The Diplomaniac!

Gearing Up for the 2010 Vote: Is Anybody Else Buying Land in Canada and Considering Putting MORE Stock into Smith and Wesson?

I know it sounds insane, but I actually know people that aren’t registered to vote. I’m not kidding either, and some of these people I’ve know for years and I know they’ll vote however I tell them to. I’ve given them countless registration papers, offered to drive them to their voting place, showed them what happens when citizens don’t participate in or pay attention to government (read: 8 years of the Bush administration). I’ve threatened their physical safety and have offered free sex. And they still manage to forget to vote.

Herein the problem lies.

An Example: Obama is trying to get that damn health care bill passed before 2010. Why is he trying so hard? Because he knows, and I repeat knows that we could get stuck in the shit after 2010 and then we’re going to have to wade through another 20 years of neoconservative nonsense before we get this chance again.

I’ve looked at the bill and I’ve read the non-partisan analyses, and it’s going to be expensive. It’s not perfect, but it will get the job done. When I talk to European students and tell them “Yes, what you’ve read is true. I know it sounds crazy, but we really do have 50 million people without healthcare.” they start to understand that Americans really do live in a different world than the rest of the civilized planet.

At 14 trillion dollars, we can damn well afford to pay for universal healthcare, and a whole lot of other stuff that we should be paying for as well. And I’m talking about healthcare for people that we don’t know personally. People with kids and jobs and morals and religion and potential gashes in their heads. Yes, some of them might even have drinking problems, or jaywalking problems. Hell, some of them are complete idiots and don’t deserve to have us to pay for their little Backyard Wrestling mishaps. But we have this thing called modern society, where we help out those less fortunate or lucky or intelligent than ourselves, even when it puts a small dent in our wallets.

The rest of civilized society gets it. European Union members live in dysfunctional societies, but not so dysfunctional that they routinely vote for people that actually admit that they don’t give a shit about the poor because it’s not their problem, or because it’s too expensive, or because, heaven forbid, it doesn’t represent that good old American tradition of bootstraps, capitalism, and a total rejection of anything that even remotely resembles socialism. Because that would be totalitarianism or communism, meaning if you want to help out the poor even a little bit then you are Hitler AND Stalin rolled into one little pink package of laziness.

So there is this self-marginalizing portion of the population that absolutely won’t vote. I’m not talking about the ones that vote, but vote against their best self-interest. I’m talking about the ones that are either totally oblivious or totally disenfranchised to the whole thing. I’m talking about myself from 2003-2006. (Ok, so I still voted during that period, but I pretty much gave up on the rest of the political process, and for me relative to the average American that’s the same as not voting. This was an unfortunate result of the Iraq war, Bush actually getting reelected, and Fox News ratings going through the roof. But I’m better now, thank God. Plus my mom would have killed me.)

So now we’ve got a President that is pushing an overly expensive, confusing, dysfunctional and possibly impassible healthcare reform bill at a time where we need society to relax a little so that the psychological factor of economic recovery hits home, and we can have spending go up and unemployment go down. He’s being forced, or is forcing himself to push a scary-ass spending proposal at the exact opposite time than he should be. But he’s freaked out that the young and the psychologically disenfranchised aren’t going to vote, and the neoconservatives are going to gain 14 or so seats in the legislature. And then we will continue to have 50 million people at risk of cancer, shark attacks, accidental ingestion of sulfuric acid, hate crimes, libertarianism, light socket tongue mishaps, etc. And those people will go into debt to the insurance companies or whoever, and they and their kids will be fucked.

We’re all so worried that this bill may somehow screw up our employee benefits that we won’t spend a dime, in case we’ve got to get our own insanely expensive and wholly unreliable medical insurance. Not a particularly brilliant time to introduce a highly controversial social program that is going to be counterproductive to the economy in many people’s minds, but will undoubtedly be cheaper in the long run. Heaven forbid we acknowledge the long run.

And don’t even get me started on the Blue dog democrats.

Because we Americans want it all, and we’ve got it all, or should I say had it all. But we don’t want to pay for it. And we give lip service to Rush Limbaugh who thinks that if the government even asks for a dime for public service than they are totalitarians. So maybe it’s not that we Americans actually live in a different world than the rest of civilized society, it’s just that some of us think we do.