So, below -- my thoughts immediately following the first, disastrous, debate between Obama and Romney, when my husband and dad were both strongly pro-Romney and I was strongly pro-crawling under my bed and eating graham crackers rather than getting on with life:
I don't feel good about anything political right now. I have enormous trouble dealing with the following ideas: old people tied to their beds in shitty nursing homes, unwashed and covered in pressure ulcers; hungry children; people bankrupt and/or dying because they couldn't manage to budget for $1000/month health insurance premiums and now they have cancer.
I just -- I believe that, whenever possible, people should not have to be in pain. Even if you have to take someone else's money to help them. You don't "earn" the right to not die of cancer, to not be tied to your bed and left to rot, to not be left alone and frightened and or abused by the people you love, by making good financial decisions.
I believe that most people would agree with the above, and so I believe I'm not unusual when I say: I will pay more tax to live in a country that does not leave vulnerable populations to suffer in the interests of interpreting more strictly a document written in a time when women routine died in childbirth, children did not live past five, and cancer was just God's vendetta against your unfortunate ass, end of story.
The thing is, we're not going to start letting people die in the streets again, in some sketchy Dickensian way. So we all collectively need to come to terms with the idea that the government is going to be using tax money for some social programs, and focus on how it can do so thoughtfully.
For instance: oh my god, effing tax effing junk food! Candy is a luxory. Soda is a luxury. Beer is a luxury. There is no reason on God's green earth not to tax these things and then spend the revenue on public hospitals and pubic health programs.
People who claim this is targeting the poor: you either represent Nestle or Coca Cola, or you are being obtuse. The injustice is not that we tax "poor people's" beverages of choice and not rich people's. The injustice is that those people who have the most incentive to care for their health (because they have the least resources to get adequate treatment for their diabetes, etc) are also the most likely to buy the exact items that are jeopardizing our health.
People who claim that this is interfering with their civil rights: this is a tax you can avoid by drinking the abundant clean water that you have, and that large portions of the world does not have. Don't like water? Learn to like it. You will likely enjoy having your gangrenous leg amputated even less, and given the choice, I'd rather not pay for it.
Also: people should not be afraid to lose their jobs capriciously. But people who are not doing their jobs should be afraid to lose them. You don't need to gut the educational system, but you do need to stop paying "consultants" and administrators two and three and four times what teachers are paid, and you do need to revamp the public school system so that it is possible to fire shitty teachers. You can do it in city-funded child care programs and city-funded hospitals if you get an able manager, someone who will work to counsel and document when staff are not doing their jobs.
If you are kvetching about your manager and ignoring your patients' call bells when their abscesses are leaking onto their linens, their diapers are going unchanged, their Dilaudid is overdue or has stopped working, then you should stop being employed as a nurse.
If Americans could stop looking at politics as an arena for talking about principles and instead consider public policies in terms of the actual effects they have on people and communities, then we could save money. While we're fighting over whether or not people on welfare are layabouts or creating new minimum wage jobs is better than giving everyone health insurance, one group of people is wasting everyone's money on programs that don't do what they say they'll do, and another group is learning that they can get free bottles, but not formula; they can buy cheetos with their EBT, but not tofu; they can get their leg amputated and go on disability, but they can't get the preventative care to keep their leg or their training they need to get a job.
.... anyway, then I had to go to the hospital, where I felt better, because when someone was in pain, I could hassle the nurse myself, not being hooked up to an IV with no call bell by my bed. When someone's abscess ruptured, I could change their sheets.
I get the frustration: Obama promised a lot and didn't deliver everything he promised. But Romney isn't even promising a lot. He's basically saying: I'll give this guy money, and it will make your life better. So we've got someone who at least says he agrees that poor people should be assisted, and someone who says outright that they shouldn't. Who says: you need housing, education, job training, and health insurance? I'll give this guy back money to start a company that will provide jobs that won't pay for any of those things. I think Romney flat out does not believe that the working poor exist, nor does he understand what constitutes "work" for a lot of Americans.
Working at Family Dollar isn't the same as working for a business that you own. Probably to most people, that statement is so obvious as to be almost meaningless. Unfortunately, our potential next president seems not to have encountered it before, and has constructed a campaign that makes sense only in a universe in which every single job will make your life like his.
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