What I’m really sick of is people going around saying the American people don’t want this. Bullshit. We’ve wanted this, and deserved this, for a century. Everyone who voted against this bill and is mad that it passed should really reconsider their morals. Be opposed to health care reform is literally advocating for the death and illness of a huge swath of our population. That’s gross. Really gross.

I spent some time at the local library this weekend getting some work done. I took some time to graze through some periodicals, including the Utne Reader. It’s been several years since I last picked up the Utne in a tiny Michigan town, and that’s a decision I have come to regret. The January/February 2010 issue has some fantastic articles and dispatches.

In particular there’s a quick dispatch from the IEEE Spectrum on the coming streetcar revival. Considering I’ve been planning a move to the stereotypical trolley-land of San Francisco in two years, the timing is interesting, to say the least. Nevermind that the true trolleys are the land of tourists and real transportation is on subways and trolley-busses (far less romantic).

I’m sort of passionate about public transportation. While driving is convenient (and a necessity for my current locale), it stands in stark contrast to my ethics. Cars are perhaps, among other things, a hallmark of American consumption and consumerism. They’re also terribly inefficient in terms of resources, and time & energy waste. And I’m aware that most people who have never lived in a public transport mecca will go on and on and on about how that is false, cars save so much time, blah blah blah.

I hate to break it to you, but no. They don’t. I’ll concede that they do in public transport black holes, but anyone who’s lived in cities where transportation is essential to the entire population will understand my point. When implemented effectively, public transportation is superior and reduces pollution and the need for resources. It’s why I’m such a huge fan of the bicycle.

But back to the trolleys. I find them to be exciting. It could potentially be a way to get an effective public transportation system in place without the crazy high costs associated with them. Smaller metropolises could utilize a streetcar system to great effect. The more people we get on mass transit the better. Driving a car is political, and it’s not politics I endorse.

That’s right, I will be teaching ~25 youngsters in a public classroom and I will be paying a university for the privilege. Now I’m no stranger to the unpaid internship, I’ve had plenty coming from the entertainment industry. But student teaching is a little different. It’s not running coffee and giggling with professionals; it’s teaching. It’s accepting the full responsibilities of a teacher without compensation. This is the business of changing lives, people.

This is completely ridiculous. And also somewhat enraging. And the logistics of it for a non-undergraduate student are next to impossible. I’m among the lucky ones in my program; I don’t have children I need to support. I’ve got free room and board to help me float the five months of forced “unemployed employment.” I know a number of single moms in my classes. I can’t even comprehend how much in savings they’ll need to be able to survive that semester. I cringe as I discuss working tail evenings and weekends with the couple who are as lucky as me.

I’m angry. I love my job more than anything, and I’m angry that I have to leave it and it’s meager salary (let’s forget the fact that I’d be willing to do it for free). I’m angry that I have to leave my buddy for a minimum of 5 months, possibly after this year if that’s what his parents and the district think is best. I’m angry that there is no way I can do both. And I’m angry that I’m going to have fight high school students for minimum-wage part-time grunt work with evening and weekend hours. But that doesn’t compare to the anger that this havoc-wreaking institution is thrusting on my lives and those whom I work with. I could at least understand it a little easier if I didn’t have to pay out of my pocket for this “privilege.” I could at least justify it if I would receive some form of compensation beyond the promise of a degree in the future.

I don’t want to leave my job. My job is the whole reason I’m getting this degree. I just find it incredibly upsetting that the two are in conflict, a conflict that doesn’t make much sense.

Our national government and almost all of the establishment media have decided to play a similar game, which could be called Terrorball. The first two rules of Terrorball are:

(1) The game lasts until there are no longer any terrorists, and;
(2) If terrorists manage to ever kill or injure or seriously frighten any Americans, they win.

Ah yes, the awesome game played by American politicians and American media outlets alike. It’s a game designed to keep all of us living in fear of ridiculously unlikely things. It’s the same mindset that leads to what counts as “good parenting” (ie nothing short of placing children in plastic bubbles).

It’s also the same reason why our healthcare system is broken and not going to be fixed by any healthcare reform that might pass. Keep the masses scared and distracted so no one can ponder what is truly scary in our country. Like our uninsured and unemployed. Like our rampant destruction of our environment. Like a million other things. Focusing on terrorism lets us ignore the mirror we should be examining. It excuses us from fixing more pressing problems

Which, of course, benefits big media and politicians. As long as we remain scared, politicians retain their power and media retains it captive audience. If we actually focused on real issues and not imaginary ones, we might actually go outside and do good work that will transform our society. Transform it in ways that demands accountability and shuns consumerism for the sake of consuming.

The public option? Gone. Expansion of Medicare? Gone. Ability for the government to negotiate pricing, pharmaceuticals, etc? Gone. Guarantees that insurance companies supply useful plans? Never there. Fines for those who cannot buy health insurance? Still intact.

I’m done. Yesterday’s paycheck told me I’ve earned around $6700 this year. The only reason I’m not on food stamps and in public housing is because my parents are giving me a place to stay and my grad school status allows them to claim me as a dependent so I still have health insurance. My grandmother is helping me with tuition.

Under this bill, I’d be required to pay the government a $1500-$3000 fine a year if I cannot afford health insurance. Considering the status of government subsidies is in peril, it’s pretty damn likely I will not have health insurance unless it is employer supplied. I cannot afford that fine. I don’t even make enough money to survive on my own. Next year I’ll be making even less money due to the legal slave labor of student teaching. Oh, right, it’s in the disguise of accredited classes. This isn’t an internship; it’s taking over someone’s job who is still getting paid for that job to the attune of at least $44,000. But that’s another story.

This bill is fundamentally violent. All it does is deliver 30 million new paying customers to a business that doesn’t actually want to provide the services we pay them to provide. Fuck that. Fuck all of it.

According to the findings, around 25% of people believe that women who have been raped are at least partly to blame because of how they dressed, how much they drank or how many sexual partners they have had.

The survey revealed that:
-38% believe that a woman is partly to blame for rape if she walks through a deserted area.
-37% think a woman is partly to blame if she flirts extensively.
-30% think a woman is partly to blame if she flirts with a man at all or fails to say no clearly.

It also found that 10% of people feel that a woman is completely to blame for rape if she has had a number of sexual partners.

Read the rest of it here.

Mitchell points out that it’s not really about “red” vs. “blue” America. Instead it is about keeping privilege, power, and wealth with those who already have it and keeping it from those who don’t. You don’t have to be one side or the other to carry favor and advantage.

The debate in Washington this fall ought to have been about why the United States has the worst health-care system in the developed world, why Americans pay twice the Western average to maintain that system, and what fundamental changes are needed to make the system better serve us. But Democrats rendered those questions academic when they decided the first principle of reform would be, as Barack Obama has so often explained, that “nothing in our plan requires you to change what you have.”

This is what I find so frustrating. Our system is fundamentally broken. By refusing to rebuild it from the ground up, it keeps that fundamental sickness in the administration. As someone who has taken a lot of antibiotics knows, you don’t stop taking the pills when you start to feel better. Doing so is dangerous because it can breed resistant strains.

We are at a turning point where we as a nation can take a stand on profit vs. ethics. Unfortunately, it seems we are taking the route of profit, even when we know better. The universal mandate without a public option simply delivers 47 million new customers to a system that doesn’t actually do anything. The health insurance companies don’t actually provide a necessary service. They don’t help sick people. They are bureaucracy for bureaucracy’s sake. One could argue a public option would be more of the same, but at least it wouldn’t be a for-profit bureaucracy.

This is unethical. The health insurance system is unethical because it is privately profitable. When you mix profit with human life the only outcome is violence. We are all victims of that violence, even if we don’t recognize it readily. I, for one, am ready for a less violent system yesterday. Denying sick people the care they need is a violent act. It’s disgusting that our manipulated sympathies with corporate entities has made that immediately unrecognizable.

We need change, and this is one case where we need to change everything. If we let any portion of the old system survive, the inherent violence in it is going to fester and one day we will be back to where we are today. We should be working to end this violence against our citizenry, to end private profit on human life at the expense of the individual. We’ve been hoodwinked into thinking about individual needs as academic questions while corporate needs are economic. This is, on the most basic level, backwards.

Tonight’s Law & Order episode, “Dignity,” took on the abortion debate.  The New York Times posted an article today about the franchise’s history of abortion coverage, which has been spotty at best.  This isn’t surprising consider the issue is, um, abortion.  Not exactly a bed of roses issue for prime time television to waltz through without thought.

It started out very promising: an obvious take on the tragic murder of Dr. Tiller. From there, it went downhill in its attempt to cover way too many aspects of the pro-choice/anti-abortion debate. A shout out to Mom Martyrs/Shamers was nice, but the detour into Jill Staneck crazyland that didn’t point out that babies being murdered after surviving abortion is a big fat (obvious) lie kind of killed it for me. And then they tried to divide the DA’s office along the pro-/anti- lines in a way that didn’t feel right for any of the characters. The show refused to explicitly say that their Dr. Tiller stand-in had as much right to his life as any that could be argued for unborn fetuses.  And that, ladies and gentleman, is where the EPIC FAIL lies. Law & Order completely failed to stand up to everything it has postured itself to believe in: that murder is wrong, that crime is wrong, that justice is what is important.

I watched this episode with my father. It was nice to hear him agree with my complaints. I like to think that he enjoyed my explanations of the nuanced references this episode made.

I live in the heart of IL-14, so we often get some crazy things happening around here. Granted, we (finally) elected a Democrat* to congress, which gives me hope, there’s still a lot of right wing crazy around here.  But sometimes we get things right out here in Kane Co. I’d say this is one of them.

I’m pretty sure it’s not a secret that pretty much unilaterally, government is having some budget issues. I find it thoroughly refreshing to see a progressive and fair way to help with that issues.  Sliding scales are what we need more of in this country.  And before you come marching in saying that making richer criminals pay larger fines is unjust, need I remind you of the link between poverty and criminal activity?  How is exacerbating that problem of any help?

* This is my childhood best friend’s dad. Pretty cool, huh?