What's wrong with us?
The propaganda pounding by free market warriors over the last 40 years have left us beaten and withering in the streets. Literally sick and dying. Lady Liberty is bleeding to death in the hospital waiting room. The numbers are familiar and huge, 50 million Americans don't have health insurance. The numbers are so large, they almost cease to have meaning. To those who are insured, what's another 10, 20, or 40 million people?
As documented in Moore's SiCKO, private health care in this country is an immoral, inefficient mess.
That 50 million don't have it, and those who do are often screwed by the companies, excuse the pun, bleeding them dry, is an awful mark against this nation, a sad indictment of our values.
We are taught, perhaps brainwashed, that private health care is better than "socialized" care, even if it leaves most of us without any insurance or those that are lucky to have it experiencing headaches they thought they having the insurance was going to avoid. Our national health is not something that should be affected by the bottom line. It's a travesty that profit is put before patients, a crime in my book.
In simple terms, our system is fucked.
The free market warriors have scared us into believing that the way 24 out of the 25 industrial nations do it is a worse way, and that our broken, overpriced system is the best. Why? Because we're America. And apparently, we can do no wrong.
Love it or leave it, right?
That always made no sense to me, love it or leave it. You don't use that philosophy towards your kids when they've been bad, or yourself when you make mistakes; but we're supposed to show more unconditional affection for this (really undefined) idea of America than we offer much more intimate and real connections in our life? And these are the same trilobites that rant and rail against Hollywood, secularists, activist judges non-stop. You'd think, if they loved America so much, they'd shut up.
I digress.
The problem, as if with many of our modern dilemmas, is the monkeysphere.
Yes, the Monkeysphere. That's the group of people who each of us, using our monkeyish brains, are able to conceptualize as people. If the monkey scientists are monkey right, it's physically impossible for this to be a number larger than 150. Most of us do not have room inour Monkeysphere for our friendly neighborhood Sanitation Worker. So, we don't think of him as a person. We think of him The Thing That Makes The Trash Go Away.
Basically our brains can only rationalize a limited number of existences, and the rest are rather incidental -- in the way mostly -- they're the ones that are making traffic so bad, the often referenced-to, ubiquitous 'they'. Like George Carlin said about other drivers, "those going faster than you are idiots, those going slower are morons."
It's a rather simple idea: there's a finite number of humans we accept into our reality, placed at around 150, although I'm sure Buddhist monks have improved upon that number, and those outside of your own group are treated with a less degree of empathy, consideration, and understanding.
Road rage. Mistrust. Social Deviancy. Littering. Obnoxious sound systems. Yelling at a liquor store clerk over the rising cost of cigarettes. All symptoms of the monkeysphere. Once you meet your neighbor and they have a name and a job and a personality, they break into your monkeysphere and you're less likely to blast your music at 3 in the morning and leave cigarette butts on their doorstep.
Is it any wonder that with more and more strangers around us that would make us more apprehensive and skittish monkeys? And that's why in small towns people feel safer. It's not that bad things don't ever happen there, it's that you walk around most of the time running into monkeys that you can conceptualize, and thus save yourself a ton of monkey-worry that the big city can cause. That old man down the street you wave to pleasantly everyday could turn out as evil as a stranger in the city. Heck, the stranger in the city might hop on the tracksto save your life.
The monkeysphere has gotten me off track.
This is about SiCKO, and why America has left so many of its fellow citizens to rot away alive. They just don't care as much until it happens to them. A bout with the health insurance companies has probably turned many a conservative to Moore's side on this issue. Until your loved one is battling with faceless insurance employees over life and death matters it's easy to believe it happens to people who somehow deserve it.
Because either you say, if someone can't afford proper insurance than they deserve to receive third world care in the world's richest country, or you fucking give them health care, somehow, someway, anything. If you don't believe it's right for them to suffer just because they don't have a job that offers it or the means to acquire it otherwise, than you have a moral obligation to seek a different way. This is quite the life or death issue if ever there was one, it is not right to throw up your hands.
We have to realize that the masses are composed of mothers and sons, lovers and comedians, they're people like us, seeking connections and fearing the unconnected. When 50 million is reduced to one heart-wrenching true story, it moves the heart more than hearing shear numbers. Life is uncanny that way.
That's why the monkeysphere is a growing problem. Every day more and more monkeys are born into this world and we're going to have to share it with them. We have to find a way to open up our minds, not by singing Kumbaya, but by recognizing civil intolerance as a disorder. I've seen good people go all Hannibal Lecter on an old lady, somebody's grandmother probably, over a minor roadway infraction. I've seen rational people crying over the death of someone they have never met, who's only gift to the world was being able to wrestle.
Another example of the monkeysphere in action.
My buddy was emotionally moved by therecent tragedy of Chris Benoit. My foolish reply was that he was a wrestler, and it was expected, so who really cares? My friend corrected me with tales of him being known as a professional, a class-act; the way the man wrestled appealed to him, it spoke of hard work and the traditional ways of the sport. Supposedly Benoit was the last wrestler any fan expected this to happen to. Chris Benoit, although they've never met, WAS in my friend's monkeysphere, but not mine, so I hadn't thought about it once since our conversation until now, definitely didn't shed a tear. Now when Hunter S. Thompson committed suicide on my birthday...
But thinking about wrestling, that's another baffling case of money trumping ethics.
The death of Chris Benoit and Owen Heart, the blatant rampant abuse of steroids, including by the owner, and the racial, sexual, and violent undertones of their "product" makes one wonder why the WWE isn't more closely regulated.
If wrestling was a reality show and a contestant falls to their death in a stunt, another goes batshit crazy, possibly roid-rage induced, and kills their kid and wife, and legends of overworked actors pushed to the brink and fed drugs to keep them going were common,that reality show would have been cancelled by now.
The wrestling industry is barbaric, in both operation and content.
When Korey Stringer died of heat exhaustion during a NFL practice the league rushed to improve conditions and take measures to ensure it didn't happen again. Think of baseball's treatment of Barry Bonds compared to McMahon's glorification of roided-out megawrestlers, starting with America's favorite tank top tearing golden boy, Hulk Hogan.
With wrestling, it seems these incidents lead to juvenile credibility, adds to the myth of the sport. You wonder if Vince McMahon isn't in private rubbing his hands together, uttering "exx-celent" with dollar signs in his eyes.
Part of the reason these workplace conditions are allowed to perpetuate is that the public isn't concerned with the exploits and tragedies of wrestlers like they would if it were the case that a certain movie producer had an unfortunate habit of causing his actors' deaths and destruction, either directly or through the rigorous demands of his business. The other reason is the WWE is a huge publicly traded company that has a bit of power in Connecticut.
The former governor himself, Lowell P. Weicker, is on the board of directors.
Okay, we've drifted again. Back to SiCKO, I'll save the monkey-wrestlers for another day.
We need to open our minds to the fact that the world is literally drowning in masses, and despite increasing prosperity we're increasingly scared and depressed, because the monkeysphere limits our minds' ability to deal with the crowds. We need to find our gills and learn how to swim and float and breath among so many people, or we will continue to fail at the major issues of the day.
War. Health Care. Environmental Destruction.
All these issues affect everyone of us, but most often too far down the monkey chain for us to realize it. The first act of war is turn your enemy into a dog. The propagandist knows this. It allows us to sit on the couch 1000s of miles away and casually comment on the images we see without realizing the utter horrors those bombs emblazoned with the red, white, and blue really cause. When someone is shot in your town they have a scroll with the victim's name and show the weeping parents standing on the street staring at the makeshift vigil on the sidewalk. When a soldier dies in Iraq they show a a map of Iraq with a star where the IED went off killing the soldier. If he or she is lucky they might mention what base he or she was stationed at.
War of this sort robs the populace of its humanity.
Once again, back to SiCKO.
Universal Health Care isn't just morally right, it's beneficial to society as a whole due to improved quality of life and subsequent gains in productivity. It's like the commercial 'happy cows come from California'. Happy, prosperous people don't have to worry about choosing food or health care, don't put off seeing the doctor about that weird lump under their skin because they can't afford it. Many insured are content to merely have some insurance and, as long as their group of monkeys is looked after, doesn't want to run the risk of change.
Michael Moore might just shock them into action, however, as humanizing the victims allows reality to break through monkeysphere wall. They become conceptualized humans again and then maybe we'll feel enough in our monkey-hearts to demand our monkey-politicians make some progress on the health issue.
And what better time to talk about it than a presidential campaign?
(The irony, and perhaps lesson, is that Moore may have more of an effect on this election for a film that could arguably be called non-partisan, than when he created Fahrenheit 9-11 with the intention of defeating Bush.)
For a Christian country we have a funny way of showing it. If Mary and Joseph were alive in modern America they'd still be giving birth in a manger. 2000 years later, from mules to Bugattis, yet we're the same monkeys we were back then.
I was kicking around in the road the other day and in the dust I saw a rusted penny, I gazed at it for over a minute and could have sworn it said:
In God We Trust and Pray We Don't Get Sick.
My eyes must be playing tricks on me. If only I could get that looked at.
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