Saturday, September 28, 2013

"Ignorance is the curse of God; knowledge is the wing wherewith we fly to heaven." ~~~ William Shakespeare

Andrew Sullivan nails the reality which constitutes the conservative's hatred of the Affordable Care Act, derisively called "Obamacare" by right wingers, which underscores their ignorance of the fact that the plan is nearly identical to a plan that came out of the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank in 1989 and also nearly identical to the plan that Willard Romney, then governor of Massachusetts, signed in to law in 2006.

Take it away Andrew:

The thing that staggers me about the Republican hatred of this law is its abstract quality. They never address the real problem of our massively inefficient private healthcare market, which is a huge burden on the economy. They never address how to help the millions of uninsured adults get the care all human beings need. They appear to regard a Heritage Foundation, free-market-designed, private healthcare exchange system as some kind of communist plot. They do not seem to believe there is any pressing problem at all. And they have nothing constructive to offer.
This is not about Obamacare. It is not even about politics. It is about a form of revolt against the very country they live in.
http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/09/27/how-to-think-about-obamacare/


Yup -- that pretty much sums it up.  Imagine -- here we are in the 21st century -- we as a people and nation have put a man on the moon.  We are exploring the surface of Mars.  We have a space station orbiting the planet and can transfer astronaut/scientists back and forth from earth to the space station in spaceship taxi style.

On the negative side -- we can spend trillions on bloody wars of choice.  We can give billions of taxpayer dollars in the form of welfare subsidies to large corporations who consistently report record profits.  We can waste billions more purchasing weapons of mass destruction from the military industrial complex conglomerates -- in many cases weapons that are never used and simply sit around collecting dust and rusting away.

Yet we cannot provide an essential human need to our citizenry -- the need for affordable, accessible basic health care?  Why?  WHY!!

And The Gadfly swears -- he is maddeningly sick and goddamn tired about the conservative's ranting about "rugged individualism" and "Murrikkan exceptionalism."  What's so fucking exceptional about a wealthy country that turns it's back on it's most vulnerable people's need for basic human dignity and right to some semblance of quality of life?  What is so exceptional about a country that has one of the highest child poverty rates in the developed world?  What is so exceptional about a country that has the highest first day infant mortality rate in the industrialized world?  And . . . sigh . . . what is so fucking exceptional about a country that has the highest rate (by leaps and bounds) of gun-related killings in the developed world?

And as far as that "rugged individualism" high school jock, macho bullshit goes --- this is not Dodge City in the Wyatt Earp days of the 1800's jackasses.  Jeebus fucking kripes conservatives --- grow up will you?

The Gadfly does not hate his country.  But The Gadfly is not sorry to say that he is greatly disenchanted with his country, and specifically a specific portion of it's peoples, and honestly feels at times that his country is headed toward the same fate as another empire that once existed in human history if they do not change their attitudes and their ways of looking at and integrating with the rest of the world.  If you know your world history, you know exactly what empire The Gadfly is referring to.

Nonetheless -- The Gadfly speaks out on these issues that he is compassionate about for he feels that silence is complicity in the wrongheadedness and ignorance that is trying to bully it's way into the national psyche.  If we don't stand up to this form of callous philistinism, then we have no right to bemoan the consequences of such inaction, which if the past history of these types of fascistic movements are any evidence, will not be benevolent in nature nor heartening for the prospect that the following words will ever have meaningful relevancy again:

. . . all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Bottom line is that every American who truly gives a shit about this country's democracy and it's survival needs to make a choice as to how they want their children's and grandchildren's future quality of life, liberty and happiness to be.  And once you have made that choice - then stand up and fight for those ideals.

The Gadfly's simple advice is --- Find your inner hippie:






And that's all The Gadfly has to say on this subject for the moment.


----TFG



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