This universe in a bottle painted red, white and blue is comfortable. Broken limbs, skulls and spirits number less inside than outside, belly full more often than pained empty, ecstatic glee over nothing in particular widespread from sea to shining sea. Nonetheless, a naked trip to the hospital can sometimes kill this outlook, as sickness is fixed at a cost known to many as the black hole that sucked up their house and everything in it. Liquidated, these inhabitants of the bottle learn to take the unwavering pride all around in stride, perhaps they also decide one day to finish the job the medical bills started, a civic responsibility for the sake of everyone else in the bottle, those of us who still have futures worthy of hope and a stomach for the kool-aid, to disappear quietly, back into the earth, so the rest of us can get back to whatever it is we’re smiling about at a given moment. A herd being a herd, doing what herds do, with a touch of bottle colored magic dust to take the edge off.
American life prompts periodical sadness and comfort depending on whether I’m watching television, playing with my kids, reading the newspaper or hanging the stars and stripes outside the front door in the morning. Riddled with give and take, the process of becoming numb to whatever type of suffering the cycle serves up can often do more harm than good as it festers, much like the way stress ignored over time can result in a brain tumour for the right person. So folks like me face a natural challenge, deciding whether to choose optimism and blinders or optimism and a bullhorn. The herd shuns the sound, calls it noise, taking it to mean I hate the bottle, that I’m someone who’ll always blame the bottle first, when nothing could be further from the truth.
Am I proud to be an American? Yes, but some days not as much as others, like when I read about a middle class family, working, paying taxes, obeying the law, thrust into bankruptcy because an uninsured child of theirs was diagnosed with leukaemia. The herd mentality forces me to look around and take into account the fact that most aren’t that unlucky, and from this point I can push it out of my mind or decide to feel sadness on their behalf. Ignorantly I often choose the latter, knowing full well that I have no control over any of it, until distraction saves me from further torment, my son shoots a baby toothed grin my way, my team wins, the book I’m reading draws me in, my wife says or does something because she loves me.
Soon enough the memory of that unlucky family fades, releases me back into the flow of peace, love and acceleration inside my own tiny nook within the comfy confines of the red, white and blue bottle, until a story about this other family comes my way, having craped out same as the last, only this time it’s cancer caused by contaminated drinking water, a lawsuit years from being decided, medical bills destroying hope swiftly, a lifetime of work and love replaced by a feeling that somehow a wager never made was deemed lost and collection demanded at once by vultures with fat bellies in offices far away, banking wager after wager, with little to no fanfare, zero sympathy, bells, whistles, just the repeated utterance of “dealer has 21”, over and over and over again.
To me, the working middle class family plays more of a vital role within the red, white and blue bottle of comfort than the vultures, but of course the vultures are also in charge of what I’m shown on the television, that show called ‘news’, telling me to budget my sympathy a specific way, to send my worry on down to Aruba for the sake of this attractive, white teenage girl whose gone missing, or the poor disenfranchised followers of the most powerful religion the bottle has going for it, their serious plight of inconvenience anointed the label ‘persecution’, told constantly that “they’re out to get you because they hate everything that goes on inside that head of yours, and they wont stop until everything of yours is theirs.” Not your home, health or possessions, but your thoughts, beliefs and ideas. Real thieves creating imaginary thieves, aristocrats doing what aristocrats do to the herd that does what herds do, and on it goes this thing of ours, inside the red, white and blue colored bottle of comfort.
Pity yourself first they tell us, and spend whatever’s left over on the murdered wife and child of a photogenic psychopath, but under no circumstances should you bother your pretty little head over the hard working family murdered by the medical bills of a psychopathic racket of altruism run amok, this health care system of ours. How it values one infant over another arbitrarily, one sickness over another arbitrarily, one treatment over another arbitrarily, basically turning the declaration that “all men are created equal” into a farce, likewise the notion that we are all God’s children, instead replacing both with cost benefit matrices that pick and choose which ’40 hour work week, patriotic, tax paying, money in the collection plate on Sunday’ Americans get to take their child to a doctor, and turn their back on those who don’t, only paying the unlucky any mind at all when sickness deems one of their lives ripe for liquidation.
My child is worthy of a doctor’s care, but yours isn’t. Stay in that job you hate, don’t move your family to someplace better, because if you do, and sickness happens to knock on your door in between, you’ll quickly find out that the freedom you were enjoying was actually a wager made on an invisible roulette wheel, and because the house always wins, you might want to consider killing off whoever’s sick, make it look like an accident, or risk setting that beloved family of yours back a generation when the vultures start to circle over what used to be yours.
For the sake of the herd and your happiness within it, leave the sick behind and never look back, just like the animals do, pretend nothing ever happened and get yourself into the first job you can find, whether you enjoy the work or not, because the health insurance racket in America is our herd’s way of keeping everyone on their toes, keeping everyone quiet, keeping everyone in a state of fear to change things for the better, because you never know when the grim reaper’s going to show up and shatter that rosy perception you’ve had all along about this red, white and blue colored bottle of comfort.
Indeed, you’re lucky like a fiend my friend, not like the miserable people who suffer in one of those 28 industrialized, proud, colored bottles across the world who provide all their citizens health care, regardless. They’re the fools, and you can believe that because it feels good to, dive right in, the water’s fine. And don’t pay any attention when the industries that provided us jobs move work overseas to such places because health insurance costs are too cumbersome here, or when everyone’s on a privately purchased health insurance plan that requires a yearly deductable they can’t afford, or when the hospital gives you the bad news that a choice between bankruptcy or death is the best America has to offer you or your sick child.
Just fork over the assets and turn on the television (if you can still afford one)…the vultures have got a full slate of people you can feel sorry for. Here, cry over this missing white girl for a while, you’ll feel better, I promise.