It’s been a lazy weekend. Both Sunday papers got read. The COSTCO run was made (but not the bed.) We went out for three different meals so cooking was minimal. But the news is really pissing me off.
We’ve reduced the President of the United States to a propaganda tool. I’ve worked in school TV. I know what will happen when the President speaks on Tuesday. Teachers who disagree with Obama will talk during the speech; others will just turn off the TV. Remember the story of the kids in Dallas who cheered when President Kennedy was killed? They were too young to have an informed hatred. It was generated in them. And now, with a President whom we all know faces more danger than most, the President’s enemies are willing to do it again.
OK lets go from there to health care. With a calculated harshness these same people have managed to stir up every frightened, confused voter in the country by convincing them they’re in infinite danger. For the elderly it’s nearly a promise to send them all out to die on an ice flow. For others it’s the promise that they’ll have to wait forever for care, that they’ll never be able to pick their doctors and that their care will lose quality. And let’s not forget the screaming madness that forever polluted the revered American tradition of the town meeting.
I’m writing this as Labor Day draws to a close. Cranky and sad, I wish for a renewed commitment, as we honor those who, mostly, work with their hands, that a miracle will move the battling legislators to “man up” and make something happen so that no worker, or any other American, will spend next Labor Day worrying about what they’ll do if one of their kids falls off his bike on the last day of summer and breaks a leg.