By Godfrey, I'm Incensed...

I never intended for my little slice of bandwidth here in the blogosphere to be political, and I promise not to let it happen too often. Politics and the ugliness that seems to accompany it just doesn’t have a place in most of the things I like to write about.

And yet, I can’t help but add my two cents to this already over-flogged, expired equine.

**As an aside, I’m an INFP, that means (among other things) that I generally dislike conflict and I will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid it. One website (http://www.personalitypage.com/INFP.html) says it this way…”INFPs are flexible and laid-back, until one of their values is violated. In the face of their value system being threatened, INFPs can become aggressive defenders, fighting passionately for their cause.” Oh yeah, and I'm a liberal, too...**

So now back to my .02 cents. *deep breath*

I am one of the nation’s uninsured--laid off and now self-employed. I’m one of the people whom the GOP doesn’t think is worthy of healthcare. I’m one of the people who, as a woman, is considered to have a pre-existing condition—that of being female—which makes my insurance premiums much higher than those of men.

This healthcare bill is not, in all likelihood, going to make a huge difference to me…but the fact that it will help some people makes me very much in favor of it. I also hope that in the future our healthcare system will be closer to those of Canada, Australia, the UK or France. The US is NOT number one in healthcare among other industrialized nations, we’re somewhere around number 37. There are, to be sure, institutions in this country that are among the best in the world, but overall, the country is not at the top. And we should be. There’s no excuse for people dying for lack of basic preventative care. That happens, sadly, in the Third World, it shouldn’t happen in the US.

And here’s what I find so incongruous. Canadians (or the French, British, etc.) would never assume that some of their neighbors should have healthcare at the expense of others…that some deserved it and others didn’t. And yet that seems to be how a good portion of the US feels. And these same people, who don’t want to offer basic preventative care, are all up in arms over the rights of the unborn. What happens after these babies are born if their parents aren’t able to get healthcare? It’s all fine, well, and good to scream about being “pro-life,” but then you have to be “pro-life” for the families and parents of these unborn babies as well. It’s unconscionable. The fact that the people who yell loudest and most vehemently about this are the uber-religious right is even more of a non-sequitur. I mean really, if you are a Christian, you want your fellow humans to be cared for and looked after. You don’t place a higher value on some lives at the expense of others, do you? (I’d think hard about that…)

These are also the same folks who, in large part, put our country’s young men and women into harm's way--with seemingly very little remorse--in wars all over the world. So it’s okay to fund wars in all corners of the globe, wars that we didn’t and don’t need to be in, but we can’t give every American access to healthcare?

The mind simply boggles.

But here’s my favorite. These same folks who are adamant that I and many millions of others don’t deserve healthcare want the country of Iraq to have universal healthcare. In a March, 2004 article from The Seattle Times (heres a link to the full text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2001870042_iraqdig03.html the Bush Admininstration fought to get $950 million to start universal healthcare in Iraq. Congressional Democrats at the time criticized the president for promoting something for Iraqis that they wouldn’t even consider for Americans. So our tax dollars can give the Iraqis healthcare, but not our fellow Americans?

How does that make ANY sense?

And to add to this already craptacular pile of dung, we now have a bunch of illiterate, racist, homophobes making death threats against President Obama and many democrats. People who can’t spell and haven’t read enough history to even know what it is that their quaint, folksy posters really mean, are suggesting that their country has been taken away.

Their country? What about my county? The America that I know believes that we are all created equal and that we are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. My America encourages civilized debate and reasoned discussion of difficult issues rather than threats of violence. And in my America we don’t like defeat, but we act honorably and resolve to take it to the ballot box next time--we don't act ignorantly at the behest of some mindless talking head who glibly tells his minions what to think.

I’m dumbfounded, to say the least, at the crassness and violent nature of the Tea Party set—not to say anything of their grammar and spelling. If you don’t have a sense of history and don’t know the context of the little snippets you are scrawling on a piece of poster-board, you are engaging in pretty serious and irresponsible incitement. And the folks you’re riling up? They don’t seem to have a lot of problem solving or conflict resolution skills. They seem to be most comfortable with threats and intimidation. And come on, those things have no place in 21^st century America. None.

So that’s my rant and while I’m guessing neither of my readers will make it this far in the piece, that’s okay. I feel better having had my say and now I can move onward and upward. 

Oh...and the title? It's what my great-grandfather allegedly used to say because my great-grandmother didn't approve of swearing. (I can't believe she'd approve of Tea-Party language, either...)