Fear & Loathing on Obamacare

Fear & Loathing on Obamacare

I really shouldn’t let myself listen to right-wing radio. Laura Ingram is spewing inane invective as I unwind from a day in court watching another shooting case that’s the latest gang-related crime in the Shenango Valley.
I had some time to think about it all while waiting for the wheels of justice to turn (they move about as fast as Congress) and I can’t say I have much positive to say about the present state of our union.
The problem as I see it is the nation is facing a crisis not of healthcare or the economy or the end of all morality. The problem is we’ve become a nation of blamers, a group of people who know one thing for sure: It’s not our fault we're facing the life we’re living.
That’s the great American fault at the moment. It derives from lack of familiar upbringing and a broken support system of love & wisdom that used to prepare our youth for the big, bad world.
Darwin’s theories are being proven daily in this brutal new, each-man-for-himself world, where kids become adults before they have a chance to be kids.
Our solution to the problem is to throw money at non-profit organizations, schools and programs that do little more than perpetuate the problem to keep the grant money coming.
Meantime, the kids are running wild without proper role models and the closest thing they have to “tough love” is the mercies that may be shown to them by a penitent judge.
Our pro-life advocates remain hellbent on advising kids to keep making more kids that are wanted like baby dolls, but when the novelty wears off and the dolls become children, their parents are out of the picture and the cycle of kids growing up without a grounding in the basic differences between right and wrong and an understanding of that greatest of commandments, to love one another.
Until we fix that and give kids back the love and nurturing that’s required to become a capable adult, we’re stuck with a spiraling problem that gets exponentially worse with each generation.
This is all happening as our world’s going to hell and everyone’s arguing about politics as usual: healthcare myths, abortion, gay marriage that are each phantom issues, the latter two of which shouldn’t even be a subject of political debate. But we’ll waste time on it while kids devolve in the streets because no one’s watching them.
I don’t have the answer, but I know what’s happening now is missing the mark. And it makes me sad and angry when I go to court hearings and see pews filled with young people gone awry.
I’m tired of watching kids with potential get chewed up by the system and transformed into criminals.
I’m also sick of everybody blaming everybody else for it, and complaining about the problems but doing nothing to solve it.
To do so would require too much that seems like socialism, I suppose. Folks would have to work together for the common good and the ties that bind us because we’re human.
Obamacare doesn’t include a prescription to cure this, society’s greatest ill, but it should.