Two catch-ups from yesterday: what I meant by the health care debate being boring, and what I meant by Uranus in Pisces being persistent, or how it needs to persist.
It’s true that the health care debate has been interesting to the degree that it’s flushed out some startling viewpoints and has sparked some conversation, but the main thing it reveals is this.
If the government does anything except militarize, and particularly if it helps people or strives to, there is a faction that’s going to scream about socialism. And since the government has, for the past year, spent somewhere around a trillion dollars buying/bailing out banks and automotive companies, this is a ridiculous assertion; it reveals a selfish streak so deep the only way out of it would be for a person to actually need government assistance and finally put the argument down; and it betrays a deeper addiction to perpetual warfare and paranoia.
This is not just getting boring, it’s been boring for a long time. I am being polite in my choice of this word.
An interesting health care debate would include a discussion about how complimentary care prevents disease for a fraction the cost of “curing” it; it would include something about nutrition and its role in health; it would include a conversation about how we might reduce some of the stress we are under, not just so we might live better (naughty, in a puritanical society) but how we might reduce the stress on the health care system that comes from how we abuse our bodies and our minds.
The fact that so many people spend so much money out of pocket on complimentary care — at the acupuncturist, the massage therapist, the herbalist, and so on, is not coming up anywhere I’ve seen. This, because it’s not scientifically established, because a massage therapist can’t reattach someone’s head, or because the pharmaceuticals don’t profit at all from massage therapy? This is really a conversation about who profits and how much, and I think we need to call it that. It’s not, at this point, a conversation about what is actually good for us. For a reference point, have a look at a film called Who Killed the Electric Car?