Ugh

I am trying, so far unsuccessfully, to ween myself away from news blogs. I have been totally wrapped up in the health care debate to probably the detriment of my mental health and sanity. As I wrote earlier (I think), how this thing plays out is in some ways, a test case to see if we, as a country, are able to actually achieve some serious, progressive reform and as such, is a test to see whether our political system at this time is actually able to see that change happen. All of this, of course, was brought forth in the '08 election when somehow, We the People actually voted in a smart, earnest, thoughtful man who wanted to fix a lot of things that needed fixing. His election, or so I thought, was a sign that We the People were ready to have somebody smart, earnest, and thoughtful to fix the country.

So how's that going?

Like a lot of people who were really pumped by that election, I am pretty much all riled up and in several stages of despair now. The system in DC is terribly and horribly broken (why the constant use of the anti-majority filibuster is considered a normal things these days and the so called "political press" doesn't seem to think anything about it is beyond me) but even worse it appears that we, as a country, actually don't really deserve any sort of change. This shouldn't have come as any sort of surprise but we are not a very serious country. Somehow a lot of us got suckered by Obama's election to believe that we were about to become one but as one blogger put it, we are still a "pre-enlightment" country. As evidence I provide the Tea Baggers, the Birthers, and all those "Town Hellers" screaming about taking the country back or how government should get out of medicare or that they believe in the constitution. Death Panels should have been seen by any reasonably intelligent person to be a complete and total BS thing but that hasn't stopped anyone from screaming it. Nor has that stopped any number of people who would probably need health care reform from going to those rallies and screaming about government takeovers. Healthcare reform is a huge and important issue that even a huge majority of voters believe in, yet nobody seems to be terribly upset that the issue has become more farce than anything else.

Last night Harlan and I watched a documentary about the evils of WalMart. The documentary didn't really tell us anything we didn't already know but in light of the health care debate I pretty much watched it at full boil, occasionally yelling out "you're a fucking idiot" to the occasional John Q Public shown in the documentary who is or was in the process of getting screwed by WalMart. It was all out of the book "Deer Hunting with Jesus" in which a huge amount of Red State conservative types got bent over in all sorts of ways yet never quite made the leap of faith to realize that maybe those Red State conservative views made the being bent over possible. Like they showed the story of a family that ran a very successful small town hardware store somewhere in Nowheresville that went bankrupt thanks to WalMart. One of the guys kept on saying "well, I believe in freedom and the constitution and I don't want to be no Communist country" but then went on saying how he wished the Government would come in and do something about what WalMart does. One of the owners of the store mentioned several times that he was a conservative Republican (even flashing to a picture that he owned of Ronald Reagan) but, like the other guy, was completely unable to make the conclusion that a political belief that worshipped at the altar of "free markets" and that business should be supported and not regulated could cause one to fall victim to the free market and a political system that supports big business and fails to regulate them.

Then there was the guy trying to organize the union and all the stories about how hard WalMart tries to fight unionization (like very), even going to take the effort to show employees instructional videos on the horrors of unions. All of those people's lives they showed in the documentary who worked there could be in better situations if they were unionized, but.... And then, of course, was all the people complaining about not having health care or not being able to afford health care. I wanted to send them all a letter asking them what they think about health care reform just to see how many of them send something back about how they support the constitution and all that.

But finally, my take away was this-- at one point in the documentary they went to a WalMart that was just recently opened in Germany. The employees there made decent money and had a generous vacation plan. It goes without saying they all had decent health care. Oh, and they were able to be members of a union, something that goes a long way to explaining their generous benefits. At the end of an interview with one of the German WalMart workers, the lady they were talking to said something like "I don't know why they don't have all this stuff in America?"

Well, to whomever you are who said that, here is your answer "because we, as a nation, are a bunch of fucking idiots."