Just over one week ago, August 6th 2009, we packed the family into our van and made the four hour drive to Washington D.C.

Gareth repeatedly asked to see the White House, elephants, and pandas. How could we deny him the excitement of seeing all three? In order to streamline our trip, we decided we would pay for the vacation with our American Express card, which had no credit limit. All our expenses would go on it so that we could easily track everything we had done and could pay our expenses all in one place.

Imagine my surprise, then, when our card was denied on the second day of our visit to Washington. I called American Express customer service to find out what was going on and found that they had reduced my credit limit to below the balance on our card just two days before we left for our trip. They did this with no advance notice whatsoever! In fact, the day after we returned home, we received a letter from American Express telling us of the change they were making, effective “immediately”.

Knowing better than to place all my eggs in one basket, I brought along a second card and used it for the remainder of our stay in Washington. Gare saw the elephants and pandas at the National Zoological Park, and he made us visit the White House three times during a four day trip. But what I really remember is that a credit card issuer very nearly ruined that trip for us.

I am glad that the credit card bill of rights was successfully signed into law, but there is still room for improvement. If I had been notified 30 days in advance that a change was going to be made to my credit line, I would have known what to expect. As it was, I was caught by surprise at the worst possible time. If we were experiencing a health emergency (not unlikely) or were simply broken down on the side of the road and had to pay for repairs, we would have been stranded by the practices of, in this case, American Express.

Here’s hoping that the credit card bill of rights does not represent the final word on consumer protections from credit issuers.

“The sky is falling, the sky is falling!” Chicken Little’s famous phrase of impending catastrophe sums up rather well the current upswing in citizen unrest mostly among our conservative population. But that isn’t the phrase that is being bandied about. No, instead, “socialist”, “Big Brother”, “Russia”, “death panel”, “rationing”, “deficit”, “choice”, and “control” are all mentioned right before somebody inevitably states or shouts “We want our country back!”

Can anyone explain to me what that even means? Who is the “we” in this case and in what state would they like the country returned to them? There are, of course, a few takes on that. One take says that the “we” are conservatives who want the country returned to them from the liberal power that has taken hold. Another is that the “we” are people uncomfortable with the changing racial topography of this country and that power needs to be returned to supposedly trustworthy caucasians. But I don’t really buy either of those. I am of the opinion that “we” represents a population that feels it no longer has any power over its own governance and that returning the country to them means that they all get to do things the way they best see fit.

Since within every “we” there are a lot of “I”, that basically boils down to anarchy since we all see the world differently. Now is a time when conservatives feel particularly powerless due to the heavily shifted balance of power in Washington, the rapid and overbearing reawakening of liberal media, and the heavy reality that their lives are not in their own control when it comes to national issues like the economic downturn. People are scared and feel helpless, and they are choosing to blame people other than themselves for all of these problems (and are right to do so in some cases). But the bottom line is that a portion of this nation is feeling victimized in a way that was once reserved only for gays, blacks, and women.

Conservative caucasians are not used to feeling victimized. They are typically full of righteous vigor and go through life pretending that absolutes abound, that black and white are the only choices while shades of gray be damned. While I would rather not start down a tangent, I will offer forth the idea that a majority of that population fervently holds to the ideal that there is no middle ground between good and evil. You are either one or the other. This is a convenient carryover from Judeo-Christian dogmata.

On top of that, we as a nation have steadily increased our sense of personal entitlement over time. We fear immigrants because they will take “our” jobs. We erupt into violence on the roads because somebody was slowing us down or in our way. We do away with reasoned debate because our opponent does not share our opinion or have our interests at heart. We will not stand for anything that impacts our convenience, our freedom, our choice, our family, and our belief that we are the most important person in our life. Oddly, we refer to the 1980’s as the “me” generation. It was so only because of the money people showered upon themselves. What we have now is worse. We have a “me” society that permeates every facet of our lives. We have a “me” country that believes it knows best in all circumstances and closes itself to the education that is an open mind and the willingness to learn from others in this world that have a longer history and greater experience.

As the saying goes, “We are number one!”

It is important to understand all of this when talking about the current climate of antagonism over health care reform. The town hall eruptions have almost nothing to do with health care, insurance, and services. They have a lot to do with a population choosing to assert power for the mere purpose of asserting power.

Why do I say this? I say it because the arguments against nationalized/socialized/tax subsidized health care make little sense. And I also say it because if these very same people were given the free market they so loudly demand, they would quickly see the role government plays in working to protect the welfare of its people.

“Choice” is a common argument. Choice of doctor, choice of treatment, choice of death. Well, okay, not that last one, because conservatives have always rallied against allowing people the choice to die (aka assisted suicide). What they fear now is that government will not give them the choice to live by denying them services at crucial times. Where would they get such an idea? From Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, actually, who pretty flat out stated that when deciding between health care for an infant, a young adult, and the elderly, the young adult should get priority since they are guaranteed to contribute to the ongoing health of the commonwealth. I have to concede that’s a very valid concern given Emanuel’s advisory position in the Obama administration. However, the guy isn’t all bad.

Choice of doctor seems like less of a concern. Every program in which I’ve participated has dictated which doctors I can and can’t see. They’ve done this by ratcheting the coverage depending on whether or not a doctor was a participant in their system and was willing to accept lower compensation in exchange for increased access to the patient base for that insurer. If every doctor accepts nationalized insurance, it would seem to me that choice would be expanded. I’ve not yet seen any indicators that the plan is to dictate which doctors you can see, nor have I seen mention regarding by which criteria such restrictions would be determined.

Choice of treatment boils down to what the reform bills contain regarding the system for approving treatments. Unfortunately, everybody has been shouting so much that we’ve not actually gotten any information about these types of details. That’s what the town hall meetings were for, but as usually happens, people who go in angry stay angry and come out angry.

The choice to participate is paramount. It is important that any national plan does not come by way of abolishing private insurance. We must always maintain the choice to get our coverage elsewhere, but we can do so without denying others the benefit of a national pool of contributors.

“Socialist” has been a favorite word since the start of the Obama campaign and has built enough steam to solve our oil dependency. Here is one of those places where we run into the problem of absolutes mentioned earlier.

There are many forms of socialism, but when we as a nation say “socialist”, we’re basically saying “communist”, which is why it is often followed by mentioning Russia. We have a good 60 years of anti-communist fervor in us, so when we hear of anything run by the state as being a “social” program, it gets bounced back as being socialist. To be fair, the proposed national health care system is a socialist form of insurance. It takes money from the production of the entire populace via taxes and then distributes that money to benefit the entire citizenry. Here are some other similarly “socialist” programs: welfare; unemployment; social security; Medicare. Suppose we throw those socialist babies out with the bathwater and eliminate those programs. Is that what people want when they say they want their country back? When I see the photos and footage of the town hall meetings, filled with a frothing older generation, I have to wonder - how many of them are benefiting right now from Medicare and are willing to admit to the hypocrisy?

I challenge everybody who is repeating the anti-socialist mantra to turn away their government checks and benefits. You obviously believe that everybody should fend for themselves, so get to it. I also challenge them all to learn about modern social democracy and how it differs from the all-out socialism they keep picturing in their heads.

Fear of the collapse of capitalism lies behind the rage against any form of social policy, which I find infuriating. A purely capitalist free market has been proven to work against the interest of consumers. There’s a reason why we have the FDA - it is to, as much as possible, protect the health of consumers against the practices of producers looking to increase profit at the risk of safety. The FDA didn’t just decide one day to exist. It was a response to real issues regarding illness and death. In an unrestrained market, lead paint gets used in kids’ toys, seat belts would never exist, you’d never be sure what meat you’d be getting in a McDonald’s hamburger, and we would have all had to just sit back and watch the nation collapse economically while the financial market continued digging its hole. Regulations of markets are a socialist construct, so please be more specific when ranting about impending socialism as we’ve had forms of it for 100 years.

“But what”, people might say, “about innovation? What motivation does anybody have to excel in a socialist system?” There they go again with absolutes. Modern socialist democracy doesn’t look to replace capitalism. It looks to complement it. In the current proposals, government is not looking to convert every hospital into a state run entity. It just wants to pay your expenses. Those hospitals are still to be independently run. Pharma companies will still benefit by improving drugs. Equipment companies will still be able to sell their gadgetry. Would one say that Blue Cross has dampened innovation just because it doled out the cash? Yes, actually. Procedures not covered by an insurer tend to not be performed, and if that procedure required a new process or product, the marketability of that product is reduced. Yet, innovation continues on.

“Big Brother” is a favorite talking point of mine because I have a long history of being staunchly against government intrusion in all facets of my life. It was my turn to be frothy when the USA PATRIOT Act was being put into place, when it became legal for the government to listen in on my calls without proper judicial review or to make me take off my shoes before boarding a plane. I was one of those guys who went on about how giving up privacy for the mirage of security was unconstitutional and an affront to my rugged individualism. Then, on December 3rd, 2001, that all went to hell. That was the day my son was born, had to be resuscitated, flown to another hospital, and treated for five weeks in a neonatal intensive care unit. That was the month that I had to make the decision between letting my son die or putting him through tracheostomy and gastrostomy surgery so that he could live into an unknown future. It was the event that showed me what asses and what saviors the state can be.  And the price of admission for this grand adventure was all of my privacy.

Mind you, not all of that privacy was violated by the state. When your child incurs over one million dollars in expenses in the first month of his life, everybody paying a piece wants your information. Add to the purely financial violation the fact that my son required massive support from doctors, therapists, home nurses, and equipment companies, all of whom must also violate your privacy in one way or another. The only place I still have privacy is in my own head, which I sometimes choose to violate by writing items like this.

To date, nearly eight years after that all began, I have yet to experience a privacy violation that was not directly related to the treatment of my son. The state has not revealed our info to anyone it shouldn’t have (to my knowledge). In fact, the worst violators of privacy have been the private nursing organizations who placed people in our home that were quite happy to regularly disregard HIPAA regulations and discuss their other cases with us or discuss our matters with their friends and family. The state, by contrast, was often refreshingly impersonal when dealing with us, which is how we liked it. Big Brother cared only about two things - making sure private health insurance was tried first before deferring to state and making sure that my son required all the things we requested. For the latter, they deferred to our personal doctors. My son constitutes an immense and ongoing expense. He incurs more cost than you or I could ever hope to achieve, and yet he continues to receive coverage. In the end, I traded privacy for his security.

What is interesting to me is that all of these topics are boiling to the surface in the fight against universal health care. There is no use pretending that that isn’t the end game here. The liberal goal is that every citizen of the United States have access to health care paid for by the populace at large. But why is this a bad thing? Why are people fighting with one another over doing good for their neighbor?

Health care is not the real concern. Control and power are what is at stake here. Health care hits at the heart of the “me” by having a direct impact on every person who is part of the program, and this is an effort that has failed for liberals in the past, making it a prime toppling target now that it has risen again. I wish people had been this fervent about the liberties they lost during the Bush administration, but throughout those eight years, none of them recognized their personal stake and responded with “I’ve done nothing wrong. I have nothing to hide.” Now, they all want to hide their medical records in order to deny help to those who need it. Ask any of these people individually, and they will all espouse their compassion but will maintain that compulsory compassion is no compassion at all.

However, none of them will say that health coverage is a bad thing, because it isn’t. What they won’t admit is the health care debate is a convenient topic for asserting a will they are afraid is diminishing. They didn’t fight the bailouts like this because they feared for their bank accounts. They didn’t fight the stimulus like this because some of those jobs might go to them. But they’re fighting health care like this because they already have coverage and don’t need that lousy government help. Rejecting government only when it doesn’t benefit you ignores the fact that it might benefit others or that you simply don’t recognize the benefit.

Let the debate on this topic continue, but please, let it be debate. Let us come to it informed and with our eyes open to what drives support and opposition to it. The moment we begin to shout, we have conceded reason and are driving from guttural emotion. As it is now, the debate can be distilled thusly:

Pro: “We want to take some money from everybody and provide for the literal health of the nation.”

Con: “Screw you, you can’t have my money or my privacy, I don’t care who suffers because of it.”

Contrast that with this quote. Some of you have probably heard it before:

I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.

As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.

No, that wasn’t said by Chicken Little.

I was stumbling through six degrees of LJ Friends pages and ended up on madamewoselle’s YouTube site where I sat down to watch Palin Rally, Penn State 08.

There’s a guy in there, wears glasses, chokes when challenged to contrast Palin’s supposed down-home nature with Cindy McCain’s uptown girl persona.  Yeah, I work with that guy.

And now I have to live with the knowledge that he had nothing other than campaign soundbites as his defense for supporting the McCain/Palin candidacy.

If you’re bored or just want to play with a soundboard, check out PALINdrome, which allows you to drag and drop Sarah Palin soundbites like so many refrigerator poetry magnets and then hear the results.

News out of New York state shows that Governor David A Paterson has signed into law a bit of legislation regarding video games.  Specifically, the law compels the state government to conduct a study of video game violence and its effects on children, requires consoles to have parental lockout controls by 2010, and requires games to show ESRB ratings.

Sounds pretty reasonable, except for three major things.

1. A couple thousand (might be exaggerating here) studies have already been done about video game violence.  Why can’t NY reference those?

2. All modern consoles already have parental controls built into them.  The industry has already addressed that concern, so legislating it makes no sense.  They had that one taken care of four years before the 2010 deadline.

3. All games sold at retail already carry an ESRB rating.  Most retailers require it.  Again, legislating a practice currently in practice.

So what did this legislation achieve?  Absolutely nothing aside from letting politicians look productive and fooling the public into thinking something will be done about this video game menace.

Well New Yorkers, you just paid for fluff legislation.  If you’re hoping it will reduce youth violence, you’re in for a surprise.  You see, poverty is a much larger contributor to youth violence than video games could ever hope to be, but nobody is trying to outlaw poverty.  No, let’s go after the inconsequential targets and hope the public doesn’t notice the dodge.

The good news is that this law doesn’t actually change anything.  The bad news is that making a law just to make it is asinine.

A couple weeks ago, I took a good chunk of my library into Webster’s for cash.  Before boxing them all up, I decided to rifle through and make sure there weren’t any old bits of paper and such between the pages.

Wouldn’t you know it, stuck in a copy of Conduct Unbecoming was a prize voucher from QuakeCon ‘97.

I guess there’s very little chance of claiming my prize now.

I can’t help laughing every time I look at this, and I don’t know why.

Members of the Alaska Wilderness League, dressed in polar bear costumes, sit in the last row during U.S. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne’s press conference in Washington on Wednesday, May 14, 2008. (AP / Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

Today is an important day for two reasons:

1. It’s votin’ time
2. It’s also business time

Yep, the primaries for PA are today, but way more important than that, today is the release day for the full Flight of the Conchords album.

As eloquently as I would like to state this, the direct route is rather preferred: this is fucked up.

MotherJones.com has an amazing and infuriating story available that looks into the Judge Rotenberg Center, a school in Massachusetts that specializes in behavior modification for both low and high functioning children with mental disabilities and/or behavior disorders.

That there is a school specifically for this is not that amazing, but that this school relies almost exclusively on electroshock aversion therapy is! One child was shocked upwards of 5,000 times in a single day before staff at the school concluded that he was not likely to respond to such methods.

Give the entire article a read. It’s definitely worth it. When you’re done, come back here for some other gathered info.

Obviously, this school hasn’t just been doing this recently. It has been going on for decades with little ongoing public outcry. The school has been challenged several times and has managed to come out the victor. Interestingly, New York as a state has outlawed the use of electroshock therapy for these types of treatments, but the state itself facilitates the placement of some of its children across the state line for admission into the JRC. The Massachusetts legislature has recently introduced a bill that would also eliminate electroshock, but it has yet to go anywhere. Judging by the potential political influence of the multi-million dollar center and the vocal advocation of the parents of attending students, it is possible that said legislation could die and the JRC could continue on its merry way.

Of interest are the following links:

http://www.kevinleitch.co.uk/wp/?p=374 - A blog entry that discusses a number of topics regarding the JRC. Be absolutely certain to scroll down to the comments and check out the information left by “Jeff”, and then scroll down further to “ann”, a one-time JRC employee, who talks about why the JRC isn’t as bad as everybody thinks. Another former JRC employee then pipes up to let “ann” know that things aren’t as rosy as she remembers them being.

http://www.judgerc.org/ - The Judge Rotenberg Center home page. Looks pretty pleasant, doesn’t it? The image at the top of this entry is from the site. It shows two kids out enjoying a bike ride in the sun, which would seem a pretty happy thing until you notice that both are wearing backpacks chock full of batteries and the devices that administer electric shocks to their limbs and stomach.

http://archive.seacoastonline.com/news/06012006/health/105752.htm - An AP article from last year covering largely the same ground as the Mother Jones article. Again, we see the electroshock backpack on a student. This photo, however, seems to show that there is a shock device attached to the straps themselves to ensure that the student receives a jolt if he attempts to remove the pack.

http://www.wbur.org/news/2006/JRCReport.pdf - A report put together by the New York State Education Department of what was observed at the JRC during an unannounced visit in 2006. Half of the students sent there by the state of New York were approved for shock aversion therapy.

http://judgerotenbergcenter.blogspot.com/ - A blog of testimonials from JRC supporters.

http://www.judgerc.org/ResponsetoGonnermanArticle.pdf - And here is Matthew Israel’s response to the Mother Jones article!

It’s chilling to know that there are parents out there who approach their children like a lot of people approach their dogs - by strapping them with a shocking collar to punish bad behavior - but I guess the larger question is this: when a child becomes a severe danger to him/herself and every one around them, what is the final recourse? Medication to the point of constant sedation? Severe physical isolation? Does this level of aversion therapy have some degree of utility?

As I’m married to a special education teacher who has focused on autism in her career, I can imagine I’ll get some first hand input as soon as she reads this or as soon as I bring it up in conversation. I’m curious to get her take on it from the educator’s perspective.

Speaking of perspective, let’s close this out with a picture of a JRC student receiving a gift from Santa Claus … while he’s wearing a fanny pack containing his electroshock gear.