Cleaning turned into rearranging today, though, for the most part, the cleaning did actually happen. I'm basically waiting for Momma to get home soon and tell me she hates it how it is. The change isn't huge, mostly involving the television/video game end of the room.
It didn't help that I let a rant escape earlier today when I was supposed to be cleaning. I'm almost afraid to go back and read it, because I'm sure I came off sounding a little half cocked. I cooled on the issue a little bit, though rechecking comments at a couple of places, I could easily get hot all over again. And that's what got it started again, what got me thinking of that damn rant that I'd have probably forgotten completely otherwise.
Thanks Chris for the link, but I don't have any discs and my DVD player is at least slightly busted anyway. I'll see it, probably, though I actually never watched his last movie now that I think about it. Hell, this my prompt me to figure out the machine and buy a blank disc finally.
At one blog I read (read past tense, not read as in regularly, but linked to from a place I do read regularly,) the kind of place where feelings run away from liking Michael Moore, a number of the comments lean heavily toward bashing him, branding him a liar, cursing his name with chicken blood so that the curse takes.
Someone, the lone liberal that should let the sheep be to bump each other with their butts and bleat stupidly, asks for information as to what Moore has actually lied about. Instead we get links to Buddy Someshit's blog, because he'll by god tell you about the lies, though oddly, we only get links. There's never any sort of well reasoned discussion because the people haven't seen the films and must rely on heresay from an obviously biased third party source.
A necessary part of the conversation is the lone agreeing Canadian, telling us how lucky we are that we don't have to wait years due to bureaucratic nonsense to get our anal clutch valve tightened. The US system is so perfect compared to theirs, and believe it when he says it, the taxes they pay are so horrible. I guess that explains why so many Canadians are coming here for medical treatment. Vermont's just eat up with people able to converse both in English and French, though they pretend to only speak French and expect us to put up signs and label things in two languages. I for one don't want to have to fucking learn to say burrito in French.
And now that we've brought it up, one of the most vile of arguments, the soon to be classic, if the US system is so bad, why are all those dirty brown people trying to come and steal it? Yeah, dirty brown people, they just want free health care, so they can go back home and be all well while they take our jobs. It can't be that their option is that much worse. The right actually attack this one fading twinkle of concern for your fellow man, the fact that hospitals have to treat you if you come in sick, even if the bills come back as undeliverable.
Never once in the entire discussion does anyone suggest anything better. Someone will agree with the exorbitant new tax burden, and another person will chime in about how they ain't damn well gonna pay no lazy ignorant so and so to go to the doctor for free. They work hard for their money, and they don't care about lazy shiftless people who can't get their own care. "They can get a damn job! I've got two myself." They are certainly happy to discuss the liar filmmaker who shouldn't even call it a documentary because it's biased, and gol dang they just hate him so.
Completely absent are any new ideas. If it exists at all, the concern for the sake of humanity as deserving of better is completely invisible. The idea that people have to earn medical care permeates the entire discussion. Being able to see a doctor is treated as a privilege that only those who work hard should be able to attain, with no explanation of what "work hard" quite means either.
They never mention children. They never talk about a family that pretty much has a decent life but for their general inability to be able to see a doctor in a timely fashion outside of emergency care. One of the parents makes enough money to feed the family, to keep the bills paid, to make a niceish life for her family, but her employer doesn't offer her insurance, and if he did, she couldn't afford to accept it. She has a really great opportunity at this job, and for the most part she likes it. There may or may not be a future in this particular location, but she's learning skills both in the kitchen and as a leader and as a manager of a restaurant that will likely serve her well in the future.
But she doesn't have insurance, and she and her husband have priced it before. They can't afford to pay for the insurance that is available to them. Perhaps if the husband were to return to work, but he would then have to work his way back up in a whole new restaurant before he was possibly able to reach the point at which he would be valued enough to have earned insurance, or he would work solely to pay for insurance bought privately. He would be willing to return to work, but the reason he quit was to open the door for his wife to take the opportunity she has. If he were to return to work full time, it would rearrange their entire lives for the worse. The family would have less time together, with the husband and wife rarely seeing each other.
I don't want free health care as such. I'm willing for the insurance industry to go to hell and for health care to be funded sufficiently to take care of people as needed, whether or not that means a slightly higher tax burden. That tax burden would lower other medically related burdens to equalize the whole very near what it is. People would earn their medical care by being human and deserving of it for that single reason.
How anyone can justify for profit medical is completely beyond me. I don't want to think these people are evil, because maybe they've just had it really good their whole lives and don't know better. Maybe they don't know what it's like to sit with a sick child hoping like hell they get better. You imagine those people that just go to the doctor because they have one, a doctor that recognizes them and greets them by name, a doctor that's gotten to know your kids over the years. You imagine yourself taking a spill playing on your adult soccer league, something you absolutely love doing, but something that makes you feel guilty sometimes because one wrong turn, and you've just cost your family a few thousand dollars. And then you think of your child playing soccer, or climbing a tree, or just being alive and a child.
Monday, July 02, 2007
so sick of
I haven't seen Michael Moore's new movie Sicko yet. I will not be seeing it in the theater as I refuse to spend that much money on a movie that doesn't need the big screen. I will see it as soon as I'm able after it is out of the theaters.
This post isn't about the movie, but having been reading around the internet today about the movie, health care is on my mind. It's been on my mind before as my family is in that group of several million uninsured Americans for whom medical care, even the most basic, is sadly out of our grasp.
We are currently paying off a couple thousand dollars debt that accumulated due to a single emergency room visit that my wife made a few months ago. She has asthma and a few allergies which are usually not a concern for her. There have been a couple of times though when the asthma flared up, and she was unable to fix the problem, and the problem was continuing to worsen. There's a certain hell that someone goes through as they try their damndest just to get a good breath. There's a whole other hell in knowing that you should have been able, with a simple doctor visit, to have gotten control over your health issue any time in your past. There's that same hell in knowing that, because our country has allowed the enrichment of a few corporations and individuals on the backs of the ill, you are going to have to suffer.
The health insurance industry is one of the most vile and evil ideas ever dredged from the mind of man. That we can actually describe something and use the words health and industry should make us all ashamed. That people can make money because others are sick is disgusting. The medical insurance industry does just that, and I can't say it enough. They exist for no other reason than to turn your and my illnesses into profit for them. We are no more or less than a plus or a minus on their ledgers. If we are well, we are a plus because they keep our money. If we become ill or are hurt, we become a minus as they have now to spend the money we've been giving them.
I'm mostly amazed the right wing bloggers that will refuse to see the movie. Perhaps they think that Michael Moore is no more than a liberal shill and troublemaker. He may have asked a quesiton in the past that made them uncomfortable. They assume words from him he never said and tell us they don't need to see his movie to know what it will say.
I'm especially amazed by the giant balls on so many right wingers. I'm working now from what seems an obvious and apt assumption, that many right wing people are also christian. Not to make this a christian versus not-so-much issue, but if your god tells you that how you treat others is how you then have treated him, then what does that say about so many people's unwillingness to help make sure that all people are afforded the same level of medical care? If you are so inclined, go HERE to see a list of verses from the Bible detailing what god thinks of the poor and what he commands his followers to do in relation to the poor. It is Bible stuff, so you're going to have to wade through some craziness.
Did you know that god even commands his followers to actually leave some of their crops in the field? to not beat the olive trees a second time when harvesting? They are to leave these things and more in the field for widows, orphans, elderly and poor. So if god tells you directly to make sure the poor are fed, I wonder what he might expect of his followers in our modern age in regards to medical care?
Finally, I'm certainly not anti christian, but I'm amazed at the religious fervor from the right in regards to certain issues. The same people that throw the Bible in the way of equality for all are suddenly silent in using the Bible to uphold the idea of medical equality for all. Outdated passages of hatred to damn gay people, sudden silence when the same book reminds them to care for others. Tricky, very tricky.
This post isn't about the movie, but having been reading around the internet today about the movie, health care is on my mind. It's been on my mind before as my family is in that group of several million uninsured Americans for whom medical care, even the most basic, is sadly out of our grasp.
We are currently paying off a couple thousand dollars debt that accumulated due to a single emergency room visit that my wife made a few months ago. She has asthma and a few allergies which are usually not a concern for her. There have been a couple of times though when the asthma flared up, and she was unable to fix the problem, and the problem was continuing to worsen. There's a certain hell that someone goes through as they try their damndest just to get a good breath. There's a whole other hell in knowing that you should have been able, with a simple doctor visit, to have gotten control over your health issue any time in your past. There's that same hell in knowing that, because our country has allowed the enrichment of a few corporations and individuals on the backs of the ill, you are going to have to suffer.
The health insurance industry is one of the most vile and evil ideas ever dredged from the mind of man. That we can actually describe something and use the words health and industry should make us all ashamed. That people can make money because others are sick is disgusting. The medical insurance industry does just that, and I can't say it enough. They exist for no other reason than to turn your and my illnesses into profit for them. We are no more or less than a plus or a minus on their ledgers. If we are well, we are a plus because they keep our money. If we become ill or are hurt, we become a minus as they have now to spend the money we've been giving them.
I'm mostly amazed the right wing bloggers that will refuse to see the movie. Perhaps they think that Michael Moore is no more than a liberal shill and troublemaker. He may have asked a quesiton in the past that made them uncomfortable. They assume words from him he never said and tell us they don't need to see his movie to know what it will say.
I'm especially amazed by the giant balls on so many right wingers. I'm working now from what seems an obvious and apt assumption, that many right wing people are also christian. Not to make this a christian versus not-so-much issue, but if your god tells you that how you treat others is how you then have treated him, then what does that say about so many people's unwillingness to help make sure that all people are afforded the same level of medical care? If you are so inclined, go HERE to see a list of verses from the Bible detailing what god thinks of the poor and what he commands his followers to do in relation to the poor. It is Bible stuff, so you're going to have to wade through some craziness.
Did you know that god even commands his followers to actually leave some of their crops in the field? to not beat the olive trees a second time when harvesting? They are to leave these things and more in the field for widows, orphans, elderly and poor. So if god tells you directly to make sure the poor are fed, I wonder what he might expect of his followers in our modern age in regards to medical care?
Finally, I'm certainly not anti christian, but I'm amazed at the religious fervor from the right in regards to certain issues. The same people that throw the Bible in the way of equality for all are suddenly silent in using the Bible to uphold the idea of medical equality for all. Outdated passages of hatred to damn gay people, sudden silence when the same book reminds them to care for others. Tricky, very tricky.
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