Blockheads

The gov’t always gets what it wants, whether it be bogus educational programmes (rote brainwashing), torture go–aheads, or grandiose, tax-payer funded coronations for faux princes in cowboy boots.

Where was Ted Kennedy’s progressive plan for Medicare when there was a chance of passing it in Congress? These pretenders are visionaries only so long as the ‘other’ party can be blamed for the initiative’s failure.

Universal health care is a matter of fiscal responsibility. Either you position armed guards at emergency room doors and make them pay-as-you-go, organise a collection service and erect the crematoriums for the bodies clogging the sewers, or get the insurance companies and Medicare out of my less-than-deep pockets. I know conservatives like to brag that only the insured receive medical assistance but it’s time the rest drop their hospital gowns and take a preventative physical. Special-interests and gov’t shell games are draining our physical, financial, and moral reserves.

Dear Ted, it doesn’t bother me that when I patronise a minimum-wage paying vendor that their sales team is speaking a foreign language, what irritates me is I can’t understand them. Why is it a foreign exchange student from Brazil can speak 5 languages and Americans can barely communicate in their native tongue? Do you truly believe that raising math and science scores will make the next generation more competetive in a global economy? Talk to me in that Choate-refined tone, Ted, where they taught you how to sabotage the economies of third-world countries but not how to support our own except through excessive taxation of those who can least afford it. We both know the only edge America’s children will be given is sophisticated weaponry that will continue to be dwarfed by the most rudimentary of tools as sure as the illusions of our intellectual and economic prowess are blown-away by the reality of our shortcomings.

Isn’t America, the real composite of this dumbed-down, over-indulged herd of haves and have-nots, merging like cement at the bottom of a California mud slide, rather than pouring into the foundation of the beacon beaming brightly at the top of the hill? Flex-time to attend a school play will light-it-up? Who’s directing, Mel Gibson?

Approaching Chicago on a rail system plagued with mechanical failures and delays, you see miles of decay surrounding a pocket of opulence, and on the Metra Rail that takes worker bees from sky-scrapered cubby holes to mortgaged asylums, all I see are hard-working people who go from birth to death supporting gangsters like yourself that got yours the easy way and could care less if most of us get a fair shake, let alone a few years or more unshackled from our yokes.

This is America. These are our friends.

And to think the best America has to offer brought us to this place.