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This post might be "too complex and nuanced for a typical web audience."
The last couple of days have been filled with anger, for me.
One involves a situation beyond my control, but leaves me feeling vulnerable and cheated by a faceless bureaucracy. Of course it will get sorted out for my personal situation, but it only reinforces my adamant belief that health care should be a right for every single person, and not a classist privilege accessible only to those who manage to find a full-time job or can afford to pay for their own health care out of pocket. What does it say about our society, if you can only gain access to medicine and technology that will make/keep you healthy if you have the money to pay for it? Isn't it bad enough for the unemployed or under-employed that they make very little money? Must we punish them further, by telling them that they don't deserve to be healthy? That, in some cases, they deserve to die?
And people truly argue about this? Fail.
I've also been thinking a lot about people in positions of power.
If you are in a position of power, and you see that the people over whom you exert power - the sheep of your flock, if you will - are not doing what they're supposed to be doing, which of the following do you think is the proper response to make your flock more functional?
A) Blame them for not knowing better (and be sure to blame other people for not teaching them better, willfully ignoring your own position of power at the moment).
B) Mock them while surrounding yourself with people who agree with you.
C) Ostracize them by making them feel ashamed or guilty, so as not to taint your tiny Type A flock of "true sheep."
D) Complain about them and how they are the reason that the group is failing as a whole. Make sure to not actually speak to them, tell them what you think what went wrong, or perform any action items to rectify what went wrong.
E) Point out to them what went wrong, and ask them what you can do with your position of power to ensure that it does not happen again.
On a lighter note, a friend of mine recently told me that she thought my Internet alias was "My Stick Eeper." I've had this alias for 8 years, and I never thought about it that way. It's supposed to be "Mystic Keeper," by the way; huzzah for aliases created at age 14.
If people want to start calling me "The Stick," though, I am okay with that.
One involves a situation beyond my control, but leaves me feeling vulnerable and cheated by a faceless bureaucracy. Of course it will get sorted out for my personal situation, but it only reinforces my adamant belief that health care should be a right for every single person, and not a classist privilege accessible only to those who manage to find a full-time job or can afford to pay for their own health care out of pocket. What does it say about our society, if you can only gain access to medicine and technology that will make/keep you healthy if you have the money to pay for it? Isn't it bad enough for the unemployed or under-employed that they make very little money? Must we punish them further, by telling them that they don't deserve to be healthy? That, in some cases, they deserve to die?
And people truly argue about this? Fail.
I've also been thinking a lot about people in positions of power.
If you are in a position of power, and you see that the people over whom you exert power - the sheep of your flock, if you will - are not doing what they're supposed to be doing, which of the following do you think is the proper response to make your flock more functional?
A) Blame them for not knowing better (and be sure to blame other people for not teaching them better, willfully ignoring your own position of power at the moment).
B) Mock them while surrounding yourself with people who agree with you.
C) Ostracize them by making them feel ashamed or guilty, so as not to taint your tiny Type A flock of "true sheep."
D) Complain about them and how they are the reason that the group is failing as a whole. Make sure to not actually speak to them, tell them what you think what went wrong, or perform any action items to rectify what went wrong.
E) Point out to them what went wrong, and ask them what you can do with your position of power to ensure that it does not happen again.
On a lighter note, a friend of mine recently told me that she thought my Internet alias was "My Stick Eeper." I've had this alias for 8 years, and I never thought about it that way. It's supposed to be "Mystic Keeper," by the way; huzzah for aliases created at age 14.
If people want to start calling me "The Stick," though, I am okay with that.
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But I figured that the power dynamic is pretty universal to how people in power react to failure within their flock.
I love his tone!
Fascinating!
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Health care is a right for everyone. Period.
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I'd love to be able to organize my life so that I only work when I'm broke, and have long stretches where I just don't work and do what pleases me. But the health insurance thing is what makes it hard for me to do that: even with COBRA, my policy would cost more than half my rent every month. (Without COBRA, I am sure I would get turned down for sneezing the wrong way one time.)
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You not only have to have access (via money, job, etc) to that system, but frequently, in order to get appropriate care, you have to understand how to navigate that system on a number of bewildering levels. (How to deal with doctors, how to find a good doctor, how to deal with bureaucracies, how to appeal to that bureaucracy when it doesn't land in your favor). And you have to have the time to do this navigating, assuming you understand how to do it.
I don't know that having a more socialized medical system than we have at present will help with the navigation problem. But yeah.
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Signed,
Uninsured since my divorce
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I do think that navigating the system is a profound hurdle, particularly so in our current system where the financial question looms so large. (And where, even if one is entitled to financial assistance in some way, it can be difficult to access one's entitlements.)
[Apologies if this is still unclear; I ought to learn not to type with a headache threatening. ;)]
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(I didn't think you were against any improvements in national healthcare, not even for a minute. I'm sorry if I gave that impression. Is Mercury retrograde or something? Because this evening is being weird like that.)
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It really makes me want to scream when the argument people make against having a health-care system run by the government is that it would be bureaucratic. They speak as if it isn't that way already.
Honestly, some of us would be thrilled just to have the option of something...
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http://holypriesthood.blogspot.com/2009/06/red-matter.html
Can anyone make sense of this?
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Our parents have been taken from us, some lost to addictions, some to self-indulgence, some to divorce, each one impaled on the dark tentacles of an unseen menace. We stand, knee deep in the ashes of a future that was supposed to be prosperous and bright, and scour the toxic landscape for tools with which to survive.
And Father Joel says, "What an incredible post!"
Incredible indeed!
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