I Try To Stay Silent
How can I? How can I remain silent when I have seen the tragedy of socialized health care with my own eyes?
I lived and served the common man in pre-Devolved, socialist Scotland for two years. I served an honorable mission for the LDS church. I met many people who professed socialist ideology as a means to affect revolution on the English, and they got it. At least the rape was abated, but the collective, emotional scars remain to this day, and the Scots are really no better off.
In that time of my life I remember waiting for hours on end with one single mother as she waded the human tide at a Council run health clinic in Beith trying to see a doctor about her child's ear infection. She was very grateful for the Priesthood blessing my companion and I was able to give. And, so we waited with her too. Would have anyway, but you may know how it is when you are a young missionary. Missionaries give a lot of blessings and a lot of their time.
Oh, you might think that probably happens in the US too. But you need to understand that there are no appointments to be had for the masses under socialized health care. You can't sit at home and see if things improve, knowing that if they didn't you could just call the doctor's office in the morning for an appointment sometime later that day. No, you have no choice but to take your sick kid as soon as possible to the clinic and wait your turn with all the other infectious people waiting their turn, and pray the wait isn't quite as long as the last time.
Another experience actually made me understand old age in ways I never would have understood any other way. We went to a "rest home" in Cumbernauld. I had been in country for maybe six weeks and had never considered places like it existed, let alone could exist.
The smell, the dim light, and Scotland is dim most of the time anyway, and the 20x30 foot room lined nearly all the way around, and on couches and chairs in the middle with people mumbling to themselves, drooling, toothless, sleeping upright as if dead already, but even awake they were either horribly riddled with Alzheimers or very sedated. Fortunately, they had a TV, and for a time, Elder Stott and me to break up the monotony. Looking back, this was the point in their lives when all society felt they owed any of them was a comfortable death.
Have you ever seen Soylent Green, or Logan's Run, or THX1138. You may not think these kinds of societies could possibly exist, but in an Animal Farm kind of way elements of this fiction will become non-fiction if the people of this Great and Free land let socialized health care come to fruition.
In Aberdeen (it was Falkirk, actually), we would frequently bump in to a guy in his late 20s at the bus station. He was employed at a restaurant and he was always happy to see us. One day he had just been to the clinic. He was a heroin addict and a convicted criminal. The terms of his probation included staying out of trouble or the heroin alt. methadone therapy cycle would end and he'd have to go back to prison without his heroin.
He showed us his neatly arranged vials of methadone and his needles. He was very happy to stay out of trouble and spoke very highly of his government issued drugs. I guess it was cheaper to manufacture the drugs and keep this kid addicted and out of trouble than to incarcerate him and rehabilitate him. Society had decided to simply trade one type of bondage that could end for one that would probably never end.
Oh, but look at how productive and happy he is. Have you ever seen the movie Trainspotting? When drugs become the only reason to do anything, that's when the best things of your life begin to leave you. It's easy for witnesses to put up blinders and walk on. Addiction is bondage, and state run addiction is the most sinister form I think there can be, because it is done with the illusion of "the greater good" or something like that. As if it were some ultra-clean way to deal with a difficult problem.
Make no mistake, freedom takes diligence and the willingness to pay attention, and speak-up from time to time. And you'd better believe there is a war raging in our country, and if you're LDS you have a unique perspective on the last days as it pertains to this country and its founding documents. This is why Glenn Beck is such a freak'n fanatic. He doesn't want to see the day when our Constitution hangs by a thread, but what we all know is that day is only mere months away and at this rate certainly not years away.
I would suggest, that if you haven't picked a side on this issue yet, you had better soon. There is no reason to expect our government would be able to administer socialized medicine any more effectively or "cleanly" than those governments that have been engaged in the practice for many years.
I lived and served the common man in pre-Devolved, socialist Scotland for two years. I served an honorable mission for the LDS church. I met many people who professed socialist ideology as a means to affect revolution on the English, and they got it. At least the rape was abated, but the collective, emotional scars remain to this day, and the Scots are really no better off.
In that time of my life I remember waiting for hours on end with one single mother as she waded the human tide at a Council run health clinic in Beith trying to see a doctor about her child's ear infection. She was very grateful for the Priesthood blessing my companion and I was able to give. And, so we waited with her too. Would have anyway, but you may know how it is when you are a young missionary. Missionaries give a lot of blessings and a lot of their time.
Oh, you might think that probably happens in the US too. But you need to understand that there are no appointments to be had for the masses under socialized health care. You can't sit at home and see if things improve, knowing that if they didn't you could just call the doctor's office in the morning for an appointment sometime later that day. No, you have no choice but to take your sick kid as soon as possible to the clinic and wait your turn with all the other infectious people waiting their turn, and pray the wait isn't quite as long as the last time.
Another experience actually made me understand old age in ways I never would have understood any other way. We went to a "rest home" in Cumbernauld. I had been in country for maybe six weeks and had never considered places like it existed, let alone could exist.
The smell, the dim light, and Scotland is dim most of the time anyway, and the 20x30 foot room lined nearly all the way around, and on couches and chairs in the middle with people mumbling to themselves, drooling, toothless, sleeping upright as if dead already, but even awake they were either horribly riddled with Alzheimers or very sedated. Fortunately, they had a TV, and for a time, Elder Stott and me to break up the monotony. Looking back, this was the point in their lives when all society felt they owed any of them was a comfortable death.
Have you ever seen Soylent Green, or Logan's Run, or THX1138. You may not think these kinds of societies could possibly exist, but in an Animal Farm kind of way elements of this fiction will become non-fiction if the people of this Great and Free land let socialized health care come to fruition.
In Aberdeen (it was Falkirk, actually), we would frequently bump in to a guy in his late 20s at the bus station. He was employed at a restaurant and he was always happy to see us. One day he had just been to the clinic. He was a heroin addict and a convicted criminal. The terms of his probation included staying out of trouble or the heroin alt. methadone therapy cycle would end and he'd have to go back to prison without his heroin.
He showed us his neatly arranged vials of methadone and his needles. He was very happy to stay out of trouble and spoke very highly of his government issued drugs. I guess it was cheaper to manufacture the drugs and keep this kid addicted and out of trouble than to incarcerate him and rehabilitate him. Society had decided to simply trade one type of bondage that could end for one that would probably never end.
Oh, but look at how productive and happy he is. Have you ever seen the movie Trainspotting? When drugs become the only reason to do anything, that's when the best things of your life begin to leave you. It's easy for witnesses to put up blinders and walk on. Addiction is bondage, and state run addiction is the most sinister form I think there can be, because it is done with the illusion of "the greater good" or something like that. As if it were some ultra-clean way to deal with a difficult problem.
Make no mistake, freedom takes diligence and the willingness to pay attention, and speak-up from time to time. And you'd better believe there is a war raging in our country, and if you're LDS you have a unique perspective on the last days as it pertains to this country and its founding documents. This is why Glenn Beck is such a freak'n fanatic. He doesn't want to see the day when our Constitution hangs by a thread, but what we all know is that day is only mere months away and at this rate certainly not years away.
I would suggest, that if you haven't picked a side on this issue yet, you had better soon. There is no reason to expect our government would be able to administer socialized medicine any more effectively or "cleanly" than those governments that have been engaged in the practice for many years.
posted by Adam Knighton at
10:14 PM
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