I have often joked that there should be a spacecraft from the intergalactic emmisary of Truth and Reason arriving any day now...to remind us that the rest of the universe is laughing at the United States of America for still using the word "United" in our name.
Another conversation with my neighbor last night - only the third time I can remember he came to my house just to say hello (he's not antisocial, it's just I ususally see him first because of the geography of the neighborhood, the mailboxes are in front of his house and I'm at a dead end).
And after having his colonectomy, after enduring two years of chemo, they think he's clean.
And he looked at me as seriously as if I were the Virgin Mother Mary herself and said,
"Joe, I'm scared to death of this bill. I don't think I'd be alive"
Now here's where I think this country is going to be fucked silly by stupid people who have let their fear turn their brain inside out.
He obviously already has health care; and he can obviously already afford it.
ANd yet somehow if 30,000,000 other people who don't have it now have the chance to have it - he feels like he's going to die sooner.
You and I at Kos know that no one is going to take away what he has.
But he's genuinely fearful. The look in his eyes was wierdly frightened given all that he's been through.
He believes in the death panels. I've explained the story over and over, that the only thing that changed was that Medicare will now pay for a discussion with your doctors if you choose to have one, and he just shakes his head and says,
"I'm still afraid".
Think about it - if there are "government" death panels, and he still keeps his BC/BS, does he believe that the government is going to tell BC/BS to let him die now? Even if there are death panels, if he's still got private insurance, why does he believe they'd even be looking at him?
People - tell me -
How can it be, that with all this technology, all this access to information, people are more scared by their willfull ignorance when we have more ways than ever before to find what the truth really is?
My neighbor simply says that anything on the internet cannot be trusted. All of you - you can't be trusted - because it's just opinions.
When I ask him why he trusts the opinions he listens to, he says that since they come from traditional media, that it's more reliable.
And yet you and I know that the great equalizer that the Internet has is it's ability to check who's straight and who's crooked. And the neighbor says,
"But who's got the time?"
There it is. The X-Files told us "The Truth Is Out There", and my neighbor says he's too busy to find out what it is.
And so he hangs on to the lie. I was going to type "because that's what makes him feel more comfortable" - but that's not it, is it?
He actually hangs on to the lie because it makes him more uncomfortable. I've been talking to the guy now for eight years, and he's never actually trusted anything I've ever said about politics.
Now you know why I hate religion. Because that's the only place I can figure out where a person is taught to believe what they want to believe and precisely because someone says something different is not a reason to learn, it's a reason not to trust them.
Galileo was put under house arrest for telling what we all know now was the truth in 1620. Four hundred years later, we haven't changed much, have we?
It seems the one thing left that could possibly be considered unifying in the "States Of America" is the fear and distrust.