As it turns out, the devastating impact of funding cuts on our hospital preparedness for such dangers as Ebola is worse than I thought. Dr. Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), says we would likely have a vaccine for Ebola had we not cut the budget as we have. (Collins, by the way, is no liberal. He’s an evangelical Christian).
“NIH has been working on Ebola vaccines since 2001,” he says. “It’s not like we suddenly woke up and thought, ‘Oh my gosh, we should have something ready here.’ Frankly, if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would’ve gone through clinical trials and would have been ready…We would have been a year or two ahead of where we are, which would have made all the difference.”
But we didn’t, which you would think would lead us as voters to re-think what we are doing. Not so.
Polls suggest our nation is about to elect even more people who will try to make deeper cuts in federal spending. If Republicans take control of the Senate, Mitch McConnell will become Majority Leader, and you know what he’s promising to do?
Not to work for more support of medical research. No, he says his top priorities will be to repeal Obamacare and eliminate the Consumer Financial Protection Agency.
It’s enough to make you scream, or make you want to give up, let the extremists take over completely and get rid of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, Food Stamps, Head Start, funding for research altogether, ignore climate change, and then we’ll see what kind of nation we have.
That’s how I was feeling when a friend sent me an email he received from a friend of his who explained why he keeps on trying to change the world. Here is part of what he said.
In all of my years discussing politics, I have not changed one single person’s opinion. Ever.
…The Big Lie has become the truth, and we are living in Orwell’s 1984. The general public is ignorant, inattentive, and gullible at best. The news media has become an ADD construct populated by knee-jerk exhibitionists with all of the depth of a rain puddle in Death Valley.
History is unexamined, forgotten, re-imagined, and newly made. My contemporaries, who grew up during the Viet Nam War, believed everything the military and the government told them after 9-11.
Logic and Science cannot be trusted, Big Business is virtuous to the point of holiness, Corporations are people (just with more rights), gun ownership is a sanctimonious right. This is a Christian Nation, the Founding Fathers were Devout Christians with a God-Given Vision for our Country, our slavery can be justified in that we gifted the Black Africans with Christianity, and no one is fit to serve in political office unless they are Christians. And Christianity is under attack. So are rich white men.
As Kurt Vonnegut used to say, “and so it goes.”
Yeah, I’ll still shout out into the darkness, because that’s who I am. The truth needs a voice, no matter how ineffective and feeble.
A friend of mine who used to bait me into political conversations, once asked me why did I care. What difference does it make? I have no illusions as to what difference I will make. But there is some sick and twisted thing inside me that tells me that the only real purpose in existence is to try and make things better. Just some innate struggle against chaos, some compulsion, maybe some egotistical attempt to prove my superiority, possibly an inferiority complex striving to assert my value. Whatever. So I try.
All I could say after I read that was…so must I. Indeed, so must we all.
linnposts.com 
Jan is quoting Kurt Vaunigutt with his “…and so it goes.” I’ve used that A LOT since reading it in one of K. V’s books 🙂 Hugs ~ Mom > WordPress.com > linnposts.com posted: “As it turns out, the devastating impact of > funding cuts on our hospital preparedness for such dangers as Ebola is > worse than I thought. Dr. Francis Collins, head of the National > Institutes of Health (NIH), says we would likely have a vaccine for > Ebola ha” >
I’ve forwarded Jan’s post to my daughter, Mara, and think Jan’s comments should be widely shared so COME ON FOLKS…lets share it with everyone on our email mailing list, Facebook, etc. THANK YOU JAN FOR ALL YOU DO! Wake up America!
Thanks. Laura, especially for sending it on to Mara.
Oops! on my first comment. I have no idea how that got posted. My computer must have a mind of its own and I am mostly baffled by computers. “…and so it goes.” 🙂 LPD
All I can say after that is: “All I could say after I read that was…so must I. Indeed, so must we all.”
Thank you once again Jan, for the great job you do. Hang in there, maybe sanity will return someday. (I think America is in DEEP weeds if it doesn’t)
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That quote spurred me on, Wally, so I will keep shouting into the darkness no matter what.
The famous essayist William Hazlitt (1778 – 1830) once opined: “…A Jacobin is one who would have his opinion govern the World, and would attempt to overturn everything in it”.
He’d have understood these times perfectly, when the creed and the truth have been decreed to be one and the same thing.
In spite of my current busyness remodeling our house before we move in I too have been hearing the drum beat of rising support for reactionary conservative representatives; and I too am frustrated! But I too will continue to promote progressive thinking wherever I can.
None of us should recoil, the stakes are too high; especially with regard to global warming. I truly believe the ideological arrogances of our dominant minority and ambivalent majority, expressed above, will end human society as we know it by the end of the next century! the earth is a living organism with far more Creator endowed energy than we acknowledge or fear.
In 1996 tropical cyclone Olivia developed off the coast of Australia reaching sustained winds of 253 mph, 2 mph shy of a category 10! (Katrina was a 5) Every month there are stories from various climate science organizations, NASA, our military, on the visible signs of changes which will make sea level rise and storms like Olivia increasingly the norm.
This week I happened on a passage from the old testament book of Leviticus, chapter 26: “But if you … spurn my statutes (regarding giving the land/earth its Sabbath time) … and you break my covenant … your land shall be a desolation, and your cities a waste. Then the land shall enjoy its Sabbath years. As long as it lies desolate, it shall have the rest it did not have on your Sabbaths when you were living on it.”
Very … prophetic?
Never Quit!