Healthcare Is Killing Us

It was amusing to turn on Saturday Night Live and hear my own words.  Evidently someone does read this blog.  Their parody of the Baby Boomer generation in comparison to Generation X and Millennials was spot on.  They are a gilded generation, the perfect metaphor for a time in American history when people mattered.  After all people are America.  People live in America, but they also make up America.  Buildings cannot be built by themselves or by animals.  Laws cannot be enacted by spirits.  People make up America.  If one looks at America today at least through the lens of reported news, it would seem that America is not fair.  America no longer is equal, if it ever were.  Certainly it wasn't to the millions of imported African slaves.  America's history never was Christian, but Americans have worked hard at making it so.  Progress has been made, and much of it has come in the last century.  Suffrage and civil rights are two important watershed events in American history.  Still one issue remains.  Equality.  America never has been equal.  While immigrants worked hard and accomplished much with the Protestant work ethic, racial inequality still remains in America.  I do not know the statistics, but older white men still hold the reins.  Comically SNL suggested it was time for them to move on.  If a city, state, or nation does not entrust the future leadership of their community to a younger generation, then you get what we have now.  We stopped embracing the younger generations, when we stopped supporting public education.  In America's prime public schools were the core of American life.  What better place is there to focus attention than on the preparation of the younger generation to come to economic fruition?  Not that long ago America forgot this.  Instead we began a covert systematic exploitation of our younger generations.  That is because Capitalism, the chosen socioeconomic system of America, cannot work without the spending of money.  Corporate America looked around and decided that the youthful generation had the expendable capital.  Emerge the iPhone, another perfect metaphor for the exploitation of American youth.  Instead of G.I. Joes, Barbie dolls, and tinker toys we primed Americas youth to want more.  Now everyone including adults are walking around staring at their palms.  I am a staunch Apple user.  I love my Apple computers, a Mac Pro, an iMac, and a Macbook Pro, but I do not have an iPhone.  I do not have an iPhone for two simple reasons.  One is I can't afford the contractual monthly charges, and the other is it is too small for me to see and hear adequately.  The three times I have had cellular phones they were nothing more than a nuisance.  I had a Samsung that burned up.  I had a Startac flip phone, and it never worked at all.  Finally I had a Nokia that did work, but I needed an ear piece to be able to hear on it.  Whatever happened to Nokia?  They were the phone of choice back then.  My mother has an iPhone, and it was my task to acquire it for her.  I did the research and then did the leg work to import her photos, contacts, and other important information.  It was not easy.  To set up video calling on the Amazon "Show," you had to have an iPhone.  We are set, but watching an 86 year old woman learn to use an iPhone is not amusing.  It was painstaking.  Remnants of that process still linger.  She enjoyed her desktop PC the most, when picture taking was still done with a digital camera.  Both Outlook Express and her Kodak software were enjoyable for her to use.  Now she struggles with Apple mail, its graphic interface, and Photos.  Neither are fun to use.  The iPhone proves to be more conflating creating confusion between it and her iMac.  Quickly she realized that a larger screen and more encompassing software create an easier human interface.  You can see more, so you can do more.  The iPhone was entertaining for a while, but now the reality has set in.  In today's political climate nothing is fun anymore.  The news headlines are severe.  Political bickering is the norm.  Few positive headlines make their way to the dinner table.  We carry on.  Luckily in my mother's case my father was an astute wager earner.  Although now he has passed, his hard work and talent have manifested themselves greatly in my mother's security.  She tells me stories of her church friends, and most of them are destitute.  Constantly I hear her reiterate how down and out most people in Fayetteville are.  With my help my mother and I have prepared for her future.  Contrarily I have not planned for my future, because it is impossible.  Her life of almost a century is overwhelming, histrionic, antagonistic, and unsupportive the way America has become to her youthful generation.  It should be no surprise there is no model for the appropriate Christian behavior to support our youth.  Instead I bear the brunt of her hardships.  Effectively she transfers her anxiety, worry, and grief to me, like all good parents should.  Truly in her own mind she feels this is appropriate.  It is unusual for a fifty-six year old single man to be living with his mother, or is it?  Not today.  With the depression of 2008 came a great economic change in America.  A handful of conniving Wall Street traders bet against the American economy.  To make good on their bets, the powers at be convinced W. that the taxpayers needed to bail out the Wall Street investment businesses.  If the American people saw that Wall Street was bankrupt, it was rumored it would be another great depression.  W. created the Troubled Assets Relief Plan, dipped his hand into the American cookie jar, and handed these Wall Street companies our money.  The money went to pay off this handful of investors chronicled in the film, "The Big Short."  Today still they have our money, and where is it?  Was this group of men qualified and responsible enough to possess that sum of capital?  Under the system of Capitalism money has to be spent.  It is a system of supply and demand.  Money must be spent for Capitalism to work.  It has to flow through society to stoke the process.  Money must flow.  The problem with America today is that the money is not flowing.  It is sitting shelved in overseas banks and otherwise invested for the gain of its proprietors.  These men and the other American corporations which refuse to infuse the middle and lower classes with economic opportunity are to blame.  Instead America has regressed back to slavery, but our slaves are in Asia.  All of our pollution as a byproduct of the production of goods squarely is in Asia, unregulated, naive, and accessible.  In a perfect metaphor for quid quo pro, China is polluting America with Gen X.  Not the Generation X, but the byproduct of making Teflon.  Likewise the Mexicans are making polyester resin at a plant on Cedar Creek Rd.  Turnabout is fair play.  Fayetteville, our Fayetteville, is a rail freight yard for DAK Americas.  Daily trains make their way down the middle of Russell Street supplying DAK Americas with the appropriate raw materials to make plastic drink bottles.  These plastic drink bottles end up creating small islands floating in the Pacific Ocean, killing marine life, and not biodegrading.  They will be on earth until someones decides what to do with them.  This is not good commerce.  Neither is accumulating money in a system that needs it to flow.  A super rich social class that has no authority, no qualification, and no stomach for doling out money to the lower classes should not be in power.  This is why and how Capitalism has failed America.  What is the most appropriate metaphor for failed Capitalism in America?  The answer is the medical industry.  Not the medical profession, but the newly created medical industry that began with the invention of HMO's.  This was the beginning of the end for American health care.  Who suffers?  The answer is the youthful generations.  I do not have health insurance and as such have not one ounce of care about my well being.  I am on my own, and I am watching out for my eighty-seven year old mother.  Because there is no model, she does not know how to support me and my life.  We have prepared for her future but not mine.  I am in a necessary stasis reflecting only her sentiments, worries, and passions.  My artistic voice, my own personal emotional expression has been silenced.  It is hard.  I played a gig last night, and instead of playing from my musical soul, I emulated my father.  I couldn't shake fifty years of paternal influence enough to reach deep into my own well of musicality.  That is why it is called work.  I realized that I didn't want it.  I don't want it.  I don't want my mothers emotional psyche.  It is thirty years older than me, and consequently there is little correlation.  While the patrons at my gig were kind and appreciative, it was not musically rewarding to me in any way.  It was rote labor hashing out tunes my father would have played.  I even made this decision, to play in his style with instruments that emulate his sound.  It has worked since he has been playing professionally.  Why would it not work again?  It is the same place, the same city where he played most of his life.  The patrons of the party were of the blood of their local predecessors.  Like the cast of SNL I was being haunted by the ghosts of the Baby Boomers.  We want the spirit of the Baby Boomers to be laid to rest like it should be.  America has not been kind to us.  In fact Millennials have received the rawest deal of all.  It's a good thing they are finding this out.  What is healthcare in America?  It is a bureaucratic spaghetti bowl of red tape which seeks only to line the pockets of its owners.  At America's inception one could go see the local doctor downtown, get an X ray, get a flu shot, or get a prescription for pain.  It was simple.  Medicine was grass roots.  The battleground of America starkly was apparent.  It was littered with the corpses of Union and Confederate soldiers, dead lynched slaves, and the sick and dying of disease.  There was no spin.  There was no hedge.  There was no future.  Healthcare was meant to save your life.  America no longer is a Christian nation.  Rest assured that satan is alive and well and living in Washington, DC.