At least around the world, he is. People all over Belize ask me about him--and when I tell them I don't think he's the greatest thing since sliced bread, I get the inevitable "oh, because he's black, huh?" It never fails, reminding me of this post.
So I've had in mind a number of reasons where, had I voted (I didn't, and PA didn't turn out to be close, either, so I can feel happy knowing I wouldn't have mattered), it would have not been for Barack Obama.
1. Trade--Obama doesn't score well with me on my new pet issue. All throughout the primaries, Obama railed against NAFTA and how we need to "protect" jobs at home (read--subsidize companies that suck). This may have been just to separate himself away from Hilary, but when free trade is one of the things that brings more people out of poverty and you go off on it, it doesn't sit well with me.
2. Universal Healthcare--I couldn't be more against this. But I've written about it before.
3. Abortion--While abortion is a card of mine, it's not my trump. But voting against a bill which would have provided healthcare to babies that survived an abortion procedure and not in utero is pretty slimeball. There's no excuse on that one.
4. Vouchers--Obama has the overwhelming support of teacher's unions, which means he is all for giving more funding to schools that don't cut it, and not allowing some choice for parents to send their kids somewhere else. By the way, just go to the D.C. area to see how giving loads of money to public high schools has not done jack squat for making kids smarter.
5. Union Voting--this is one of those bills that will fly under the radar, but Unions support Obama because he will sign off on a bill that takes away the right to a secret ballot when voting to unionize. There is absolutely no legitimate reason for this, and will only bully members who don't want to unionize into doing it. There is a reason why we vote in secret on election day. How coul this be called "democratic?"
6. Supreme Court Justices--Obama will likely have two nominations during his first term to the Supreme Court, and these people influence America for their lifetimes. Let's just say I'd rather have judges who vote to "uphold the law" over justices who look to make rulings based on "empathy.
It was after my third year of college. At that time, I decided to start wearing my retainer again, after pretty much not wearing the thing for two years. It hurt like a bastard. I stopped after about three or four days, and for two weeks afterwards I would have bouts of some of the worst pain I have ever felt on my upper right jaw. My mom gave me some nice pain pills, which didn't anything about the pain outside of making me not care so much about it. I went to the dentist, who prescribed a mouth guard so I would stop grinding my teeth at night. He also mentioned that there could be a very outside chance I had some tumor in my brain, causing these complications with my jaw.
Thus, the MRI. I told my mom better safe than sorry, even though it was clear the whole thing was caused by my trying re-do two years of braces on my lower teeth in two weeks. My mom even told me she knew I didn't need it, but we went along with it, anyway. 45 minutes and a bunch of magnetic knocks later, I was out the door, with a clean brain scan.
When people talk about why medical care is so high these days, they should point to stuff like this. And it's the exact reason as to why I am totally against the idea of government-provided universal healthcare.
I got the MRI because I could do it without paying anything. My mom's hospital covered our insurance, so why not? The fact that a third party picked up the bill meant that no cost would be spared for my health, even if the necesity of such procedures was as dubious as my MRI.
The fact that health insurance has been such a regular part of our lives for so many years blinds us to the absurdity of it. What if, as John Stossel showed in this 20/20 special, our jobs paid us with food insurance? Our demand would surely change when we were inside the supermarket, since now someone else would be paying for it. Why buy hamburgers when your "food insurance" covers steak? Why buy one steak when food insurance would cover five? In the end, we would buy things we wouldn't need, and we would stop looking for discounts or cheaper options since someone else would be picking up the tab. It's the same for health insurance.
Who among us has any idea of how much a doctor's check-up costs? Who has ever compared prices for doctors if insurance was covering the whole cost? Who would ever try the cheaper and probably just as effective medicine when insurance pays for the brand new top of the line medicine? The fact is, we are so used to having someone else pay for our medical bills that we don't even care about how much it costs. When people order every medical procedure possible when only one or two is needed, our insurance premiums skyrocket. We never think about the cost when it's someone elses money.
What's worse, hospitals and doctors aren't given incentives to find cheaper and more efficient means of getting a job done, because they get paid just the same when people don't think about cost. The fact that we would compare costs and services with multiple doctors means they would search for better ways of doing things. But people who don't care about costs would never do such things.
I was discussing this with a friend a little while ago, and she mentioned to me how some people if they had to pay for more of their medical care would refuse to get it. More people would die, she argued, especially among the poor. But isn't that a bit elitist? Do we really not have enough trust in people to know when they are legitimately sick versus the people who just use the system because they can?
The fact is, if we continue to expect all of our medical expenses to be paid for, the costs will continue skyrocketing. We will order just about anything, because someone else foots the bill, and will pay for it in ridiculous insurance premiums. It wasn't long ago when people used to pay for medical bills out of pocket.
Insurance isn't such a bad thing, when it's used for emergencies, like cancer, AIDS, or long hospital stays. But can't we see that expecting insurance to pay for everything will only make it all the more costly? Or expecting government to pay for it "free of charge" will do the same, and more?
Freedom or health? Which one would you pick? Based on my conversation last night with my British friend JP, I choose freedom.
I have quite a few opinions, to be sure. So does JP, a self-described political "pinko-lefty-faggot." As we watched the Phillies pound the Rays last night, a political ad came on about Obama's healthcare plan. JP took the opportunity to remind me why he thinks British socialized medicine is better than the American system, to which our conversation swerved towards the concept of freedom.
We both agreed that a great way to keep healthcare costs down was to decrease risky activity. But where my ideas were about giving people every incentive to stay healthy, JP's were about government laws banning smoking. He championed how British cigarettes cost now ten dollars a pack, and how it's illegal to smoke in all restaurants and bars on the Isles.
It is with the latter where I especially take issue. Why should the government be allowed to tell me how to conduct my business if it is privately owned? Would that not be a gross violation of property rights?
If a bar has people smoking inside of it, no one twists my arm to go in and join them. I am at complete freedom to choose whether or not to go inside. So are the employees who choose to work there, who are surely compensated for having to work in smokey conditions with higher wages, or else they wouldn't work there. Finally, if the market for non-smoking bars and clubs was there, why aren't there more of them?
The problem I have with "universal healthcare" is how the government would then have more ability to take away my freedom to live an unhealthy lifestyle. I had a great conversation this summer with my Spanish teacher in Xela about my favorite unhealthy pet restaurant, McDonald's. She lamented how terrible it was that McDonald's was allowed to sell food that was so unhealthy, and how the Guatemala government needed to step in and put a stop to it. But who makes the choice to eat at McDonald's, and gorge themselves on Big Macs and McFlurrys? It is my decision to do it, and I am fully aware of the bloated feeling I will get after downing the #1 with a Coke. But like parents that pay for their children's injuries during a tackle football game, the government is paying for my bad health decisions gives them more "rights" to regulate what I can and cannot do. Currently it is the push to ban smoking in all restaurants. The next thing is banning trans fat. Why would we be convinced that it would stop only at that?
Will I have to pay a fine for eating a gallon of ice cream in one sitting, or for ever drinking soft drinks? What about sitting at home on my butt all day instead of going for a walk?
The problem with this kind of medicine is that it gives governments incentives to tread on the rights of its citizens. Rights are not just what I can do, but also what I don't have to do. I can either smoke or not smoke cigarettes. I can get smashed off and drink ten beers in a few hours. I can be a glutton and take poor care of myself, because that is my right. Parents have rights over their children because they pay for the consequences of their child's actions. When someone else pays for the costs of my bad decisions, instead of me, they start having "rights" over what I can do. I choose more freedom.
I gave a quiz to sixty students, and they have scored an average of 5/20 on it, just as I suspected. Here it is: If I asked you the capitals of the USA, Russia, China, Britain, France, India, Egypt, Germany, Brazil, and Honduras, how would you do? And if I asked you what countries Havana, Shanghai, Sydney, Seoul, St Petersburg, Buenos Aires, Ottawa, Rome, Tokyo, and Baghdad were in, how many would you get? Passing is 13, and answers are at the bottom. In the mean time, to make my point, I wrote this:
Imagine you are given a quiz on world capitals.If your teacher asked you the capitals of China, France,
and the United States, would
you be able to say Beijing, Paris,
and Washington D.C.?
If you were a Mount Carmel Student, the answer would almost
assuredly be a “no.”And that is quite
sad for us, when one considers that MCHS hails from a country of no more than
300,000 people, or 1/20,000th of the world’s population.
But MCHS students didn’t only score poorly on world capitals
far away from home. The vast majority
couldn’t identify the capital of Honduras
(Tegucigalpa), and also were not aware that Havana was in Cuba.Indeed, not knowing such basic knowledge
would be an excellent predictor of a student’s knowledge of anything else from
those countries.
Why the disconnect?How could a country so small fail to grasp the importance of cooperation
and interdependence with the rest of the world, during the age of high speed
internet and multi-nationals?Yet that is
exactly what Belize (and Mount Carmel) has done, and continues to do, with what is
does emphasize in its curriculum.
Consider: Mount Carmel is one of two high schools in the
entire country with any semblance of a world history program, and even that is
there only grudgingly, a meager two hours a week for one year of high school,
when the rest of the world considers four days a week and two years of world
history a minimum.When it comes to
basic geography and the quiz our students so terribly failed regarding world
capitals, we are testing them on the countries and capitals of the Caribbean,
ignoring anything outside a perimeter of 1,000 miles, and much inside of it, as
Honduras and Cuba don’t fit into our Caribbean category and therefore don’t get
studied.
Doesn’t this show a complete lack of priorities?Can we tell ourselves with a straight face
that studying the geography of Saint Lucia and Dominica is as important as
knowing where China is, or that Cairo is the largest city in Africa, or that
the world’s financial capital lies in New York City?Does it show a lack of priorities that not a
single Mount Carmel student could identify the capital of the world’s second
most populated country, India,
where one out of every six persons in the world resides?
We keep defending this decision to ignore studying anything
from the outside world under the idea that our students are not ready for such
topics, “since they don’t even know who they are.”But what kind of statement is that, really?I may know that my ancestors immigrated to
the United States from the Prussian and Sudeten areas of Germany 150 years ago,
but is that “who I am?”Since almost all
of my immediate family are of German ancestry, does that mean I have to
specialize in farming, lager-brewing, or photography, since that is what
Germans were famous for excelling in their past?Am I rejecting “who I am” for desiring to
learn Spanish (and not German) and for loving to dance salsa, something never
correlated with German culture? Wouldn’t that be me “hating” myself?
Yet we are using that line of thinking when we teach our
students.We tell them that who their ancestors were is “who they
are.”And sadly, by ignoring the rest of
the world, as proven by a simple quiz on major world cities, we have been
giving them a distorted version of
who they are. Mount Carmel students are not being taught that Belize is part
of the world, but that Belize IS the world.A person is defined by all of the things they have experienced in this
world, not by the things that their great great grandparents experienced.
Like it or not, the world is globalizing.At exactly the point in the history of man
when we should be turning our focus outside, we willfully turn the gaze inside,
and it is a distorted gaze, at that. We give our students no favors by
pretending they are the same people as some of their far away ancestors were.
Answers: Washington DC, Moscow, Beijing, London, Paris, New Delhi, Cairo, Berlin, Brasilia, Tegucigalpa, and Cuba, China, Australia, South Korea, Russia, Argentina, Canada, Italy, Japan, and Iraq.
