Sick & Tired

It was a long ride back home from the funeral. Driving when there's no distraction like music or conversation is ideal for thinking. I don't have great thoughts often, and I can report that I had none on this trip. But there is one thought I remember well. I'm just damned sick and tired of "the bottom line," "market forces," and "profits." I think I'm damned sick and tired of this destructive, murderous brand of capitalism that we practice here. It doesn't give a damn about what's good for people. Doesn't give a damn about people in general. The only people who matter are stockholders. Period.

I was thinking about the health care issue. I simply cannot understand how people can honestly believe that:

a) the health of people--a life and death issue to every human being, literally--should be connected in any way with profits to some damn corporation;
b) the health of people in a society is not that society's business;
c) 50 million people without health insurance is acceptable in a supposedly civilized society;
d) continuing to succor the health insurance companies in this country is an acceptable "reform" of health care here.

I'm sorry. There are imperatives that citizens have to live with if they chose to be part of a society. Things like obeying just laws, serving the society in some way, and paying for services that societies are bound by their very nature as being composed of human beings to provide: health, education, transportation. A society's first responsibility is to have compassion. To take care of its least members: children, the poor, the crippled, the helpless, the sick. But where's the profit in that? Right? Hence the unshirted opposition to any meaningful reform of the vicious American approach to health care.