The biggest thing that I've learned about politics since this election and the health care "reform" debacle was that the oligarchs in this country wanted to make sure the public learned a very important lesson for daring to speak up about what we wanted:
They wanted us to kill our own bill.
It wasn't good enough to simply kill the bill, because people got organised. They got involved. They could have killed the bill directly, but we were motivated, we were talking, we were calling, we were exerting our influence. And that had to be disciplined out of us.
They wanted us disheartened, disorganised, and utterly apathetic about the state of politics in this country, and there was only one way to do that. They took everything we demanded in this bill and stripped it out piece by piece, leaving in loopholes for the insurance companies and required mandates, everything we didn't want.
Because it wasn't good enough just to kill the bill. They had to make US kill the bill, to turn our backs on everything that we worked on, to instill that discipline and that lesson that we are not to interfere with the matters of DC, for we are but paupers before them.
I have no answers, but it is absolutely sickening watching these politicians twist and torture this bill to the point where we have no choice but to take up arms against the very bill we'd been pushing so hard for.
It's said that politics is a game the rich play with poor people's lives, but it goes farther than that. We tried to play the game, and those same leaders want to teach us to never meddle with their game, by forcing us to turn on the very things we wanted most.