More grumps about what is happening re health reform

I’m still thinking about what is happening re health reform. And the continuing uproar by the “opposition” is what is getting my attention now. Even though it is a long long way, from ways for enabling better health economically. Getting a little say-so in the matter of health, does seem to have been accomplished, on paper anyway.

Anyway … what my pattern-seeking back-of-the-mind has frequently come up with lately, is that by enabling health insurance for workers even if they are not working, or if they change jobs, this has deprived the employers of a powerful leverage for getting workers to endure unjust conditions on the job, just to keep their health insurance for themselves and their family. In other words, it deprives those who would be essentially slavemasters, of one of their threats against their slaves … er, employees. Thus they would have to improve working conditions and increase pay, to have people continue working for them.

From this train of thought, I sometimes drift into the generalizations, imagining that there are a couple of mindsets involved; using archaic terms, one is that of the peasant and the other of the lord. Terms of Medieval territorial fifedom days. Nowadays some might call it the sheeple and the elite. Or grunts and bosses. A two class system; not so much losers and winners, but the downtrodden and the bullies. Workers and manager-owners. America carved up into two pieces thereby. And the manager-owner class having their staked out territories, each with their pitiful horde of workers. The bully-mentality spends its life beating its way up the hierarchical pyramid, focused on getting others to do their bidding; thus reaching that plush life of the owner-manager class, hobnobbing among the Upper Class, and attracting the best looking women with whom to breed. Yes, lots of incentive to take that road. But the bully mentality may have genetic roots, extending back into the murky battles among the bulls for exclusive mating rights, not striving to protect the herd, but instead striving to injure the other male. This sociobiological force still lurks heavily amongst humanity. It often gets shined up and fancy suit put on and trained in the ettiquete of proper eating and Roberts Rules, and somehow having acquired college degrees to pretend they are people of knowledge and wisdom. But their words are used to do battle, to put down the other person, instead of to build mutually supportive projects.

Not that the grunt class does not have its bullies, too. But am not exploring that here now.

So in light of the furor over health insurance reform beginnings, it could be seen as anger by the owner-manager class of being deprived of one of their whips to drive the sheeple to work harder. Maybe even more because it would seem like the manager-owner class is being given orders by the sheeple class: how denigrating. How could the sheeple class know how to rule, how dare they try?

Backing off from the circus one level higher, it looks like the owner-manager bully class most of all enjoys a good fight, a team fight. Yay team, what exciting fun, get to show our stuff. Otherwise life would be just a dull grow up, breed and die, how boring to them. Got to spice it up with strife. And the Democrats put up a good sporting fight and won a round in the stadium; and that deserves a bit of respect, a more worthy opponent in the big game to them.

And if I shift to one more notch higher in the Big Picture, it seems that the craving for Drama is playing out. Not just among the boys, but amongst the girls, too. How exciting.

I wonder where the sense of responsibility is going to come back into the picture. The responsibility we have of taking care of our world that nourishes us and our loved ones. The responsibility to craft our mutual civilization with our finest wisdom, that we have a much finer world to live in and enjoy.
But instead now, it seems more of just grab, root and growl, to get the most for the least effort. The Creator typically lets it play out, see how worthy the new creations are. Sometimes thay last for tens of millions of years, like the dinos did. Or the cockroaches, been going for 250 million years and still going strong, despite the latest pesticides that mankind sprays on them, ending back up in the people’s food supply too, poisoning us humans too, in our tunnel vision of the overall consequences of our actions. So Homo Sapiens might just be a flash in the pan, a few 10’s of thousands of years or less, the way we are going. We have just too many powerful tools of civilization to not utilize them with sufficient caution and responsibility, lest we take ourselves out along with lots of other species. Even though they have crafted themselves to powerfully direct the activities of others in group effort, the bullies just are not built right to lead humanity in the correct directions. And more despairingly, I suspect that a higher education of the present kind, is not going to convert the bully minds into responsible compassionate minds nearly often enough.

Shrinking the vision level way down again, the struggle to care for the health of all Americans, whether they are working at the moment or not, whether they are on one team or the other team, seems both a compassionate step forward and a wise step forward, since a healthier workforce – and in the larger picture that includes the owner-managers too – surely ought to be able to accomplish more and better deeds. And then hopefully we can next focus a bit on that which purportedly provides better health, an industry that too long has been led by the bottom line instead of the best end result; even corrupting the paths of science toward only that which makes the most profit for the least effort; instead of the most effective body-mind-spirit health product for the best effort.