Political Theater

On national news, you hear a lot these days about raising the debt ceiling. Since Reagan entered office in 1980, the debt ceiling – the amount the U.S. government is permitted to borrow to pay off its debts – has been raised 39 times. It was raised 17 times under Reagan, four times under Clinton’s administration, and  seven times under Bush’s watch.

In ten days, the ceiling must be raised again or the U.S. government defaults on what it owes to its creditors. Obama has said that if this happens, Social Security and Medicare payments will STOP.

Really?

Baby Boomers are defined as though who were born between 1946 and 1964. Those boomers who are 62 years of age and older are allowed to collect social security. So that means people born between 1946-1951, may be drawing SS. That’s a lot of boomers.  In the sixties, war was the primary focus that galvanized the boomers.  Mixed into this revolution was music, pot, sex, and a profound dissatisfaction with the status quo.

But watch what will happen if Social Security checks stop. If Medicare payments stop. You think the Sixties were revolutionary? It’s going to look like child’s play if Boomers take to the streets to protest the end of Social Security and Medicare. Many of these Boomers now own guns. Many of them are accustomed to a particular lifestyle that includes that SS check, that Medicare payment. Many of them understand how to manipulate and navigate the system. They vote, they are vocal, they will be deeply frustrated as the woman in the photo above, and somewhere in their memories the sixties continues to whisper to them, prompting them to take action, to get involved.

Perhaps the economic collapse of the U.S. – and, therefore, of the rest of the world, as the pundits predict  – is how the new paradigm is ushered in. I remember a passage from one of Whitley Strieber’s books about a vision he experienced in which he and his wife, Anne, were plucking walnuts from a bush or tree so they would have something to eat.

Will it come to that? Must it come to people going hungry, desperate for food and shelter, for the paradigm to shift? It might.

All this political theater boils down to this: the Republicans do not want you and I to have affordable health care. They don’t want this because it’s the signature of Obama’s administration. It really has nothing to do with us, the people. If they can force Obamacare – the Affordable Health Care Act – to fail, then Obama fails as a president and that supposedly raises their status in the eyes of voters.

John Boehner, the speaker of the house, is the most ineffective leader ever, in the history of Congress. He claims he doesn’t have the votes to bring this issue to the floor of the house. How do we know that? C’mon, Boehner, bring the vote to the floor. Let’s see where things really stand. You don’t have anything to lose – even if you’re voted out as speaker or as a congressman, you’ll still have your pension, your status as an ex-speaker, and oh yes, your health care.

Ten days and counting…tick tock, tick tock.