Skipping toward the Gulag
Screeching sirens startled me awake yesterday morning and the first thing that leaped to my mind was, “Oh god, the Tea Partiers have blown up something important…”
A bit histrionic, I know.
But since the intellectuals who brought us death panels have moved on to spitting, spewing hateful racist epithets, accusing their coworkers of infanticide, heralding the coming apocalypse and comparing the spring rain to the tears of the founding fathers, we’ve already significantly overshot the line of polite civility.
It’s all in the name of “what the American people really want.”
As a real American, I feel qualified to say that, by and large, what the American people really want is a Big Mac, a handful of extra strength Tylenol and not to be scared out of their wits that the soviets are coming to kill grandma, by leaders who should know better.
I’m not so sure the health bill will radically change my life or bend the cost curve enough to reform the health industry. But the Potomac is yet to run red with the blood of patriots and nobody’s painted a hammer and sickle on the capitol dome.
Buying private insurance was relatively painless for me and unless they find a way to medicate exceptional clumsiness, bad joke-telling, or trypophobia, I don’t really need it anyway.
But I’m not most people. There’s my friend in Chicago who was turned down for the same low-cost health insurance plan I have, just because she takes a prescription medication. And all the unemployed journos I know who now might be able to get back on mom’s insurance for a few more years.
And people like Vic Chestnut. The quadriplegic musician talked to Terry Gross about his difficulties getting adequate health coverage, right before he killed himself last Christmas.
These clearly aren’t layabouts who are trying to defraud medicare or file frivolous lawsuits… just people who could use a break for once.
I’m not trying to lambaste well-reasoned fiscal conservatism or a desire to rein in the deficit or create a smaller government. The feds aren’t your mom, so put your own dishes in the sink.
But I also think it’s despicable to leverage the free market economy as an excuse to deprive people of a long, full life. If we really believed that a rising tide lifted all boats, then we should believe in investing in our human capital and improving the health and wellness of our workforce. Anything less is untenable.
Plus, by making health care a luxury good that only the elite tan and fit John Boehners among us can afford, are we really distancing ourselves from how that dreaded “socialism” has been implemented in our modern world?
The writing’s on the barn, as it were: All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
All Americans are created equal –endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights– but some Americans are more deserving of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness than others, because they’re not poor or sick?
That’s the kind of complete disregard for social justice that makes me want to throw all the tea into the harbor.
With all the talk of the evil socialist quagmire, I turned to the writing of Alexander Solzhenitsyn for a little perspective. His One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is based on his own experience in the Soviet Gulag after his writing displeased Stalin.
This remains the only book to give me a nightmare as an adult and I can’t think of anything more irrational than equating it with laws that make multinational corporations a little more culpable for human suffering.
Here’s an excerpt:
Several voices called after him, “Keep smiling,” “Don’t let them get you down” — but there was nothing much you could say. Gang 104 had built the punishment block themselves and knew all about it: the walls were stone, the floor cement, there were no windows at all, the stove was kept just warm enough for the ice on the wall to melt and form puddles on the floor. You slept on bare boards, got three hundred grams of bread a day, skilly only every third day.Ten days! Ten days in that cell block, if they were strict about it and made you sit out the whole stint, meant your health was ruined for life. It meant tuberculosis and the rest of your days in the hospital.
Fifteen days in there and you’d be six feet under.
Thank heaven for your cozy hut, and keep your nose clean.
