Losing Faith

I often wonder about humanity-- especially how it is that we've managed to make it this long. I like to believe that people are mostly good, but often, I have my doubts. In the last week I've encountered multiple reasons to lose faith-

• I finally got to see Sicko-- It's absolutely heartbreaking and infuriating that people in the "greatest" nation in the world have to choose which finger to reattach or have to watch their husband die, not because there isn't a cure, but because the insurance company won't pay for it. Sickening. Absolutely sickening that our $*@& politicians are so deep in the pockets of the medical insurance lobby that they can't revolutionize our system the way that EVERY OTHER INDUSTRIALIZED NATION ON THE GLOBE has revolutionalized theirs. But it wasn't only the whole insurance racket that made me sick--it was the supposedly "good" people. In one of the first stories, you meet a middle-class couple who have lost everything because of medical bills, and so they are forced to move in with their daughter and her family. Get this-- the daughter makes them sleep in their extra rec room--refuses even to move the desk and computer out. Says something about getting them bunk beds. WTF?!?! The mother's still suffering from her illness and her daughter (who she put through college) doesn't even have the decency to give her a proper guest room??
  
• We were discussing different types of discrimination in my writing class and, because we were talking about homophobia, the issue of the bible came up, which brought up the issue of how the bible wasn't literally written by God (like he has time for that) which made one of my students exclaim, "Why would he sit up there and let people write things that weren't exactly what he wanted?" To which I (stupidly) replied, "I dunno, why would he let genocide continue to happen in Rwanda?" to which another student quipped, "He has a plan." Whaa??!! really? Because if he does have a plan that includes the rape and murder of innocent women, children, and men, then I am certainly not at all interested.
• I was flipping through the channels on Sunday night. We don't have many of them, so I settled on CSpan. Maybe it was CSpan 2, who knows. But Ann Coulter was on. (who, in addition to being a spawn of satan also has an enormous Adam's apple) I usually can't watch her-- she makes me twitch and feel like I need a good shower. But there wasn't anything else as interesting. Now I know that Coulter, herself, is absolutely off her rocker. Anyone who can, with a straight face and absolutely no irony, casually promote the killing of countless people in middle eastern nations is not really sane-- or so I thought. Because when she advocated bombing Iran (it would be fun, she said, to bomb them into admitting that the Holocaust happened), people laughed and clapped. And when she further advocating bombing them to the point that they couldn't even build a transistor radio, people applauded even more. And these people looked normal-- they were young, they didn't seem to have cloven hoofs or horns-- but they thought it was a jaunty little joke, and more than just a little bit of a good idea, to wipe a country off the face of the earth just because they don't agree with us.

I swear, if anyone out there can tell me how to find a nice academic job in Britain, or some other country that will unconditionally treat my husband's Crohn's, I'm ready to pack up and go. Not that I think things are magically better other places, but it sure seems like the level of humanity in this particular country is growing fainter each and every day.