Honestly, can you imagine what the anti-health care reform protests would be like if the House was about to actually pass a single-payer bill? Those fat and/or old fuckers up there in their Playskool colonist hats and ready-made "Kill the Bill" signs would be undulating and wheeling around with guns, threatening to shoot shit up until it was time for Country Buffet to open. Jesus, they're already threatening war over the small steps the current bill takes in making the American health insurance system less savage. Glenn Beck has called this as much of "a turning point" in American history as "the Civil War." So that means that offering a subsidy to people to buy into a health insurance exchange that's regulated by the federal government is the same as slavery?
Here's what's going to happen after the vote on the reconciliation bill in the House on Sunday: Almost every Tea Partyer who was out there protesting will go the fuck away. They will devote whatever energy they have left to posting comments on blogs and Facebook pages. Their leaders, desperate to still be relevant and still draw a paycheck, will try to come up with some other phantom issue to whip up enthusiasm. But once it passes, no one will give a shit except the people it helps. The Civil War won't be re-fought. The Constitution won't be shredded. One or two states might try to force their misinterpretation of the 10th Amendment. Soon, Beck and Hannity and Michele Bachmann and Steve King will discover another Republic-ending crisis, probably immigration reform, and we'll start the magical cycle all over again.
Meanwhile, those poor, ignorant bitches and bastards in the photo up there will shuffle home, curse the process, and, like good corporate tools, continue to suck down fast food and sodas and buy shit they don't need because it's cheaply made in China and sold at Wal-Mart and proudly drive gas-devouring vehicles and keep their children stupid and tell themselves that they aren't the problem, no, they are the solution, wondering how to fill the desperate couple of hours between the end of Limbaugh's radio show and the start of Beck's TV rants, despising those who are attempting to do something for them and their neighbors, wondering where their country went, when, after all, this is where it's gone.
For a couple of them, the day will come when they lose their jobs. And the COBRA runs out. And maybe for a moment they panic about where they're going to get health insurance for themselves and their families. And then it will hit them, that "oh, yeah, there's that" and it just might end up okay. But, like the dunces who want the government to keep its hands off their Medicare, they will go on thinking the same, doing the same, never learning, never changing.
We are Americans, after all. Our swinish laziness, blissful ignorance, and blithely cruel selfishness is something our soldiers are fighting and dying for right now.
It's okay. The rest of us will be out here trying to do good, even for those who would like to see our blood discolor the streets.
Note: If the health care bill doesn't pass, then, well, consider the Rude Pundit teabagged.
