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Sometimes I Get Discouraged

Posted on July 19th, 2010 by Staks

Over the weekend, I was putting together an Examiner article on the upcoming PhillyCoR Picnic. This is an event that I have been promoting for months so I was very excited to be writing the article. However, I noticed that the PhillyCoR website was down and so I contacted the PhillyCoR president to find out what was up. It turns out that the PhillyCoR is falling apart. The Picnic is being organized mainly by the Philly Humanist Society (one of the eight groups) with almost no support from the other organizations.

To make matters worse, just after I published the Examiner article, I found out that the Picnic’s special guess (who I have also been promoting for months) may not be able to make it. Rosco’s wife and campaign manager Cari fell out of a 60 foot tree and is in the hospital. They were supposed to leave Montana this Tuesday for Philly to perform the Sam Singleton, Atheist Evangelist show at Sunday’s Picnic and two additional shows.

Cari is doing well, but is banged up pretty badly and I don’t know if she will be up for the trip. The Philly shows were going to be part of a larger tour around the nation. One really distressing part of the whole thing is that they don’t have any health insurance because Atheist comedy shows don’t make a whole lot of money.

This gets me thinking about politics. While I was one of the few people well aware that Obama was not a progressive during the campaign, even I am surprised at how much he has continued the Bush policies and has done little to nothing to fix the problems facing this nation. During his great Health Care reform speech, he said that this was the last time America would have to deal with this issue and that we were going to do it right once and for all. What a joke.

If Obama had done it right, Rosco and Cari wouldn’t be without health care. In fact, part of the current problem is that even those who do have health care are not entirely sure that our medical expenses are actually covered. As it stands now (after HealthCare reform) we still have to pay the Health Insurance companies, but they don’t have to actually perform the services for which we are paying them. There are loopholes all over the place and Health Insurance companies have tons of lawyers who are looking for as many as they can find.

Sometimes I get discouraged. During the Bush administration, people told me that they were going to move to Canada and I discouraged them. I reminded them that America was the last battlefield and if we left, the Religious Right would take control and use America’s nuclear arsenal against the rest of the world. We won the last election, but it doesn’t seem like a victory. While it is true that we would be in far worse shape if the Republicans won, I am still so discouraged and disheartened that Obama seems unwilling to do much of anything except make great speeches.

He said that he didn’t want to play the game better, but wanted to change the game. But the fact is that Obama is just playing the game. What good is fighting hard to gain a political victory if that victory is hollow and meaningless?

I must admit that over the weekend, my wife and I actually had a serious conversation about perhaps moving to Canada. This health care issue is really motivating us to consider what I once thought was unthinkable. We actually went on the internet and started researching houses and areas to get an idea of costs. We definitely can’t afford to move anytime soon, but we are thinking of taking a vacation trip to scout out the possibilities.

Sometimes I get discouraged.