tarantella64 wrote:
To those who have no healthcare: if American and over 26, what did you find at healthsherpa.com? (If you're under 26, you belong on your parents' insurance.)
I haven't read through all the Randian hard-ons here, but wish desperately that 40-year-old Republican men would can it with their "all by myself!" fantasies, like they're overgrown preschoolers. Because that's all it is, but they cling to it so fervently that they're willing to distort their own pictures however necessary to believe that they got whatever it is they've got All By Themselves. Which means ignoring everyone who helped and helps them. Except in private moments when they admit that their wives actually do most of the work of turning them into tolerable and successful human beings, and then they hate and fear their wives for it, and fear even more that their wives will leave them. Not because they love the woman -- they barely notice her -- but because without her it'll be clear inside a month what pathetic wrecks they are.
The flip side of American All By Myself (With a Boost from my Main Man, Jesus) is the bleak narrative of American wreckage. Death of a Salesman. The Hustler. A Face in the Crowd. Taxi Driver. Dog Day Afternoon. Do the Right Thing. Anything by the Coen brothers. In all these, again, the women barely exist, we're just collateral damage. It's just a desperate and childish bid for boys to feel like men. Grown men understand that All By Myself is a sad, lonely, destructive fantasy.
I'm in my mid-40s and have been lucky enough to live in countries with saner mentalities about how people get by. I'm also a working single mother whose ex was disabled and whose own family went AWOL in fine Boomer style. (Unfortunately it's not just me they're happy to abandon; it's anyone who's not good company out at lunch, I guess. Just shanghaied my grandma into a nursing home, and my brother's mid-divorce and will find raising a child without help quite difficult, I suspect.) Each year for the last eight, I've received in the mail a large check courtesy of former president Bill Clinton. It's called the Earned Income Tax Credit, and its premise is that if you work your ass off, you should at least be able to have a place to live. It's nonintrusive and automatic: if your income's below a certain amount, especially if you have children, a check just arrives.
Because of this sort of thinking, my daughter has grown up in a decent house in a safe neighborhood and gone to a good school where they not only teach her but know her well and look after her. She's had health insurance -- subsidized one way or another by tax money all the way through -- and all her shots and checkups. She has eyeglasses and can see the board. She also goes to summer camp, because there are people who believe that children are in fact owed decent childhoods. She knows how to swim because an entire community believes that anyone should be able to go swimming, and she reads all the time because the same community believes books are so important that in summer the (publicly-funded, because people deserve transportation) bus downtown is free for any kid with a library card.
In short she's a bright, healthy, happy, confident, nice, and reasonably well-educated kid with a good head on her shoulders and an excellent shot at a happy and successful adulthood, even though she's got one stable, if ASish, parent who doesn't make much money and not much in the way of extended family.
We may run into some trouble when it comes time for college, because around the time I was in college, a different president decided it was time to quit subsidizing these lazy punks who just wanted to sit in classrooms and study engineering or whatever, because nobody owes them college educations. And the states likewise started de-funding their public universities, which means the universities have put tuition through the roof. Where once you could work for the summer and pay your tuition that way, you're likely instead to graduate with $25K in debt, and your parents will have debt to match, or more. Debt which is nondischargeable and carries a relatively high interest rate, because the banks and our government are, apparently, entitled to make as much as they can off 18-year-olds who're told that if they don't get a college degree they can't get a job. This glorious scheme has resulted in adult children living at home until 30 and not starting families of their own because they can't afford to, even though they spent college freaking out about taking a wrong step and winding up unemployed or unemployable after borrowing so much money. It's helped turn them into wild-eyed points-grubbers who don't much care what they're learning so long as the points are good and they get to keep their scholarships and graduate on time.
So, to those who started this thread: Please take your hands off your dicks long enough to grow up a bit and see that in fact All By Myself is not a workable social model. And no, you can skip jumping straight to the Soviet paradise, because other countries have already worked out various forms of happy medium, to which Americans are emigrating in increasing numbers -- when they'll have us.
Couldn't have said it better. "All By Myself" only applies when it's 1820 and you go out and be a homesteader living off the land (land you probably had to take from the original inhabitants by force without paying anyways, but nevermind that can of worms). These days it's pretty damn hard to live off the land. Even if you knew how, the land is already bought up by others. There's no frontier left (not that there ever really was - in the good old days people just took other peoples land by force, which is the way it's been done pretty much been since before the dawn of civilization). Start your own business? You're still not creating something from nothing. You rely on other people having enough money to buy your s**t, i.e. they must be paid well enough by someone else before they can pay you. The Ayn Rand nonsense is outright delusional.
25 Nov 2011, 1:22 pm
