brain

These days I can't help but think of a German saying, a Bavarian one to be precise. God, throw some brain from the sky! It's the frustrated exclamation of a Bavarian at the ineptitude of God's underlings on Earth who just don't seem to be able to make use of that gray matter up there under their skull. I could use some more of those cells to understand what is going on these days in my country of choice.
I've been living in this country for 10 years and as much as I am a studious observer and willing participant - there are vast parts of this society that leave me perplexed. Many Americans are up in arms over the health care reform that the President wants to accomplish. At first that seemed rightful. There are close to 50 million people uninsured or under insured, the majority of personal bankruptcies is due to medical debt, the world-class care you can undoubtedly get in this country is easily affordable for a Japanese yakuza or a Saudi prince or a Hollywood millionaire while the majority is in some weird health care provider plan that limits the choice of doctors and hospitals (like mine) or kicks you out when you get seriously ill or move to another state. And should you lose your job that great plan you had is gone as well.
So you would think there is a lot to get angry about.
But what are people mad about? On the radio I heard a woman in Pennsylvania at a town hall meeting say, in a quivering voice: "They (the government) let the beast out. I don't want to live in Russia." Heck yeah, the health care system there is dimensions worse, but I didn't see any connection. Russia though to her was synonymous with socialism. "I don't want the state to have power over my body. This is the end of America. No to health care reform, no to socialism." I wasn't sure she or any of the many enraged voices truly read any of the proposals. All they felt was that somehow the decades long fight for an adequate health insurance system in the world's richest country signals the end of a free America and the opening stages of a Communist dictatorship. Hence the rage.
But here's where my middle-European Americanized self has to give up. Why this irrational, emotional drama of the perceived end of whatever America they have in their head? There is a problem, it needs a solution. Urgently. All it gets from that half of the American population is emotional resistance. Who could seriously think of socialism as a threat at the end of the first decade in the 21st century? I guess I am more flummoxed by the fact that people actually have not evolved passed that rhetoric that clearly dates back to the 1930s and 1950s. Who would seriously find this a threat? And who in this country can seriously find private enterprise the ONLY best solution when all that has done in relation to health care is quite evidently put millions in misery. Health care cannot just be run like a business because consequentially sickness would have to be a profit center only and sick people deserve better.
If you don't like the way a government does tasks it should do, take it to the task. Have competition. Make private enterprise work for you, make government work for you. Punish each if they don't perform. Government is not per se the end of a job well done. It does "security" obviously very well. Soldiers, policemen, firemen - any private sector competition in this area has not necessarily shown its superiority. And it doesn't take a Blackwater or a Katrina disaster to make the case for bad private enterprise.
I know a little about real existing socialism from my limited but curious exposure to East Germany. I did not like that type of society. Nothing in the US points there. I just don't get it in my head that the very same people who might benefit from a reform don't even want to listen, understand, shape the debate for fear of some perceived dogmatic mistake. That to me is more socialist in thinking than the open debate I expect from a democracy. If anything those wailing voices remind me of the way East Germany did its propaganda - never listen, never look at the issues, the facts, the solutions - just adamantly fight what they call the evil capitalists and subsume everything under that phrase. Why would you not want something that could potentially improve your life and instead voice an opposition that ultimately only benefits the status quo and those that don't have your best interest in mind. What's the matter with Kansas?
This country has an admiration for un-intellectualism that sometimes scares me. All the talk-radio guys and the Sarah Palins of this country are an amazing boost to encourage intellectual ignorance, quell intellectual curiosity and cultivate an almost fanatic need to look at the world through eyes that are stuck in the 1890s or 1950s. So, yes God, throw down some brains, so at least there is a debate about health care and not about ghosts of the past with no relevancy to today. I just can't be dogmatic any more, it's 2009 for Chrissake.