What’s Truly Evil?

Immediately after I posted a link to “A Simple Solution to America’s Cop Problem,” an acquaintance wrote, “Wow, that's the most evil thing I've ever heard you propose.” First, I’d like to know what other “evil things” I’ve proposed. Second, I’d challenge the idea that this is evil in any way.

A nation that was so happy with bankrupting its citizens for medical debt that half of the 2016 voters elected someone who promised to return the country to the debtors’ indentured servitude we “enjoyed” before the ACA pretty much has a lock on evil. “More than a quarter of Americans say that someone in their household is struggling to pay medical debt” and that statement is from February 2017. Medical debt is the #1 cause of personal bankruptcy in the USA. And many Americans are happy with that statistic and the situation, apparently. I’d call that “evil.” In 2014, 40% of Americans were in debt for illness expenses. While the number of actual medical expense caused bankruptcies is often debated, for instance in Snopes.com, we all know it’s high and unreasonably, irrationally high. But the American Way is to never allow public interest to interfere with corporate profit, so we effectively don’t care. That is, also, evil. The Republican healthcare plan originally called “RomneyCare”—and renamed by the racist assholes masquerading as libertarians, conservatives, and other forms of fascism as “ObamaCare”—actually succeeded in reducing medical bankruptcies, so they want to get rid of it. Also, evil.

If you are bright enough to understand that the nation is willing to let people with physically identifiable diseases and injuries die and be tortured on their way out with a middle-class wealth extraction system that bubbles-up a lifetime of savings and responsible behavior to the idle and destructive 1% investment class it should be perfectly clear to you that any help, sympathy, or compassion for mental health illness is so far past non-existent that it isn’t even imaginary. At best, pseudo-conservatives offer prayers and other superstitious hoodoo as substitutes for actual assistance after a chronically depressed person either breaks down and falls into the black hole of our incompetent and ruthless mental health system or locates the final exit. Cancer patients are expected to continue work through their chemo and radiation therapy to pay for their insurance and mental health patients are expected to rise above their failing brain chemistry and heal themselves. “Work or go broke and die” is the national healthcare motto. That is also evil.

The fact is, this country’s “mental healthcare” is an oxymoron, at best. You can peel back all of the suicide prevention advertising bullshit to find absolutely nothing behind those billboards. The fact is that mental health problems are not only ignored but criminalized in the US. We not only don’t care about people suffering with depression, neurosis, and psychosis, we want to make a profit from their misery. “Cure,” my ass. For most mental health patients there isn’t even a lick of hope for relief. Even the industry admits most-or-all of the prescribed medications and therapies are unproven to be in any way effective.

The other side of my proposal, which was written as a cynical science fiction “solution” to a problem I believe this country will never become adult enough to admit, was to “assist” cops in finding appropriate victims. Many US cities have turned their police departments into armed tax collectors, disguised as something else. Ferguson, Missouri, for example, has a police department the Washington Post described as a “plundering collection agency. (Please follow and read this link. If it doesn’t break your heart, you don’t have one.)” That police department so terrorized the citizens of the city to the point that any sort of police interaction could result in a citizen being hauled off to jail, fined for a variety of insane charges, tossed back on the street even further in debt to the city, fined into unemployment and homelessness, and harassed to the point that even a glance from a cop could result in a totally rational desire to run for safety. Which, of course, gave the cop justification for firing at will because everyone knows a person running for the cops must have committed a crime and probably scared the cop out of his half-wits.

Last year, suicide rates in the US jumped to a 30-year high. On average, about 40,000 Americans commit suicide every year and that number has been fairly constant for decades. That number is also pretty close to the fatality rate of a Vietnam War every year.

Citizens-killed-by-cop numbers are not accurate or complete because state and local departments do not report all police shooting information and some federal agencies, like the Border Patrol, do not provide complete information, but at the least police kill about 1,000 citizens every year. It’s pretty obvious that many cops would like to be free to kill a lot more people. With all of that as background, add to it the fact that millons more Americans have had about all of this life they can stand. If we’re not going to fix any of the country’s healthcare and policing problems, we might as well find a way to blend the two dysfunctions into the best stupid solution we can manage.

And that is exactly what “A Simple Solution to America’s Cop Problem” was all about. Do I think it’s an ideal solution? What? Are you stupid? Of course it isn’t ideal, but I’m just working with the poor material I’ve been handed. Likewise, do I think launching the world’s idiots into space in a marketing campaign like that described in “The Marching Morons” is the solution to the constant down-breeding of the human race that has been practiced in the flyover US states and most of the world’s various theocratic nations for the last 500 or more years? Well, maybe.