I'm Your Neighbor, Too

I watched with dismay this video of a woman at a town hall meeting in Oklahoma asking Sen. Tom Coburn if he can help with her husband's catastrophic illness since he lost his job and no longer has insurance to cover his care. Sen. Coburn replied that the government wasn't the solution (though oddly he offered the help of his office: isn't he the government, too?), and that the neighbors ought to be helping out. I'll avoid some of the snarkier comments I've heard about neighbors coming over to change this man's bedpans or whatever. What disturbed me was the applause Sen. Coburn got when he made his anti-government remark.

To those of you who applauded at the meeting, and to those of you who agree with the anti-government ideology of the right wing, let me whisper a little something in your ear: I'm your neighbor, too.

Sure, I live in Chicago. I love my adopted home town and I love living in cities in general. And I know you all love living in Oklahoma, whether in a city or out in the country. And while I wouldn't necessarily want to live there, I want you to know that the things I want for me: a job to support myself, a safe neighborhood, streets to walk on, roads to drive on (on those occasions where I want to drive, I'm more of a public transportation person myself), electricity, good schools for our children (and for adults who want to learn a trade or earn a degree later in life), and of course, affordable health care, I also want for you as well. And I will do what I can to make sure that you can all live the kinds of lives you want to live. In short, I want you to be happy and prosperous.

Now, it's true that some of these things are best handled at the community level. I am not against that, and why you think I would be, I don't know. But some things really are best handled by something bigger than that. Imagine what Oklahoma would be like without electricity or highways. Oklahoma has always been a relatively poor state, it's quite possible that, on its own, it wouldn't be able to build highways or bring electricity out to everyone. Certainly no private business would do anything on such a massive scale: even if could afford to do so, where would be the profit? Just as there's no real profit for an insurance company to pay for expensive care for the husband of that lady at the town hall meeting. Some things have to be done by the federal government and that means that it has to include all of its citizens, not just the ones you want it to include. And I'm sorry that you can't find it in you to understand that. I just wanted you to know that you don't have to do it on your own.

But I know I'm wasting my words here. You won't listen to me. You've made up your minds that anybody who doesn't live in your little world, whether that means someone who's not a family member or who isn't part of your immediate community or outside your state or even someone who lives in a city as opposed to living out in the country, is somehow your enemy. And you have been working very hard over the last few years to disassociate yourself with the idea of America as a community, accentuating the differences between us while minimizing the things we have in common. To your credit, for the most part, you have succeeded, and it's quite possible that the country will continue to move in the direction you are pushing it in.

But as the saying goes, be careful of what you wish for, you may get it. Oklahoma would be a much poorer place if it was on its own rather than being part of the larger community that is America. Because you choose to distance yourself from anyone or any place outside of Oklahoma, you have made your lives harder and you have made it easier for the ones who are exploiting you to continue to do so. Perhaps the day will come when you or your grandchildren or your great-grandchildren will understand that and try to make Oklahoma a great state within a great nation, part of a great nation among other great nations in a global community of different cultures and histories but with a common humanity linking us together. But until that time, there's very little anyone can do for you. This is one case, it seems, where it really is all up to you.

RIP Sen. Edward Kennedy 1932-2009

We'll miss you.

Gee, Ya THINK?

An Oklahoma senator says the angry tone of the health care debate is the result of people losing confidence in government.

Republican Sen. Tom Coburn says the government has earned that loss of confidence.

At times during protests, critics of President Barack Obama's health care overhaul have likened him to Adolf Hitler.

Coburn calls health care a symptom of the debate over an uncontrolled federal government. He says unchecked spending by Congress has raised the question of whether lawmakers are legitimately thinking about the American people and their long-term best interests.

I guess, Senator, it all depends on what "spending" you're talking about. You didn't seem to have problems with the trillions of dollars (much of it "off the books") we spent killing brown people on the other side of the world, but as soon as someone suggests the working poor and unemployed get a few dollars, you all go apeshit about money.

The mistrust of government has been fueled by years of corporate propaganda to that end. Ignorant and fearful people cling to that paranoia and go out and elect people to office who hate the very idea of government, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. And in the meantime they're all blind to the fact that politicians like Coburn and his financial backers are robbing them blind.

Government spending, the health care fiasco, illegal wars, these are only symptoms of the real problem, which is the widespread ignorance of the American public. Do something about that, and the other problems can be solved very easily.

Have You Got A Nickel?

Digby, on the GOP's propensity to throw a hissy fit:

The solution to this is obvious. The Democrats should always put something really outrageous into every bill to give the wingnuts something to rend their garments over. In the stimulus they should have set aside a couple million for illegal alien subsidized beachfront housing. In health care they should have put in a tax on guns to cover plastic surgery. When the nutters predictably go bonkers, they can reluctantly "give in," thus leaving perfectly mainstram, useful items like contraception and counseling for living wills alone.

Of course, they're just throwing these hissy fits because that's pretty much what their constituents want to hear. Having spent years in the wilderness observing their behavior I can tell you right now they live from one outrage to the next, it may be the only thing that keeps their miserable lives meaningful.

Liberals gave them electricity so they have air conditioning to keep them cool in the summer, liberals built huge highways and other roads so they could travel around, union workers built cars for them to drive around in, and in general made their lives much better from days past. In effect, liberals improved their lives so well they're now bored and have nothing better to do with their time than listen to other bored gasbags on the ray-dee-oh and tee-vee tell them how they're always in danger from someone or other. Liberals, socialists, commies, blacks, Mexicans or other "illegals", they're beset with dangers at every turn, and only by giving money and votes to politicians who vow to protect them from all these evils can they survive the tumultuous times they live in. That they in turn get ripped off by these same politicians, who are just fronts for the shadow government of industry, never occurs to them: after all, those politicians and bidnissmen are "real Murkans". As I've said before, it's a Ponzi scheme masquerading as a protection racket.

What Digby also wrote reminded me of a story I heard about Chuck Barris when he was doing The Gong Show...when they were auditioning acts, there was always a censor there to say whether the act could or couldn't be on TV. After a while it became clear to Chuck that they always seemed to find something wrong with one act every session, most likely to justify their phony-baloney jobs. After that, they started intentionally auditioning one ludicrously awful act every session so they could be banned and everyone else could get on with the business of putting together a goofy show featuring bad performers.

Until one act got through...

Punk'd?

It seems to me that if there WERE a group of powerful people acting behind the scenes on a global scale, and I'm not speculating one way or another, then the question is, what is their endgame? If the ultimate goal is some form of corporatist world order, then bringing down the United States would be a logical means to that end, as a single global superpower that is free to launch war (as in Iraq) would definitely be a roadblock. Certainly if all of this is part of larger plan and if they really DID want to get the US out of the way, they're going about it the right way.

And bringing the US back down a bit may even be a legitimate goal towards a more peaceful world, as the nation which spends more on the military than nearly every other nation in the world combined represents a real threat to global peace. Better to have the US as one great nation among many than one who feels that military might can trump any form of diplomacy or movement towards global peace.

All of this is just speculation, of course. I'm just a guy who reads things and likes to think he's fairly well-informed, and if such a group did exist, they would be very good at keeping hidden. The question is, where are we humans headed as a race? There are about six billion people in the world, I would hazard a guess that two thirds of them live under what we would consider to be abject poverty and most of the rest are trying to AVOID poverty, while a very few control the bulk of the wealth and political power, enough to manipulate governments and public opinion. Is this the kind of world we want to continue to live in? And is there anything we can really do to stop it?

My Kenyan Birth Certificate

Make your own!