I have been been baffled and underwater for so many weeks now I worried that I’d lost the ability to see what’s true, but the Senate healthcare bill and response to it has cleared my vision. (So, “thanks for that, Mitch McConnell?”)
There are many problems with the bill. It is cruel beyond measure, it is fiscally nonsensical, it is naked class warfare. I am knocked back by an additional thing. It is profoundly un-American.
I am a big fan of America. The ideas we were founded upon move me. “We the people,” “all men are created equal,” “more perfect union,” and “promote the general welfare,” are stanzas in a hymn to best we are capable of. Our forefathers and foremothers took up arms, risking their real lives, living children, and actual fortunes because they believed that the experiment would work.
It has worked. Not always, and often with monstrous failures. But we check the results and decide to make changes, to dust off our better selves and try again.
The Kochs, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and a handful of very rich white men have a different idea. They care not for the experiment, and have decided that they’re in a position to pull the plug. Since The New Deal, through Brown, Loving, and Roe, the ideals of this nation have matured beyond their framing capacity, but because they have confused America with a marketplace and freedom with capital, they want to run a new experiment.
They envision a vile laboratory funhouse where Randian hallucination dissolves over the mirror-deep morality of the prosperity gospel, creating a land where sick children are an expression of the sins of their parents, and the gods of the market will punish them until they get perfect or get dead. They want a system without humility, without compassion, without lawful justice.
This is really old-world stuff. Only the ancient gods will be at home here. Power derives from strength, and those with it can take what they want as long as they don’t anger someone more powerful. Those without will lie low, do their work, and avoid the swans.
I am hanging all my hope on the belief that they are very wrong. We are alive, and idea of the commons is not dead. These pretenders are not Jupiter. They know that they have the resources but not the numbers, and their window is small. They’re in a hurry, so they will err. And we will show up, and keep showing up. And we, the many, will keep running this experiment.