Today has been a very depressing day. I am sinking deeply into a funk. Things are very ugly in this country, they seem even uglier now than they did during most of the Bush presidency. Perhaps this is because all the people who felt relatively contented and superior when they had Bush as "their" president are feeling threatened and hysterical now. They're attempting to exert themselves, to reestablish their sense of control, so they lash out. I alternate between feeling violently angry and wanting to go hide in a closet.

My father likes to make comments about the "religious left," he apparently thinks that this is a good argument against the assertion that the ultra-christian conservative right is uniquely crazy. What he implies is that making moral judgments based on politics happens on both sides, and that "liberals" who become angry when discussing thieving CEOs are exactly the same kind of nuts as people on the right who scream about the "murder" of aborted "babies."

Two things that happened recently:
1. I had an argument with Hailey about politics...Hailey, by the way, whose education is currently funded entirely by the state of Georgia. Hailey who has applied to become a ward of the state ala "permanently disabled" status with the Social Security Administration.
2. I snapped at someone in my American government class and now and considered something of a pariah by many of the other little GSC undergraduates. The conversation:

Prof: (explaining something about winning hearts and minds in Iraq) Afterall, we can't kill all the Iraqis.
Krista: Heh, why not, we killed all the Indians! Heh heh!
Me: That is not funny. At all.

God, trying to write about this makes me so fucking tired.

The thing about political opinions, if you ask me, is that they are not objective. They can't be. They can be uninformed and often are, but they are never separate from your personal philosophical perspective on the world and on the nature of humanity. Your politics are not "just your opinion." They are an expression of your worldview. They tell me something about you, and what you say matters. For example, when I talk about healthcare reform and what appears to chiefly concern you is the possibility that illegal immigrants might access that care, I know that you are making a statement of your morality that is more compelling than anything you may say in church.

The persistence in upholding the American myth of "working your way up" despite all evidence to the contrary demonstrates a deep ambivalence toward the very idea of collective good. So what if you had advantages, if you were born white in a wealthy area, if your mother was able to access the prenatal care, vitamins, and good nutrition that allowed you to develop your full mental capacity. If you are successful, it must be because you deserve it, and by that same token if your neighbor is not, he must be undeserving. You have no responsibility to your fellow man beyond throwing a few church dollars and a load of rhetoric his grateful way.

The underlying cultural belief, so loudly expressed now, is that other human beings may just deserve to suffer. That it is not your problem that people in your community work hard in shitty jobs for terrible pay and benefits. It is not your problem that other people don't have healthcare, and how dare anyone presume to limit what you may purchase in order to help someone else live a less miserable life.

"Freedom" means one thing in American society--the freedom to buy. "Choice" is only for consumers. Ideas like freedom from abusive labor, freedom to spend time with your family, freedom of political participation, freedom from working and paying taxes for your whole life into a system that will let you starve in your old age, these freedoms may as well not exist. They don't exist.

A huge part of the reason that the American auto industry cannot compete internationally is the American refusal to provide the healthcare and reasonable pensions for its citizens that Germany and Japan do. If this society functioned the way it should and provided a real social safety net, the burden wouldn't fall on industry. Of course, it's more convenient to blame the unions that insist on fair treatment of workers than it is to look at the structural problems that support inequality.

But now I'm rambling. You've all heard this before. My point is, according to my father I am a member of the "religious left." I think that it is wrong to value the ability of some people to get rich over the ability of all people to lead productive, happy lives. I think that there is a greater good. When my father throws around the "religious" adjective he thinks that he is chiding me, but I couldn't care less. I'm not so stupid as to pretend that my politics reflects anything other than my personal values and the knowledge that I have.

And I am willing to serve the greater good--not by working at Walmart and taking whatever scraps the current system wants to throw at me, but by using my nursing training to work for a public hospital or clinic. I want to pay income, property, and sales taxes at rates comparable to those in Norway and France. I don't expect to be rich, I won't have a giant car or a big-screen TV, I won't vacation at the Riviera every year. I'll probably live very much like I do now--frugally but securely. We will have to be careful with our money and there will always be worries. But I want to contribute and in return I want to live in a worthwhile society.

I want there to be housing available for homeless people, and social services to help them get the mental health care that they desperately need--if someone asks me for change I want to be able to give it to them (or not) without worrying the rest of the day about what they'll do for shelter at night. I mention this because I spent practically an entire Am.Gov. class listening to my classmates complain about how homeless people are all lazy, shiftless drug addicts who need to just get jobs.

I want to be able to send my children to good public schools and not have to lay awake at night worrying about how I'll ever manage to pay for college. I don't want to anguish about going back to work and leaving my babies in their infancy. I want to stop talking about abortion and start talking about why we don't have federally protected extended (up to a year in many cases) maternity and paternity leave in this country, like they do in most of Europe, Australia, etc. I want to know that if I lose my job there will be enough unemployment and social support to keep me from also losing my house and any hope of financial recovery. I want to be able to retire in my 60s without facing starvation or burdening my family.

And I want to be able to go to the doctor when I am sick, without having to fight with my insurance provider or put my employer out of business. If medical malpractice hurts me or my family, I want to sue for lost wages and medical expenses so that I am able to recover financial from the blow--but not for "pain and suffering" to the tune of millions of dollars. If a doctor has a history of malpractice, or engages in conduct that is malicious or severly neglegent, I want her to lose her license. I don't want malpractice insurance to force other physicians out of business because of one doctor's mistake. If I have a catastrophic accident or illness, I want to know that paying for my care won't leave my family destitute. If my life can only be extended through expensive treatments, I want to receive the best possible hospice care. If it is a matter or my receiving an expensive procedure with a limited rate of success, or that procedure going to someone younger or healthier than me who has a higher likelihood of survival, I want the procedure to be given to that other person first. Sometimes you give, sometimes you receive. Just one or the other won't work.

But I really don't see this country going that way. My values and those of many of my friends aren't shared. You can't talk to people on the other side because the chasm between your basic values and theirs is so monstrously huge. Americans are greedy and callous and insistently stupid--they deliberately misconstrue arguments and facts to bolster their own paranoia. I point to DEATH PANELS by way of an example. That rumor, by the way, was apparently started on SARAH PALIN'S FACEBOOK.

WTF? Seriously, wtf!?

Maybe it's just that I'm living in GA again, which is truly a breeding ground for assholes (see "genocide, lol!" comment above), but I am starting to freak out. I don't want to pay taxes to support Haliburton contracts and "limited government." I want a real socialized system of healthcare, not just some bullshit public option for a few million people. I DO NOT WANT TO LIVE HERE. I don't want to be a part of this.

I didn't expect Obama to perform magic as soon as he got into office and fix all our problems, the legacy of corporate greed and deregulation (and don't even get me STARTED on the argument that the "real problem is the fact that markets aren't free enough," OMFG), etc. I guess what I naively believed was that once Bush was gone, America would drift back to its roots of social justice and start making reasonable decisions once again. I didn't realize how serious the cultural problem was--I supposed that once the puppeteers were out of the theater, we would realize that we were on the same side. Turns out, we aren't on the same side. At all. I think that my problem is that I've watched too many movies about the 60s and not enough movies about the 80s.

The arguments against socialized medicine alone just seem so ugly, so mean-spirited and small-minded. Do we really believe, for example, that the only reason that doctors become doctors is to make lots of money? If medical education didn't put people in such debt, wouldn't doctors in this country be happy to make what doctors in France make? There are millions of people in this country shrieking that they wouldn't. What if that's true?

I think that the conservative response to this post would be a resounding "if you don't like it then get the fuck out" and I think that they're right. I should leave.