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Coming to Canada soon!
(slrpnk.net)
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this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2024
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I'm super grateful in this regard to live in Germany, where free doctor visits are not a benefit of something but fucking minimum for literally everyone. Even though it may take a while for specialists. I even get benefits for going to free appointments at the dentist. Safes money and pain later, leading to more productiveness as well.
Was really weird watching "Breaking Bad" just as I had cancer myself years ago (Cancer-free today 🙂). Being in a hospital, receiving anything I needed just by showing my insurance card (for which I didn't have to pay anything either as I was without a job at that point). And as long as our government ain't complete dicks I'm more than glad to pay that back.
The US just weirds me the fuck out. I don't get this selfish lack of solidarity towards your fellow humans.
It's all manipulation, Americans are not quite as psycho and as selfish as we seem outwardly. In general, unless you're talking about bigotry and deep-seated prejudice, most of the dumb stuff Americans believe, we have been essentially force fed.
In this case, for historical reasons I don't remember ATM, it became normalized for employers to offer health insurance and for that to be the primary way people obtained health insurance. Combine that with the strategy to teach poor white people to hate on minorities, as a way to feel superior to someone and thus less angry about their own lot, and you can start to see how the link between employment and healthcare can be seen by some as a moral situation - the person without the good job to get the healthcare must be lazy, and since we don't want to encourage laziness, it's therefore acceptable (even preferred!) not to take care of them.
I can't stress enough how much effort is put into teaching a huge portion of America to fear and hate, constantly. We wouldn't be this bad otherwise, we're pretty normal folks by and large. Even pretty kind and generous, often. We've just been really fucked up, and very deliberately.
I would argue that there has been a shift to exactly that, and it's tied to everything happening alongside for-profit health care. America has a fetish for "self reliance" that has IMO been corrupted into "You're on your own, sucker. Got mine." instead of the ability to build a life from the land, which is likely part of the reason self-reliance ever became so important. Self-reliance also gets pushed by those who have the luxury to say it, already safe in some kind of wealth, or at least to those they look down on who have a hard time rising even to a modest level of financial self actualization. Self-reliance is pretty much the same as "picking oneself up by his/her bootstraps" these days.
The grind of the Capitalist Machine gets worse every year with the never-ending pressure to make the quarterly report better and more profitable, infinitely. That improvement comes at the cost of, well...ever increasing costs, more expensive benefits like healthcare, and having to work more for less buying power. All that on top of the fact that one bad event in one's life could send you into poverty because that self reliance twisted into bootstraps has dictated slashing taxes, and slashing those taxes has had a focus on destroying social programs that help people not be so poor, because it's your fault if you're not self-reliant, and people have decided that it's better to hoard what they can, particularly their money, and blame others for being have-nots. Why should I help some lazy (fill in the blank) when I have (insert difficulty here)?
That's not on the people though, but the system. What has been said in this thread - that US citizens ain't as bad as they're being thought of - can be applied to literally anyone, anywhere. Having a background of abuse and having learned of the botched Stanford Prison nonsense as well as the Tongan Castaways, I came to believe that we are indeed inherently good as long as we're properly cared for, i.e. no existential fears or neglect. It's hard not to immediately point out awful shit being done, but once you look into the people conducting it you can always find either a cause for their individual worldview to be so corrupted or a systemic cause making them believe to act morally correct. That, or the responsibility is put on someone else freeing them from any of it - as can be seen with the Stanford Prison Experiment, where the guards were acting kind and humane until being instructed by the Professor to not be; who held both responsibility and authority, fucking the whole shit up. This was only discovered around 2015. Nobody looked closer back then as the original believe of "human bad, human needs to be controlled" was initially confirmed, something culturally engraved and pushed by books and movies like "Lord of the Flies".
Causing existential fear by putting everything you need behind a paywall - even down to something as fundamental as water in many cases - and enshrining unethical behaviour into law and an economical system created with the expectation of humans being inherently greedy, selfish and only held back by fear… the only reason why a society like that remains stable IS that people ain't inherently bad despite everything. Same for other countries.
Probably one reason why religion is so alluring to many, another US thing that can turn out to become a problem (like right now, christo-fascism is a thing). The desire for good, and to be good in a world that, in a believe of fellow humans being bad and selfish, we keep making worse unnecessarily.
So yeah, we the people of this world are fine. It's the US system that weirds me the fuck out.
I'm not familiar with Tongan Castaways but will have to give it a look. I felt similarly abused by the revelations of the Stanford Prison Experiment - my understanding of the experiment (pre reveal) did shape, to some degree, my understanding of humanity.
As I've gotten older and times have gotten more fraught, it's become clearer and clearer that most people are fundamentally pretty decent, pretty "meh" at knowing what's important to focus on (or even likely or possible to be accurate), and - critically - most of us are very vulnerable to fear-based manipulation. Those three traits are not as discordant as they seem.
Unrelatedly, I find it odd but endearing that you seem to use "ain't" kinda routinely, as a German, lol. Even lotsa Americans don't. That's not a veiled accusation, btw, you seem genuine to me and I simply wonder how you came by it. Sharing things is great, for my part as much as I love odd beers and experimentation, y'all's Reinheitsgebot has improved my life in a non-trivial way, hahaha
Wait, isn't "ain't" commonly used? If there is some "undertone" to it of being not genuine please tell me, I would never know otherwise. 😅
"Ain't" is fairly regional in the US, and also kind of a class indicator. Class is not quite right but it's close. In general you find it used a lot more frequently in the south, and also generally in lower income populations. It's also less common among folks for whom English is their 2nd (+) language.
If you like it, keep using it! Language should feel good.
Edit: missed your "please tell me" part - it does stick out a bit the way you use it. It's a very casual and informal word, almost to the point of being crass, and it doesn't normally get used in the kinds of eloquent writing you do.