Saturday, April 22, 2006

An Unquestioned Democracy Will Inevitably Become Tyrannical

I will never call myself a patriot because I never plan on swearing allegiance to any country, unless of course the perfect one comes along. On the other hand I find it ironic when I am called unpatriotic when I bash the workings of this country. I have a hunch that the flag waving, parade watching, anthem singing super patriots are missing a very important part of what makes up "being patriotic"

Sure anyone could blindly follow a government and feel that it is doing everything just perfectly, but we all know that its not true. Humans are fallible and they will never be perfect, and when you put these humans into a government they tend to be even less perfect. There are a lot of things about the American government that are just plain fucked up, but at the same time we have some pretty cool privileges that come along with the package too. One of these being the right to free speech, even in elementary school the most one sided conservative peace of shit teaching establishment ever, I learned that if I wanted to call the president a goon I could because I have that right. That is not completely true however when society tries to bring itself together so strongly that exercising that free speech becomes unpatriotic.

I hear all the time "what's the problem with Bush wiretapping phones, If you don't do anything wrong there's nothing to worry about" The problem is that it's your right to privacy that they are infringing on. The more you allow them to do this the more rights they will try to take away. We only have so many rights separating us from fascism, do we really want to be like Nazi Germany? Is that really the direction that we want to head towards? I want more rights, not less and I fight for them.

I can't help but think that the more civil rights that you exercise on a regular basis the stronger a patriot you are. I once read on a bumper sticker that "the highest form of patriotism is descent" and I can't say that I disagree. Descent simply means questioning, questioning if things we are doing are morally right, and if they're not, fighting to get it changed. That's what democracy is. Democracy may not be the all time, answer to all our prayers, perfect system but it just might be the best thing we can do right now. We can choose to use it, or lose it, I choose to use it.

Sunday, April 02, 2006

Don't get sick, capitalism says you can suck its left nut.

The other day I was blessed with an infection in my eye. I can't say enough that I am glad that I still get health insurance from my parents. I do feel horrible however about the poor bastards that don't have it, and worried as I only have a couple years before I have to get my own. Health care in this country is so fucked up, I know I've said it before but this infection was a prime example of how capitalism is killing the American people. The doctor I saw prescribed to me medicated eye drops, two tiny little bottles of medicated eye drops 5 milliliters a piece. The grand total for these pieces of crap that in the end did no more than saline solution...$168. I can't even imagine if this was actually a medicine that I absolutely needed and didn't have insurance. I decided to crunch the numbers to find out how ridiculous this price actually was. At $168 that is $16.80 per milliliter, put into terms of 20oz mountain dews thats a $9,928.80 bottle. Somebody is making too much money and it is making my brain bleed. It goes like this folks, the pharmaceuticals raise there prices, so the insurance companies raise their rates, so employers drop their policies and the employees have to pay for the full prices of medicine, or they die. Greed doesn't work for everyone, there's always a losing side, and they have children that need to eat too.

I've heard the argument over and over about why America's capitalist economy is the best system that there could ever be. Unfortunately I must be dumb or something because I can not for the life of me understand how that could be. If its so high and mighty why is it that some people don't have to ever use the same toilet for 2 shits in a row but other people can't afford to eat? It's not that the poor person isn't working as hard, they're actually probably working much harder. So how is it justified that the basic principle of capitalism, that you earn more money the harder you work, doesn't even begin to work out?

My oh so favorite quote as for why capitalism is the best will always be that “it is the best economic method because it uses people's inner most pull, greed.” I was told by my high school economics teacher that greed rules the world, and without it humans would still be living in caves. I can't argue with that, but at the same time I think its important to point out that if we didn't also have the ability to control our greed we would still be eating our young. Greed might very well be a central part of our minds as humans but we have also evolved quite a ways since our caveman days. Just like the Geico commercials point out, cavemen are stupid, should we really be basing the system that allows us get food and medicine on a cavemanian way of life? Do you think maybe we should be looking to evolve a little bit, maybe towards not allowing the children of our human race to starve? I'm not to keen on competing for anything, especially when its resources that sustain the lives of people. There's is plenty to go around if we can just learn to share.

Sharing and Caring it can be fun.