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THE SCREAMING SENIORS OF SUMMER, 2009
08/13/2009
All you really need to know in order to assess the intelligence or lack thereof of the mostly elderly citizens packing town hall meetings this month and screaming at their elected representatives is this statement made by one of them: "I don't want the government to get between me and my Medicare."
Good grief!
Medicare IS the government, as anyone receiving it should know. Medicare is the government run health care plan for those over 65. I thought all seniors knew that, but apparently not. Are we really so poorly educated as a country that even those who get and love government administered health care (what many might call "socialized medicine") don't even know it comes courtesy of the government? This is tragic.
But it is also typical of a country where so many pride themselves on being conservative. For what does it mean to be "conservative" after all, but to want to prevent change, to want to hold onto the past or the status quo, no matter how good or bad, no matter how damaging or productive, no matter how that "status quo" was achieved?
Most of these screamers and hysterics who seem to be terrified that they are "losing my America" are perfectly happy with the America that the democrats gave them starting with FDR. For it was a democratic administration that gave them both Social Security and Medicare. Republicans fought those "changes" every step of the way, but now the screaming seniors seem to have developed amnesia.
Should another democratic administration pass health care reform, in which the children and grandchildren of these hysterical "conservatives" win the right to health care that is affordable and can't be taken away, fifty years from now those children and grandchildren – if they remain as ignorant as their grandparents - will insist this wonderful right not be tampered with even if that "tampering" improves it. They will forget that the democrats gave them this benefit, and that their grandparents went insane during the dog days of summer, 2009, trying to stop it. They might even rewrite history and say their ancestors were in favor of it. Their new definition of conservative will mean conserving what democrats legislated in 2009. But if republicans are still peddling lies, they will forget or deny that it was the democrats who gave it to them.
What the conservatives (which is just another word for people who are "anti-progress") in this country do not understand is that life, and the needs of human beings, are always changing. Progress is always being made and, unless we have a nuclear holocaust in which we go back to the days of cave dwelling, will continue to be made. With progress come new problems. As the Industrial Revolution came to this country, people moved to cities and new ways of living developed, with new problems such as crowding, industrial waste, and not enough green space. And so came the need for new solutions. When the internal combustion engine was invented, and cars filled the few roadways, we had to build many new roads (and fund them with tax money) and we had to address the new problems of smog and pollution.
Likewise, both progress and problems have come as we have developed new medical procedures and treatments, as people began to live longer, and as medical care became prohibitively expensive.
Let's go back to the 1960s when many medical advances were being made, but seniors could not afford medical care and could not purchase health insurance because of their low incomes, their age and medical conditions.
During WW II, health insurance became tied to employment. Retired people didn't have employers and so had to purchase their own insurance, if they could afford it. With fixed incomes, and many pre-existing conditions which disqualified them, most seniors were not insurable. So unless we were willing to let our seniors die unnecessarily, we had to do something.
One hundred years earlier, life expectancy was in the forties or fifties and no one had to worry about senior health care. But prosperity, which included good nutrition and increased safety, allowed people to live longer, and soon diseases that had been rare (heart disease, diabetes, cancer, dementia, Parkinson's disease, arthritis, etc.) because people didn't live long enough to get them, became commonplace and needed treatment. So progress in preventing early deaths made it necessary to find a way to give older people on fixed incomes access to health care. Thus, Medicare was created during the Johnson administration.
I have yet to find a senior who wants to give up his Medicare.
Yet the vast majority of hysterics at the town hall meetings state that they fear they are going to have a government worker come between them and their Medicare. Except government workers already administer their Medicare and administer it well according to them, so they are simply talking nonsense. (They should be far more frightened that the republicans will destroy Medicare and then a private insurance worker will come between them and their health care – that is what the rest of us under age 65 have to deal with.) These hysterics have been frightened by the right wing media nuts and politicians who simply can't stand it that a democrat – and a black man - now sits in the White House and they will do anything, say anything to get elderly people riled up so they can defeat him.
This is worse than tragic – this is a deliberate attempt to undermine democracy by lying to the people. And I honestly don't know how any of us can do anything about it. As Winston Churchill once said "A lie gets half way around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on."
The republicans know this and they don't care. They want Obama destroyed.
Health insurance companies know this and they don't care. They want health care reform stopped so they can continue to make outrageous profits on the backs of sick people.
Many of the hysterics at the town halls know this and they don't care. They want the White House returned to a white man.
To be fair, democrats bear their own share of the blame for this insanity. To paraphrase an old saying: politics abhors a vacuum. And by not having a definite bill to present to the people, with specifics that could be pointed to and debated intelligently, by trying to be "bi-partisan" with a party that wants to destroy them, the democrats have been suicidal. They left the details vague and created a vacuum of information which trouble makers like Limbaugh, Beck, and Palin quickly filled with lies, accusations and distortions and so, once again, democrats naively underestimated the enemy. Yes, the republicans are the enemy - of the democrats as well as the people - and someday, perhaps, people will finally see this. But maybe not in time to save health care reform.
The summer of 2009 will be remembered, I believe, as a summer of unnecessary hysteria, a summer when corporations and politicians used primal fears of death, longstanding white prejudice against African Americans, and republican contempt for the poor, to kill something that is sorely needed in this country. For the reality is that the rising cost of health insurance will destroy many small businesses or force them to stop offering a health insurance benefit to employees. Or it will force individuals to have to pay the criminally high rates out of pocket or do without health insurance. And it will send more and more citizens into bankruptcy or an early death, and create even more chaos in our already broken health care system.
On the other hand, if we are lucky, this summer of 2009 will finally rip the mask off some of the most despicable people in our nation: republican politicians and corporate lobbyists who care nothing about the people but only want money and power for themselves. It might finally expose the republican race-baiting and fear mongering appeals to those whose sophistication doesn't rise above the level of a third grader and to those who have lost so much, thanks to republican redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich, that they care only about themselves and what else they might lose and can't begin to imagine how much worse some of their fellow citizens have it.
Many of the hysterics at the town halls sob that they are losing the America they once knew. They can't really explain why, because their sophistication doesn't get beyond a third grade understanding of anything, but they shout words like "socialist" or "Nazi" or "Communist" because someone else gave them those words.
I don't have the same fear these poor people have. I'm not susceptible to propaganda and I know how to think for myself. I am proud to have a black president and I don't fear change and progress. I'm a proud liberal and I want health care reform, not just for me but for all my fellow citizens.
But this August, 2009, I am somewhat ashamed of my country – or at least that segment of it that stokes irrational fear, and that crowd of people that succumbs to it.
I really wish America could finally grow up. Maybe then we could boast that we have a real democracy and that we are the greatest country in the world. But while some of our less evolved citizens are having temper tantrums and stopping health care reform, a number of other countries like England and Canada, which have managed to develop systems of universal care without deteriorating into Nazi or Communist systems of government, are putting us to shame.
All content © 2005 outragedcitizen.com
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