Speaker of the Rich Paul Ryan has finally released a statement on the new "healthcare" bill. Which is really not so much a healthcare bill as it is federally sanctioned mass murder of everyone that Republicans deem undesirable: women, the poor, communities of color, the mentally ill, and the very sick and disabled. The question so many have been asking -- and rightly so -- is how people who purport to be in favor of "family values" and the tenets of Christianity can take a gigantic steaming dump on everything Jesus ever taught. Your answer is an idea that dates all the way back from the Calvinist bullshit of the Middle Ages. This is how far Republicans want to turn back the clock.
In the Calvinist view, disease and illness and injury are just physical manifestations of sin. If you are chosen by God, bad shit will never happen to you; if you're not worthy, welp, sucks to be you don't it? The current Evangelical support of legislation that rewards the rich and punishes the poor is centered around this. In their view, it's only natural that we reward God's "chosen people" so they'll put in a good word for us. Everyone else who is poor and sick? They've already been rejected by God, so who cares about them anyway?
If this sounds like a terrible way to view the world, then congratulations. You're not a sociopath.
Republicans love the fuck out of this sentiment because it absolves them of having to do anything to fix the country's problems, literally all of which go back to poverty. Crime? Drugs? Violence? All directly tied to poverty. Because when people are poor, they get scared. When they get scared, they get desperate. And desperate people do drastic shit in order to survive.
Abortion? Most abortions that occur are done because the mother can't afford to care for a baby, or even the cost of giving birth (bare minimum with no complications, childbirth costs around $30K; abortion is just under $1,000 at its highest). In some professions, she risks being fired from her job just because she's pregnant (it's been illegal since 1978, but it still happens with alarming frequency, and if you can't afford a child, you sure as hell can't afford a good lawyer).
Poverty is also a direct cause of ill health itself. Healthy, nutritious food is expensive. The highly processed food that poor people can afford is loaded with salt, sugar, fat and empty calories (calories that provide no or very few nutrients). Being able to cook requires energy and free time that many working poor families don't have. On top of that, jobs with shitty pay tend to be physically demanding (retail, food service, etc.), and because the pay is awful, employees need to work longer shifts or multiple jobs to buy even the shittiest food. This doesn't even factor stress into the equation, or urban food deserts where there's no grocery stores for miles and your only options are fast food and bodegas (which overwhelmingly sell the aforementioned highly-processed crap food).
For Republicans, the problem is that fixing this mess would require going back to the income tax levels of the mid-20th century, where top-earners paid around 70%, as well as building stronger unions and better regulation of the financial sector to prevent the kinds of market collapses we saw from the 1970s onward. And that, of course, means listening to the people rather than their campaign donors, who tend to skew wealthy as fuck and, like Thorin at the end of The Hobbit, don't want to part with a single coin.
It would be much more beneficial to them if all us pesky poor folk were kept in a highly efficient queue of high birth and death rates, so we could continue to work shitty service jobs for shitty pay until we drop dead of heart attacks and get replaced by the next desperate shmoe. And the easiest way to do that? Restrict abortion and birth control such that the rights to them are merely ceremonial in order to force the birthrate to go up, and gut healthcare for the working classes so we die faster.
That's where the American Health Care Act comes in.
Immediately, you should notice three words missing from the bill's title compared to the ACA: "patient protection" and "affordable." This is not an accident; this bill is not intended to protect patients, nor is it intended to make healthcare affordable in any way unless you're young, rich and already healthy. In other words, already chosen by God, and fuck the rest of us.
It's the same Victorian-era bullshit of regarding wealth itself to be a virtue. If you're rich, then you're obviously a shrewd and virtuous person. If you're poor, it's because you obviously did something awful or stupid, so why should you get any sympathy?
This is what lets hard-right God-fearing Christians sleep at night while they vote to slash the safety net for the country's most vulnerable. All that stuff about charity and helping your neighbor? That only goes for people who already have God's favor.
This is one of the biggest reasons I walked away from Christianity in my college years and didn't look back (besides figuring out I was gay). The idea of a "chosen" people never sat well with me, because the next logical step is to dismiss those not "chosen" as deserving of their fate. I'm not saying all Christians do this, not by a longshot; there are many wonderful churches and Christian charities that do a lot of good in the world. But ignoring individual churches who do good things for a minute? All the major players in the Bible who came after Christ promoted this idea of chosen vs. damned, and to defer to God's word (or what people assumed was God's word) rather than trying to understand things on your own. I found myself unable to maintain my faith in a system that just about required me to leave my empathy and critical thinking at the door.
But this is exactly the thought process that has brought us to this point. And it's not just limited to Evangelical fundie whacknuts. Everyone who voted for Trump did so for one reason and one reason alone, regardless of the language they couched their decision in: he is a straight, white, rich cisman, the epitome of privilege, and therefore "chosen." If they vote for him, they can be "chosen" as well.
Only now, with the very real threat of shredding healthcare to a point even worse than it was before the Affordable Care Act, do they realize what "chosen" really means: everyone else is damned.
No comments:
Post a Comment