So, USA
So, USA, you really outdid yourself this time. You told everyone to go home and turned off the lights. Of course Congress still gets a paycheck and we’re still bombing the hell out of third world countries, but the veterans can’t visit their memorial—which seems to be a really big deal for them—and everybody else seems to be getting worried.
With all that bombing going on, at the very least that means there are 1.3 million people who didn’t get temporarily laid-off, unlike the 800 thousand non-essential federal employees who got furloughed because the boys and girls on the Hill couldn’t play nice.
But it’s pretty ridiculous why this even happened. Certain GOP candidates used this opportunity as a Hail Mary to put an end to the Affordable Care Act. They played chicken with the nation and since the government is partially shutdown but healthcare.gov is more or less operational, it looks like nobody blinked. While it’s easy to blame those GOP reps for the situation we’re in, let’s not pretend that those pushing for healthcare reform are saints either.
Sure, people can preach about the glories of the Affordable Care Act, and maybe in a different country it would be something to be excited about—like Switzerland, they have their act together. But America is not one of those countries.
Cynicism aside, it’s projected that the Affordable Care Act will increase health spending by almost $2000 a year for the average individual. That’s a bit shy of the $2500 saving we were promised by the POTUS, but being lied to by politicians is nothing new.
It’s naiveté to believe that anybody up on the Hill is there for noble intentions. This is a nation run for profit. America isn’t a country anymore, America is a business. Those elected officials, they’re the executives and we’re just the white- and blue-collar cogs in their machine.
America is like any other corporation, except that the interview process is crowd-sourced. The big-wigs up there are trying to stay afloat and make a profit so that they can have bigger houses and bigger boats and can snort more cocaine off the backside of more expensive prostitutes. Political parties are more branding than ideology now. They’re all pimps and pushers, and their services go to the highest bidder because the only true leadership in America comes in green.
These professional politicians are looking out for themselves and that’s left We The People out in the cold. “Republicans and Democrats,” that doesn’t really mean anything anymore. With all these spying scandals, pointless wars and bipartisan politics it should be pretty obvious to see which dirty hands are being greased by the big, bad political-industrial complex.
Mark Twain once said that “We have the best government that money can buy.” But it feels like it’s time to get our money back. We’re spending more than we ever have with a government so corrupt and bloated by their own greedy self-indulgence that they’ve ceased to function.
Whether a person thinks that the government should be there to help its people or that government should take one giant step back, or maybe someone thinks government belongs somewhere in the middle—well, I have bad news. This government isn’t fit for any of them.
The lines we’ve drawn are outdated, but the hardliners are still out there who want to see that D or R at the end of a representative’s name like it actually means something. But I want to know, why are We The People so quick to side with one team and point fingers at the other when neither side cares about any of us? So, USA?
Alex Sousa is studying journalism in UVU’s communication department. He’s serving as the managing editor at the UVU Review as well as the editor of the music blog on uvureview.com. He’s had experience working as a freelance writer and also as a copy writer at a marketing agency. Currently he’s working as the Editor-in-chief of the Utah Tech Magazine, an interactive, digital publication. He’s a Utah native who’s traveled around the world; having lived in Mexico, backpacked through Europe, studied in the Middle East and—for a time—been stranded in the Ukraine. He can be found on Facebook and he’s available on Twitter @TwoFistedSousa or by email at [email protected].