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Not even a rant. It's a tantrum.
Aug. 19th, 2011 02:27 amNot talking about this on Facebook because I need to use that medium for professional stuff. But here, I'm just a private and relatively anonymous citizen, and I can say what I want.
So if you're on my friends list and you don't believe in universal health care and a genuine social safety net, get the fuck away from me. Un-friend me. Don't talk to me. Go the fuck away.
If you have never stood in your proud, ashamed, tearful, poor and uninsured friend's kitchen and asked that person to PLEASE let you pay for him to go see a decent doctor so maybe he will get back the use of the badly injured wrist he needs to work, if you have never watched someone you love struggle with undiagnosed and untreated mental illness for 20 fucking years and then finally begin to pursue her dreams of education and a career when she finally had health insurance and got proper diagnosis and treatment in her mid-30s, if you have never wept for a smart, creative, educated friend with multiple disabling mental illnesses and a physical disability who has to work graveyard shift at Taco Bell and clean people's houses for not nearly enough money (and not see her partner for days on end because they work different shifts) until her goddamn disability payments finally start, if you have never had to swallow hard and ask your partner's mother to pay the health insurance premium that you have absolutely no way to pay and which will make available to you the care and medication that literally make the difference between life and death, then I don't give a flying fuck what you think.
I don't care about your philosophy or your values or whatever other bullshit you use to justify denying other human beings the basic dignity of being cared for when they are sick or injured. I don't give a shit. Fuck off. Go get yourself a fucking clue. When you learn what life is really like for people with no health insurance and with truly disabling conditions, when you grow a goddamn conscience, when you can muster the decency to care about the totally fucking preventable suffering of other human beings, then you can talk to me again. Until then, please take your much-discussed bootstraps and shove them right up your ass.
Tomorrow I will probably be a calm, rational, policy geek again. But tonight I am completely fed up. I am absolutely fucking sick and tired of the cruel, selfish assholes who have never known real need, who have never had to face the raw, ugly humiliation of having to ask someone else for what you literally require in order to survive and know that they might decide your existence isn't worth it, who seem determined to retroactively justify their privilege and their lack of empathy by denying other people something every other industrialized nation defines as a basic goddamn human right.
So if you're on my friends list and you don't believe in universal health care and a genuine social safety net, get the fuck away from me. Un-friend me. Don't talk to me. Go the fuck away.
If you have never stood in your proud, ashamed, tearful, poor and uninsured friend's kitchen and asked that person to PLEASE let you pay for him to go see a decent doctor so maybe he will get back the use of the badly injured wrist he needs to work, if you have never watched someone you love struggle with undiagnosed and untreated mental illness for 20 fucking years and then finally begin to pursue her dreams of education and a career when she finally had health insurance and got proper diagnosis and treatment in her mid-30s, if you have never wept for a smart, creative, educated friend with multiple disabling mental illnesses and a physical disability who has to work graveyard shift at Taco Bell and clean people's houses for not nearly enough money (and not see her partner for days on end because they work different shifts) until her goddamn disability payments finally start, if you have never had to swallow hard and ask your partner's mother to pay the health insurance premium that you have absolutely no way to pay and which will make available to you the care and medication that literally make the difference between life and death, then I don't give a flying fuck what you think.
I don't care about your philosophy or your values or whatever other bullshit you use to justify denying other human beings the basic dignity of being cared for when they are sick or injured. I don't give a shit. Fuck off. Go get yourself a fucking clue. When you learn what life is really like for people with no health insurance and with truly disabling conditions, when you grow a goddamn conscience, when you can muster the decency to care about the totally fucking preventable suffering of other human beings, then you can talk to me again. Until then, please take your much-discussed bootstraps and shove them right up your ass.
Tomorrow I will probably be a calm, rational, policy geek again. But tonight I am completely fed up. I am absolutely fucking sick and tired of the cruel, selfish assholes who have never known real need, who have never had to face the raw, ugly humiliation of having to ask someone else for what you literally require in order to survive and know that they might decide your existence isn't worth it, who seem determined to retroactively justify their privilege and their lack of empathy by denying other people something every other industrialized nation defines as a basic goddamn human right.
