The Affordable Care Act Is the Reason I'm Alive

Warning for very frank discussion of suicide and suicidal thoughts and tendencies.

When I walked into my doctor's office last week for a baseline, it was the first time I had been able to see one outside of an urgent care center for the last decade, because I did not have and could not afford proper insurance.  Before enrolling in a Marketplace plan earlier this year, the last time I had insurance that even covered doctor's visits was when I was still on my parents' policy.  Which meant that I could not see a doctor without one of them in the room, and that one was usually my mother.

This was unfortunate, as my mother has always believed, and still largely does, that certain fields of medicine are strictly quack.  Lies and bollocks, meant to fleece patients out of their money by treating medical conditions that don't really exist.  She believes this about one certain field in particular: mental health.  To my mother and millions of people who think like her, deficient mental health is nothing more than a moral failing, and the only help a mental patient needs is a swift kick somewhere sensitive.

The first time I ever considered suicide, I was seven years old.  The first time I attempted it, I was eight.  I figured out the hard way that a telephone cord makes an awful ligature.

I do not remember much from when I was that young, except for how I felt like an instigator of terrible things, even if I had no idea how or why I caused them.  I felt guilty and responsible for everything around me.

I also remember being too ashamed to say anything about these feelings to a doctor with my mother in the room.  Because I did not need reminding that I was a moral failure.

But when I walked into my new general physician's office last week, my mother was not with me.  I could talk about anything I wanted.  I originally was not going to mention the constant guilt and worthlessness and hopelessness, and how every time I talked about "the future" I got this sick feeling inside because I did not think I had one.  I was originally not going to talk about how I was shopping around at funeral homes to get the best deal on prepaid disposal services so that my family would not have to worry about cleaning up a body when I killed myself later this year.  I was originally not going to say that my birthday a month ago was the last one I was ever planning to see.  I was originally going to keep that moral failing to myself.

But fortunately for me, I was wearing a t-shirt.  A shirt which exposed my arms, and the scars on them.  Places I had scratched skin off my wrists.  Places I had taken razor blades to them, when merely biting the inside of my mouth until it hurt to eat no longer did the trick.  Most of those scars were old, but not all.  In particular, three prominent gashes from a razor blade that I had given myself just last month.  That I blamed on my cat when anybody asked.

The doctor noticed these.  Started asking questions.  Goodness, that looks painful, how did you get that?  But with that look, that tone, that made it obvious he already knew the answer.  But in order to do anything, he needed to hear that answer from me.

I was originally going to shut up and keep it to myself.  I didn't.

While I did not tell him everything, I told him enough.  For the first time, I did not blame the cat.  I owned up to the scars.  I told him I shouldn't exist.  When he asked why I believed that, I didn't have an answer.  When he asked how long I had felt that way, I told him I couldn't remember ever feeling different.

There was more to that conversation than could ever fit into a blog post without becoming a novel, of course.  But the important part was that for the first time in my life, it was made apparent that my mother was wrong.  I wasn't a moral failure.  I was simply a sick person with messed up brain chemistry, and there were ways to treat that.

I was told, for the first time ever, that I did not have to suffer anymore.

I walked out of that office with a prescription that cost me no more than a $5 copay at the pharmacy.

But I also walked out with something else.  Something free and at the same time priceless.  I walked out of that office with hope.  With the knowledge that it did not have to end with me at the bottom of a gator-infested canal around the corner from where I worked.  Or with me hanging from the old mango tree in my backyard.  With the knowledge that it did not have to end, period.

I would not have had this opportunity without the Affordable Care Act.  Without my own doctor and my own insurance, without the ability to receive treatment without my mother in the room, without the ability to talk about this and not be judged a failure, I would still be planning to die instead of apartment-hunting.

While we still have a long way to go on mental health in this country -- nobody should have to suffer in silence when help is literally sitting three feet away, because they're too ashamed of what they're feeling to speak up -- but making it part of standardized healthcare rather than a Cadillac feature you have to pay for with a blood sacrifice and your firstborn is a huge step in the proper direction.

Thanks, Obama.

Why Both Sides of the Gun Debate Need to Pipe the Fuck Down

We do not have a gun problem.

Yeah, I said it.  This progressive does not think guns are the problem, and has a recurring pipe dream wherein both sides of the gun debate -- both the ammosexuals worshipping Wayne LaPierre as some kind of messianic Rambo instead of the corporate shill he is and the Moms Demand Action reactionaries who can't tell you how the thing they want to ban even works -- sit down and shut up like the children they are and let the adults in the middle do the talking.

"Guns don't kill people" is a stupidly irritating way of phrasing it -- because killing is what guns were originally invented to do; they are not a "misused tool" when you shoot people with them, they are doing exactly what they were built for, so comparing them to cars and screwdrivers and pencils and maxi pads and anything else that was designed for a purpose completely unrelated to killing and wounding is ridiculous -- but the sentiment behind this annoying catchphrase is valid; a gun is an inanimate object.  It can't kill anything without a human operator pulling the trigger.  But it's far easier for people to blame an inanimate object rather than a functionally broken society that encourages violence against one another, because the inanimate object can't talk back to you and tell you you're full of shit.  In the 1950s, it was comic books.  In the 1990s, it was video games.  Today, it's guns.  Tomorrow, it'll be computers.  Or porn.  Yeah, probably porn.

The problem with the NRA side is that "well just arm everybody" is not going to accomplish anything (other than making gun manufacturers rich, which, let's not kid ourselves any longer that that's really the NRA's mission and has been for a long time).  Saying the cure for violence is more guns is like saying the cure for lung cancer is more cigarettes.  Guns are not the sole and direct cause of violence, but throwing more of them at the problem sure as fuck won't help.

Because that is why the very concept of "gun control" in this country is an illusion.  There are just too fucking many of them.

Policing gun sales, especially with the advent of the internet, is like Bill Murray in Caddyshack with the damned gophers.  For a very recent and horrifying illustration of this, look no further than the Las Vegas shooters from a couple weeks ago.  Jerad Miller was a felon, thus already barred from legally buying a gun.  So what's a militant right-wing bigot to do in order to start the revolution and fight The Man?  Buy his guns on Facebook, of course!

Gun sales are against the TOS, but who reads that shit anyway?

My point is that stricter gun control laws would not have stopped Jerad Miller from killing 3 people, because the existing laws had already covered him; he just found a way around them.  Granted, that has not been the case for a frightening number of mass shooters, many of whom purchased their weapons legally (not included in the linked article: Elliot Rodgers, the UCSB shooter, who also purchased 3 handguns completely legal), so the "well, crazy people don't care about the law anyway so why bother?" argument doesn't hold up, either; James Holmes and Jared Loughner obviously cared to play by the rules long enough to obtain their weapons clean.  And I agree that we shouldn't make it easy for people like them.

But the problem is twofold: 1) we don't enforce the laws we've already got, and 2) we have a far bigger problem of too many people who want to kill other people in the first place.

You want to know what would've actually stopped James Holmes?  If the cops had listened to the psychiatrist who was treating him when she told them he was dangerous a little more than a month before the shooting.  The Columbine shooters?  Parents attentive enough to know what their kids were doing (spoiler: building explosives in the garage).  Adam Lanza?  A better and more informed diagnosis (we can start with not blindly using Asperger's as a catch-all for every awkward kid that walks through the door).  Jared Loughner?  Wade Michael Page (the Wisconsin Sikh temple shooter)?  Better access to mental healthcare (Loughner was an undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenic at the time of the shooting), and in Page's case, a crackdown on the white supremacist echo chamber that fed his rage machine.

In virtually every shooting of this kind, you'll find warning signs.  Signs which went ignored.  In Elliot Rodgers' case?  A string of Youtube videos and a 140-page manifesto detailing how he was going to get revenge on society for denying him his hot blonde sorority girlfriend.  In Lanza's case?  A fascination with shootings and killing (particularly his obsession with Columbine).  And in Jerad Miller's case?  That he was at the Bundy Ranch supporting the waving of guns at BLM agents was a pretty big clue something wasn't right (his begging for a gun on Facebook to start the revolution was the giant neon signboard).  Warning signs that, had they been heeded, would've allowed law enforcement and/or the mental health system to intervene before something bad happened.

Problem is, we don't care enough about solving the reasons people kill each other.  Caring about who is "right" and how much control they get over people who are "wrong" is a lot easier and more satisfying precisely because it doesn't do jack shit.

That's why we're obsessed with locking up criminals rather than preventing crime (and because the for-profit prison system creates a demand to fill jails, but that's another rant entirely).

Which brings me to my next point: more gun control isn't a magic pill that's going to reduce violent crime rates, either.  It may make it slightly harder for people to commit crime with guns, but it won't really stop anyone.  Because of the aforementioned problem of having too many guns in circulation to effectively police sales.  And because guns do not cause crime; guns are tools used in crimes.  Expecting gun control to reduce crime is like expecting Prohibition to reduce alcoholism, and we all know how well that worked out.

If you want to effectively reduce crime, you have to attack that shit at the source.  People who point to gun bans and lower crime rates in places like Australia, the United Kingdom, and Japan tend to forget that those countries don't just ban guns.  They also have a much better and better-run social safety net than we do here.  All three have universal healthcare.  Australia has a minimum wage more than twice that of the U.S.  The United Kingdom spends the same percentage of its GDP on the health and welfare of its citizens (pensions, education, healthcare, and welfare) that the U.S. spends of its GDP on everything, ever.  In Japan, not only are public universities far more respected than private ones -- the University of Tokyo is #23 worldwide -- but the cost is dirt cheap compared to the U.S., and the student loan structure doesn't leave students broke for life.

Bottom line is that countries with gun bans and some of the lowest homicide rates on the planet are also looking after their citizens far better than we are.  And when people aren't starving, uneducated/barely educated wage slaves, they tend to have fewer reasons to be violent.

Stopping gun violence isn't about stopping guns; it's about stopping violence, period.  If you can curb that, it won't matter who owns a gun because they'll have fewer reasons to point it at anyone.

You want to stop violence?  Stop poverty.  Stop hatred.

Handing out or taking away a gun will not stop either of those.

If you want to stop poverty and hatred?  Don't hand out guns.  Instead, hand out living wages.  Hand out education.  Hand out healthcare.  Hand out mental healthcare.  Hand out birth control.  Hand out compassion.

Don't take away guns.  Instead, take away fear.  Take away uncertainty.  Take away that which makes people feel threatened and rejected.

If you don't want to do that?  Then shut up and get out of the way so other people can.