The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I live in the only industrialized country in the entire world that doesn’t have universal health care. Instead, we have privatized health care, the kind that’s supposed to bring the full firepower of capitalism’s vaunted competition to bear on prices, meaning, we, the citizens, are shoppers in the medical market. It’s like buying a couch or a car … except far far more complicated. I also live in the only advanced nation in the civilized world that rejects the science behind global warming. Not only rejects it, but now thumbs its nose at the rest of the world.

Today our president started the process of rescinding EPA restrictions on American power plants. With a stroke of his mighty pen, he proclaimed a New Day for coal powered plants and for coal mining jobs. He’s making America great again. If only he realized how complicated this will be!! If only he’d checked to see what natural gas plants cost now to run. Or how many jobs are in the alternative energy field compared to coal mining and gas and oil extraction. But no, he’s bringing back coal, making America, if not great again, what it was 50 or 100 years ago.

What’s next, you ask? Cotton farming and slavery? Kodak and the print film camera? The slide rule? We going to raise buffalo to hunt, old growth cedar to log, 80 pound salmon to fish?

I wish the world was the Way it Was when I was a kid, a white middle class kid anyway. I wish technology wasn’t moving so fast most of us feel shocked and stupid and scared. I wish the world would get small again, about the size of the South End and its environs. I wish I wasn’t bombarded with the news, faux and real, 24/7, maybe give me time to read a book or listen to music. I wish there was a job for everyone that paid well, except maybe the Irish/Jewish/Eastern European/ Hispanic immigrants who’d work for cheap all those jobs we need but don’t want to do ourselves.

I wish America was the fantasy on Roy Rogers and Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver. I wish Ike was still president. But you know what, it wasn’t all that great for a lot of us and it won’t be like that again, I don’t care if the buffalo roam the plains by the millions. We hunted them to death, we killed the Indians that needed those bison to live and I can tell you with no little certainty, those coal jobs aren’t coming back either. Who’s kidding who here?

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