  It’s not just a random secondary entity we can sneer at. It’s OURS. We create it. We build it. We monitor it. We compel its behavior.  And while of course so many times so many of our leaders do indeed seem more interesting in serving their own petty interests or the interests of the businesses that pay them off, we still CAN influence them. Our voice can be heard. We can make the government do what we want. At least a little. At least a little more than they are now. We can compel them to spend our money the way WE want.  That’s MORE than we can say about our neighbor or the major businesses and corporations that run so much of our daily lives.

  So I don’t accept the idea that “Government screws up often” as the end of the argument leading to the conclusion of inaction. That’s the beginning. We recognize the flaws of our government, and then we work to make it better.  So that it CAN act and in ways that we need. We get them to try to fix things. And when they screw up, we demand we fix their mistakes. We demand they make things better.

  But it’s terribly wrong to just say “Government sucks, we’re better off not doing anything and being on our own”. For that line of reasoning leaves millions to die. Die while we sit comfy in our own homes content with our own good Health. And not just die. Die miserably. Die in pain. Die afraid. Many will die alone.

  Yeah I want my government to spend my money fighting that. Yes, I want them to do it right, but above all I want them to just start DOING IT!

  We’ve waited far too long already.

  “This is the primary directive of life, the essence of our will as human beings, all perhaps that is measurable of our souls, the will to live. And when we go to a doctor’s office or a hospital or a storefront clinic in a ghetto we are expressing this fundamental cry of humanity: I want to live! I want my child to live! I want my wife to live! I want my father to live! I want my neighbor to live!  I want this stranger I do not know and never will know to live! This is elemental stuff — our atoms in action, our survival mode in charge. Tamper with this and you are tampering with us.”

  • 5:53 pm
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