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.
