By Mickey Walker-October 4, 2009
Never in my youth, was the neighborhood and school
playground so rife and out of control as are the town meetings where Bubba and
Bubbette ‘cross the land, gurgle into microphones and burst out into atomized
saliva scorn when protesting what they refer to as ‘Obama Care.’ They all against it. Like in to the death; don’t try to
convince them ‘cause their pea brains are made up already. They don’t want no “Youth in Asia” for
grandma, see? Say what? Yep that’s the way they spelled it out
on their protest signs. Somebody
sure stirred them up. One of them
shouted she wanted the gummint to keep its damn hands off her Medicare, and
then took to callin’ them Obama fellers a bunch of Socialists. Wouldn’t do a bit of good to share with
her that her precious Medicare is, in fact, socialism, dipped and fried in
socialism. Duhhh. She wouldn’t cotton to knowing that her
beloved free Medicare is a single-payer, gummint-funded healthcare plan for her
and anybody else over 65 because, well, you see, she can’t agree with no
socialist programs even though she wants Obama to keep his hands off her
Medicare. Say what?
There has to come a time when anybody with an IQ higher than
George W. Bush has to just stop to consider just how coo-coo and stupid many
Americans’ take on REALITY really is. Many have given up, pissed on the fire, and gone to the house. I find myself truly not wanting to
watch the news anymore. Ten
minutes of Glenn Beck or Hannity, I am certain would send me into toxic shock
from the virulent virus Dumbassius Neoconsis. I shudder to think about how their ignorant talking points,
repeated ‘til your eyes hurt, seem so banal and repetitive. Dumbass, repeated so often and so
frothingly, could be cumulatively fatal. When Glen Beck took to cryin’ on
camera the other day, I thought he might had hit the final stages of the
virus. It was scary. For instance, Glenn Beck, who touts the
tea parties, counted 1.8 million demonstrators at the Washington Capitol two
weeks ago. Oh, yes, he said, there
was a university what done a study (from Dr. Suess’s balloon, maybe) and
figgered it was 1.8 million tea baggers by a certain mathematical formula, but
Beck couldn’t recall which university done the study. The official truth squad figures of all real networks, news
magazines, you know, the boring old tell-it-like-it really is news services
said 75 thousand, tops. 75
thousand people, Beck. That crowd,
the real one, is like 1/20th the size of the one you blurted out to
all of America was 1.8 million who were fed up with the Obama Care program that
would tax us all into oblivion with tax increases, and other things you told us
went bump in the night. Beck,
instead of the signs being paraded about with Obama in Joker face, should be
wearing that mask. Yet, I thought
that even though lies are believed by the masses, a la Joseph Goebbels who said
a lie regurgitated over and over would become embraced eventually as the truth,
does anybody really care that lies creep and crawl about like stink bugs on
your summer tomatoes?
I listened to the FOX and Friends program the morning after
where Glen Beck held court on how the demonstrators voiced such outrage at
Obama’s attempts to shove socialism, higher taxes, and healthcare for all
Americans down our throats (or so Beck said), and I had to think of Pontius
Pilate’s pregnant question: “What
is truth?” Indeed, what is
it? If millions will believe a lie
because Rush or Hannity or Beck utters it, does it become the truth? According to Goebbels, of course it
does. I shuddered. Is this the road we Americans have chosen
to travel? None of the Bubbas
interviewed cared about the truth. All they wanted to do is to express their slobbering sentiments of hate
to the camera eye. Mindless. Will we turn 47,000,000 Americans
without healthcare into the street? Will we kick them to the curb with our own asses in the same sling by
denying all Americans healthcare, including us, because the deep pockets who
pay Glen Beck’s salary want to keep their tax cuts for the upper crust while
watching 47 million Americans get cheated? By a government that is supposed to be of, by, and for the
people, not the rich?
Methinks we all were taught the difference between right and
wrong early in life; and some of us crustier old farts still believe in
doing the right thing. But, alas, with all the spin, all the TV ads paid
for by big money we have let our foot slip. Some of us morphed our sense
of justice into the wrong rut, the money side, and have convinced ourselves
that doing the right thing ain't necessarily what our forefathers and parents
taught us. We got smarter, I guess. Maybe we became deciders and wannabes where the money, the
paid-for television spots, the Religious Right, posing as workers for the
Lord, told us it was okay to attack other countries and to kill the Muslims we
couldn't convert to democracy and our American ways of thinking. Maybe we
could play the terrorist card for all it’s worth and attack Iraq on principle
instead of having legitimate proof of WMDs. Then we could become the darkness
too, and we got the planes and army and weapons to be just whoever we would
want to be. But are we a better
nation for doing it? And sending
our Reservist men and women to combat 4 or more times in a war they are not
trained to fight? And do we really
care one way or another? Do we
give it the same passion we give to demonstrating against the prospect of
bringing healthcare to all Americans? Or would we rather keep on trying to bring democracy to Iraq, a land of
displaced Muslim Sunnis and Shiites? It’s trillions of dollars either way. Truth is, they convinced us to shoot America in the
foot. According to Nietzsche, “Battle not with
monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss
gazes also into you.”
In the process of our becoming a better nation, or as some
say, in doing the Lord's work, we might have lost our very selves. Are we
not anemic in emulating the spiritual significance of the Good Samaritan? We, many of us, anyhow, are devoted to
railing against Obama’s desire to help Americans get National Healthcare so
that our neighbors can live like many of the other nations' peoples that have a
national health plan, like, France, England, Germany, Canada, Norway, you know,
all the ones whose lifespan is longer when compared to us Americans who profess
to love our neighbor and to do the right thing by our fellow man? Now the
right thing seems to be drowning social programs in the bath tub as Newt
Gingrich, Grover Norquist, and George W. Bush all tell us to do. Now,
doing the right thing seems to amount to jawboning about No Child Left
Behind, but when it comes to when the green hits the mahogany, everybody snaps
back and forgets to vote for the funding of it. In other words, Bush and
nobody else who voted for the NCLB Act remembered to pay for it so the school
buses could transfer inner city kids to the school house to attend
classes. Nobody wanted to fund the Act's books and reading programs,
either so that Bush's brother Marvin could charge the US gummint millions of
dollars for a nepotistic reading program sold to the schools under Barbara
Bush's stamp of approval. And nobody won. Except the Bushes and big
gummint. The kids got shafted. The money fell short. Except for the money paid up front to the Bush
family. And nobody cared to call them out on it.
The apparent abject failure of the Healthcare for all
Americans of 2009 Act seems to tell us a lot about who we are. We know
one thing for certain, though. We
can drop the pretense of being Good Samaritans who care about our neighbors. Nope, we can’t blow smoke on that one
anymore. We can now come out of
the closet and be stingy without fear of discovery because it ain't a secret
anymore. We just don't care about our neighbor. We proved that we
did not care about our neighbors' sons and daughters who joined the Reserve
military forces to get a little extra tuition money, or maybe a new washing
machine, and hoo-aahhhhh, got sent to combat in Iraq 3, 4 times without the
Decider even wincing, or Cheney lighting any candles for them. We just
don't care, and it doesn't matter anymore. The giant spin makes us
dizzy. When we could have
demonstrated with signs of protest about the Iraq War based on lies, we didn't.
But when we as a nation, were confronted with giving a few bucks a month more
to pay for the 47 million Americans who have ZERO healthcare many of us gave
them a Nero's thumb down. They were not worthy of having a quality
life. We may not wish them dead, but the result is the same as if we were
glad about it all. Our 30 pieces of silver that Hannity says we might
save for ourselves in voting NO for 47 million Americans, is ours, and we are
entitled to it. So f--- off ye riff raff, freeloading neighbors. This
is our very own Brave New America. We will kick you to the curb on national healthcare without flinching,
count on it. You are a
deficit. And Reagan taught us that
“Deficits don’t matter.” And all
you old people that we pretend to care so much about, just forget about
it. You are a liability. You cost us so much on Medicare, Medicaid,
and SS that while we blame the Democrats for wanting to kill Grandma and
subject her to "Youth in Asia" truth is, we just don't care enough to
fund any more programs that deplete our hard-earned dollars from big tax increases that
Obama is proposing. So all you old people, while we might blame the
Democrats for wanting to kill you, just know that in secret, the Neocons love
it. It's a win-win for Neocons because when the sh-- hits the fan and
funding gets cut for the seniors just like when we cut it for the school kids
in sinking SCHIPS and the NCLBA, the GOP can blame the dumbass Democrats. And like always, they won't even know
what hit them. 