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Where are the Grown-ups?

I wonder whether our health care system covers mental health issues; not for individuals, but for the nation.

Look at the fix we are in!  We decided that banks and investment companies and stock market brokers were our best friends, with our best interests at heart.  Because they had our best interests at heart, we decided they should be free to do anything they thought best, and earn as much as they could get away with.

They got away with nearly all of it:  a good slice of my pension funds, for instance.  They milked the cow until the cow collapsed from the suction.  We didn't want the cow to die, so we paid to get her onto her feet, again.  The cow paid big bonuses to those who had sucked her dry.

There is nothing like a good war to pull us together, so we put 9/11 aside and invaded Iraq.  Then, when it was too late to remember 9/11 and bin Laden again, we remembered and went back to Afghanistan.

The stock market collapsed.  Detroit collapsed.  Mortgages collapsed.  The building industry collapsed.  People lost their jobs; some forever.

"What we have to do," our politicians said, "is to cut taxes on the people who are doing well, so they can do better, because rich people have holes in their pockets, and the money will gradually trickle down their pants legs, and the rest of us can pick it up and be just like them.

We cut taxes on everybody.  People out of work, no income, fewer taxes on those who had all the money, bigger and better wars, an insurance industry skimming every dollar spent for health care, and what did we decide to do?

We decided to make it worse.  Cut government investment in infrastructure, education, research, because we didn't want to go into debt:  you know, taxes are bad and government is evil!  Government?  Schools, police, parks, research, roads, trains, wind and solar power investment, healthy people, food on the table.

When people with a lot of money decide to use their money as a cushion instead of investing it, there is nothing but public money to support the economy.  But what are we doing?  Starving the system!

"That's right!", the Tea Party says.  "Starve the beast!"

Fire teachers and policemen!  Cut off medical care!  Reduce Social Security!  Let the bridges fall!  No more of those train-things!  Sell the parks!  Kill the unions!  Slow down the economy!  Raise property taxes instead!  Or better yet, cut them and do home-schooling, shovel our own streets, and send the sewage down the river!

Give the States independence!  Regulate crotches and bedrooms, not derivatives!  Establish a Christian religious test for holding public office!  Outlaw climate change!  Make it illegal for the ice to melt and the oceans to rise!  Teach creationism instead of science!  Get that Black/socialist/communist/Muslim/Nazi/Social-gospel-community-organizer out of Our White House and put in a White, god-fearing, Republican of Tea Party persuasion, instead!  Somebody who respects what the Constitution ought to say instead of what-it-does!

Starve the beast, call the President an alien, change his religion, try to kill health care, bust the unions (such as they are), feed the rich, damn the unemployed, blame everything on the people who do stoop labor and housecleaning for us (on the cheap), sell the freeways, and pretend that Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann and Donald Trump and Sharron Angle are just what we need to lead us to the promised land!

Good god!

When people get scared, they do irrational things.

It is time for the grown-ups to speak up.
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