Approaching the End of the Decade & It Turns Out Tiger Woods is the Gene Simmons of the PGA

Current Tunes: Pardon the Interruption on ESPN

Between all the insanity surrounding Tiger Woods and the death of Bengals’ wide receiver Chris Henry this morning, I’m moderately thankful I’m not a celebrity. The debacle Woods is going through makes me oh so grateful for my privacy, what little of it I still have. Admittedly I myself am actually most responsible for any lack of privacy I’ve suffered. Using Facebook, Twitter, this blog are all conscious decisions that degrade my level of privacy, at varying levels. The Internet is shrinking the privacy bubble; we’ve all known that for a while, but how much smaller is it going to get? Could we possibly complete burst it?

RFID chips in national ID cards? ISPs logging all your purchases and shopping accounts to better know how to market to you? Patriot Act wiretapping, warrant-burning, Miranda rights stomping nonsense. There’s lots of ways our privacy is being curtailed. I’m not out to sound like a conspiracy theorist. One person I know would probably respond, “Who cares? The government doesn’t have any interest in you, you’re a speck of dust on the shelf.” It’s probably true, but shouldn’t privacy still be a principle to stand up for? A right to be protected? And like I said before, that right is almost completely gone for major celebrities who have to live with people trying to hack their cell phones for pictures or text messages, whether incriminating or not. Average standing citizens might not be far behind, and that bothers me.

Now, about Joseph Lieberman. I never liked this half-wit from the start. Sorry to be tooting my own horn, but I wanted this guy gone from the Senate years ago. This is the same knucklehead who thinks that Congress should get to decide what music you listen to, what movies you watch, & what video games you’re allowed to play. Apparently American government is knowledgeable enough about art to dictate what’s tolerable, but they can’t run a health care insurance racket? I know they’re completely different subjects, but that logic just does not add up to me.

In reality, I haven’t been following the health care debate/issue/hodgepodge/catastrophe in great detail. I’m not very invested in the discussion, to be truthful. But I can’t miss out on a chance to bash on my Most Hated Senator, Mr. Lieberman. Nevertheless, if you want to know what I think about health care (and you obviously do if you read this freakin’ blog!), I think the public option should happen. My general logic for this is, if people get sick, they die. Or, they miss work, or they under perform at work. Or they can’t take care of their children. Then the economy suffers as a whole. That’s disgustingly simplistic, I’ll admit.

So let me look at it a completely new way. I understand the exchange of commerce is vital to our society’s stability, but what are some things we don’t charge for, or charge very minimal for? The examples that come to mind, for me, are breathable air & water. Another thing we provide that we don’t pay much for (compared to what it costs) is military protection. Why is it we don’t pay a fee to the military, but we have to pay for a little round white dot that cures headaches or infections or whatever? Yeah, I know what you’re going to say: taxes. Well taxes pay for lots of other things than military.

Health care is expensive, but so are Hollywood film productions. James Cameron just spent $300+ million on a movie. But when it comes out tomorrow, people are going to be paying an average of about $9 a ticket to see it. You can make significant investments, as a company, and still keep prices at the consumer level low and affordable and still make it profitable. Looking at the same industry, Sony Pictures & Terry Gilliam aren’t going to charge $30 a ticket for “The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus” to make up for the fact that only a third (or less) of the people who saw “Avatar” will see their film. And they even spent less money making “Parnassus.” But yet health care companies, hospitals, insurance companies, whoever are going to charge more for a certain procedure or prescription just because this treatment gets used less often than a dose of Tylenol or a swift slap on the back?

If anything, allow me to use a purely Pathos-based argument: America touts itself as the greatest, most prolific, most well-to-do country in the world, but we let our citizens die every day of treatable, curable disease just because they don’t have the financial means necessary to line the pockets of hoggish health insurance companies. That idea just sickens me to think about it.