Back to the office, which means back to exposure to CNN in short bursts whenever I go to the kitchen or walk through the main lobby. And so yesterday, as I went to nuke my leftovers for lunch, I got to see a CNN feature that attempted to answer the question, “Why are people so mad?”
And so they were interviewing people at a football game in (I think) western Pennsylvania, and one middle aged woman explained, “All these things happen – the bailout, healthcare – and we don’t have a vote!”
Um… what?
Perhaps she is forgetting that “voting” thing we all did when we selected a president (and the guy with the most votes won) and we picked representatives in Congress (and the ones with the most votes won) and we sent them all off to Washington to run our government?
People are, of course, upset because we’ve been in a recession, lots of people have no jobs, and so on. Being upset and anxious is natural. And there are things to be angry about.
Like… the bailout. It make me angry that federal regulators basically abandoned decades of smart regulation to let the financial industry shift the risk of questionable practices onto the public while making lots of profit, and it makes me angry that when the whole thing imploded – as many predicted it would – we were left more or less with a gun at our heads – “save us, or the whole system will freeze up, and the resulting liquidity crisis will plunge your society into a historic depression!”
So Obama went ahead and implemented the Bush plans to deal with it, because really, there was little choice. What we hear is anger that he handed over the money to the muggers rather that let us all get shot in the head and have our brains spilled all over the sidewalk. It may not be something that makes us say “ooh rah!” but a bad choice? Hardly. The problem I have with the government in this is that we do not seem to have learned much from our mistakes, and now that we’re bailing out the people who got us into this mess, we seem frighteningly hesitant to force any kind of reform to keep it from happening again.
Healthcare? Whatever flaws there are in the proposals out there now – mostly, an incredible timidity to really address costs – I have trouble getting at a president who campaigned saying that reform was needed and is now trying to do it, while each year about 18,000 Americans die early because they were unable to get proper care, being the losers in the American form of healthcare rationing (which works the same way as casinos in Las Vegas; some win, some lose, but the dealer always does fine).
The anxiety is reasonable. The anger isn’t because we don’t have a vote, it’s because so many of us waste that vote by choosing ignorance. It’s easier, of course, to scream “Obama is a socialist!” than to actually think about issues and details, and there’s an entire political class egging people on and being careful never to talk concretely about anything. So we have Republicans posing as “reformers” by talking about tort reform as the key to medical nirvana, while malpractice adds about 1% to our health care bill, and examples of strong tort reform – like here in Texas – don’t actually lower costs or get care for more people.
As always, these brief encounters with CNN leave me feeling that we live in a nation of stupidity, where ignorance is bliss, and CNN devotes segments to reading tweets from people who will tell you they have no idea what any of the healthcare reform proposals say or what the financial bailout was and have no opinion about what would happen if we let the auto industry go belly-up. But darn it, they’re mad, so that’s news.
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