Pushback

[galileoreloaded]

I don't know who they think they're kidding, our Congressional representatives. Mandating payments to a system of private corporations, with dubious ethics and a strong profit motive, will not happen the way they think it will. I look all around, and people are dropping out of the system either by default or by design. And this will push many more.

I had this conversation with my mother again very recently. At 55 years old, she is a true believer when it comes to the idea of government having the ability to provide for the general welfare. Anecdotaly, I think this is a generational thing because as a Gen X'r, that is not what myself or others of my generation and younger feel like is rational. This new realization that things might not be the way they appear, is causing much angst to these true believers. True believers, who until recently, have with unwavering resolve assumed that our federal system is somehow an effective organizational framework and governmental delivery system. That's funny to me because no matter how many companies I work for or have had experience with, no matter how much I assume that they're tightly run ships, they are always all screwed up in some way or the other.

But getting back to good old Mom, the true believer. What's becoming evident to her as she continues to pay into the system that offers her less and less in return, is that she is being affected by the law of diminishing returns. The little town she lives in has now cut their library down to two open day's a week. Other public services are being gutted and/or deferred, due to budget restraints. Police and fire are next on the list as well as sanitation and the Parks Department. Her community, which has a higher than normal concentration of leading retirement age boomers, has a severe shortage of doctors in basic, primary medical care. It's almost impossible to find a doctor that will take new patients at all, much less Medicare or Medicaid. This is having a chilling effect on entire populations of true believers. The rapidity of their new-found austerity coupled with the stark realization that they probably don't have enough time to rebuild their assumptions of a comfortable retirement is becoming very worrisome to this entire generation, the generation of my parents.

So I spoke with her recently regarding the status of health care reform, mandates, public options and Medicare for all. What struck me was that of all the trial balloons and political grandstanding, there was a universal truth that remains. For her, and what she portrays to me to be the majority of her generation (where she lives, and as she knows it) anything more than the current cost of Medicare for persons over 65, which I believe is around $95 a month, is absolutely unaffordable to a population who is more terrified about finding jobs that pay more than $10 an hour than at any time in their adult lives.

The premise of the argument framing this entire health-care debate for this group is moot. This is a community of people that have slipped so far down Maslow's Pyramid, that in a short 18 to 36 month time frame, has seen their entire worldview rocked by scandal, theft and the abject economic brutality of generational theft perpetrated upon them by those same elitists whom have promised substantive change. Her largest adjustment will come, as she explains it, when she is left no choice but to withdraw from what she assumes or has always assumed to be her greatest set of ideals. And as a true believer, that sense of abandonment by the system that she's so diligently fed and nurtured, because that was what good Americans did, is debilitating.

We had our original conversation over a year ago, where I proposed that it would be people of her generation, and socio-economic status (firmly in lower middle class) that would lead the revolt that we are about to see. She scoffed at me, because she believed at that time that there was a common bond of what I can only describe as "doing the right thing". When I suggested that eventually that specific group of folks would initiate, not follow, but actually initiate the ultimate destruction of the system that they paid and paid and sweat for, she looked at me like I had two heads.

But I told her then, as I told her recently when we spoke again, that she and her generation would not be alone. My generation, disillusioned, disenfranchised, and completely removed from a system of republican governance that has degraded into either a traditional or corporate plutocracy, has nothing to lose. We have no sense of loyalty to the systems that have never served us, and systems that frankly we have never recognized as being legitimate towards the efficient functioning of our everyday lives. Many of my generation see these systems as tools. Tools to be exploited, but not necessarily counted on. Actually not to be counted on at all. We don't believe, and never believed that the social safety net was ever going to be there for us. And as such, we've become almost primal in our sense of self preservation.

Someone once told me that an 18-year-old male was the most dangerous animal on the planet. I disagree. Show me a 35-year-old ex-business owner, with two kids and a wife and bills. He's not afraid of risk, handles stress well, and is looking for a way to survive.

I guess we'll see.