Thursday, November 06, 2008

Reading Other People’s Blog Comments Can Be Hazardous To Your Health

I’m behind on my blog reading, have been for quite some time.  I just don’t feel like reading about other people’s lives like I used to, nor do I feel like participating in other people’s lives like I used to.  The last couple of years have been a learning experience - some people I like far more than I used to (yeah, I can’t figure out how to say what I want to say without ending in “to”), and some people, far, far, far less.  Anyway, I was reading Dooce’s blog - she’s generally pretty entertaining, her dogs are cute, and I usually like the commenters.  However, I read a couple of entries that alternated between terrifying me, depressing me, shocking me and making me angry.  Let me rephrase that sentence - the comments from the entries are what had my head spinning, not the entries themselves.  The comments that terrified me were in the blog entry that she wrote about John McCain and his sarcastic air quotes when referring to abortions that are done to protect women’s health.  There were so many women in the comments who didn’t seem to have a problem with him mocking the health of women who needed abortions because being pregnant could cost them their lives.  Ick, and the number of women who were willing to vote for Sarah Palin, probably the most unqualified and unintelligent running mate in presidential election history, was scary.  Sarah Palin makes Dan Quayle seem like Albert Einstein.  Reading the comments made me afraid that Obama was going to lose…and I was reading the comments a day after he was already elected.

Those comments weren’t the worst, it was the really depressing/scary comments were regarding Dooce’s hypothetical question of whether people would give money to feed starving children, if it also meant giving money to a crack addict.  The number of people who completely lack an ounce of compassion is stunning.  There were a bunch of dumb comments about giving a “hand up, instead of handout” and teaching a person to fish, blah, blah, blah, as if getting someone job training was going to help them feed their children tonight.  Also, there were lots of comments about people needing to just get jobs or fend for themselves or people who made up wild scenarios that had the crackhead getting high and killing the children that you were trying to feed.  These people seemed to not understand the concept of the “working poor” or the fact that record numbers of people are losing their jobs through no fault of their own or that some people have medical bills that have them living from paycheck to paycheck.

Here is an example of the compassion from someone named Katie, “Any children involved do deserve help which is why they should be given to a family who can take care of them properly. People who lose their jobs just need to find new ones. People who get sick should have taken better care of themselves. I don’t believe in that “bad things happen to go[sic] people” crap. People should exercise the control they have over their lives and stop whining!”  I hate to say it, but my first thought was that I would wish her a terrible painful illness, a lost job and hundreds of resumes sent out without getting a single interview, and no health insurance, leading to her need the generous charity and compassion of others.  My second thought was, that’s a terrible way to think and I shouldn’t wish for bad things to happen to someone solely because they were born without a heart.  I’ve got to imagine that for someone to get to the point of having little compassion for their fellow human beings, they really must be miserable.  Nonetheless, she wasn’t the only one who expressed thoughts like that.  She had lots of company.  It was depressing to see how many people would let kids starve (hypothetically) just because they were either so intent on wanting to make sure that a crack addict didn’t get a day’s worth of crack on their dime or that they just didn’t want to help someone if they didn’t have to.  Of course, this is the same group of commenters who had someone in their midst who posted this:“I’m sorry, but NO where in the history of the US does it say, we DESERVE health care. Why do democrats think that everyone is entitled? It’s a judgement call… If you work hard you earn the right, it’s not just to be given to everyone. NO guarantees in life baby… ps… I am unemployed with NO insurance and still believe this to be. Also, my mom died from heart failure because she stopped taking her high blood pressure medicine because she thought she couldn’t afford it any longer. Her fatal flaw was not asking for help from her family, but never did she think she should be just GUARANTEED health care from the universe. She wasn’t a martyr either.  

Ack, someone who doesn’t think we deserve heath care, that we only deserve to be taken care of if we have money.  Someone whose mother died due to lack of medical care.  I’m sorry, but that’s just stupid.  No one deserves free cosmetic botox or free stripper-sized breast enhancements, but we ALL deserve basic health care, whether or not we’re fortunate enough to have a good job or to have inherited money or to have won the lottery; in fact, those of us who can’t afford health care are the ones who deserve it the most - rich people can afford to buy it.  Maybe we should split the country in two, and us “bleeding heart liberals” will pay more taxes, but our children (gee, I think this and I don’t even have any kids, what a wacky liberal I am) will all have health care and a good education because we think everyone is deserving.  Our country will have lower infant mortality rates, better health care, a longer life expectancy, and on and on.  How strange to want all those things that lead to a better & happier life.  Here’s a study that shows that we’re definitely on the wrong track as far as health care goes.  The commenter from Dooce’s blog can continue to not get health care because she can’t afford it, but I want my friends and family to get the health care that they need, not the health care that they can afford.

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1. Reading similar comments in other blogs also make me feel the way you do.  Don’t get me wrong, there are really some cases where your own will is the only thing getting in the way of success, but that’s not 100% true.  There are always things that are beyond an individual’s control, and that’s what makes the difference between “poverty” and being poor. (I also discussed this issue in my post for Blog Action Day here: http://frugalpinoy.com/misc/is-poverty-really-a-choice/)

   I told Rose earlier today that some people living in the first world (or even upper-middle class people in the third world) should live in impoverished areas in the third world for a couple of years to see what it’s really like to not have access to basic health care, education, and the other things you said.  Without experiencing it first hand, I don’t think these people will ever understand it.

   I say a couple of years and not a couple of days (or weeks) because the latter would only lead to photographs with captions and out-of-touch suggestions on what should be done to improve the quality of life of poor people.

   celine  on  11/07  at  06:13 AM

2. Some of those Dooce readers are CRAZY. I’d be terrified too, reading some of those comments. I really think that, whether or not they know it, those people who make compassion-free comments are really just terrified to let in the idea that it (losing jobs, getting sick, being a crack addict) could happen to them.

   roro  on  11/07  at  03:07 PM

3. Great rant.  People like that have no idea what they’re talking about.  Maybe that kind of reaction comes from fear.  If your problems are all your fault because (hypothetical) you made bad decisions or you’re lazy or whatever, then those bad things can’t possibly happen to me.  We all need and deserve a safety net in terms of healthcare and income loss.  When people can understand that tax-funded healthcare benefits everybody, not just those other (lazy, uneducated, un-American, bad-choice-choosing) people, we’ll be living in a much better place.  (I think it’s called Sweden, actually.)

   Nancy  on  11/07  at  08:27 PM

4. Yup. You said it.

   laurie  on  11/09  at  09:21 PM

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