Healthcare Reform: Vaseline Is Your Co-Pay

The Harry Reid-Nancy Pelosi love affair continues. Both are set to convene behind closed doors, without GOP representation present, to hammer out what will be a Frankenstein’s monster of healthcare reform, cobbled together by the bits and pieces of the respective Senate and House bills. An overhaul that is opposed by half the American population, yet trumpeted as a majority mandate by the two. Are they under the delusion that “red state” Americans simply vanished once Democrats won the White House and gained control of Congress?

Democrats Set To Exclude GOP From Final Health Care Deliberations

This is not government by the people, for the people or of the people. Instead, it is government nefariously conducted by a few politicians in the back halls and secluded rooms of the Capitol, to the exclusion of anyone opposed to their ideas and self-anointed mandate. On an issue as expansively significant as healthcare reform, such partisan politics is an ill that will kill the patient – the United States of America.* Once the Reid-Pelosi cabal pushes their bill through, taxpayers and providers alike will pay the burden with its implementation. And there will be no government-issued Vaseline to soothe the pain.

In Health Bill For Everyone, Provisions For A Few

Coal in America’s Stocking

*Operative word:  “United”

©2010 Steve Sagarra

Let Slip the Dogs of War

Am I missing something? What good does it do to re-examine security procedures and install full body scanners, à la Total Recall, at U.S. airports to stop terrorists on inbound international flights? Certainly, these measures, in theory, are an attempt to thwart another 9/11, and to present the appearance of addressing the safety concerns of American citizens. However, this is backward thinking at a time when the need exists to think progressively, if not aggressively, of the future unthinkable act. Apparently, it is our allies abroad who need to step up their security – or maybe, at the very least, check the terrorist watch list – to prevent the terrorists from boarding planes in the first place. No passport? No luggage? Hello, red flag calling Amsterdam!

What really needs to be realized is that al Qaeda is indoctrinating and training the next generation of kamikaze bombers. Like their WWII Japanese counterparts, their mission is simple: demoralize our will to fight. Similarly, it says something else – al Qaeda is desperate, knowing they are on the verge of defeat despite their best efforts. The Japanese unleashed the kamikaze upon the Allies out of such desperation, as a last gasp at victory out of the clutches of their eventual defeat. And like that time, there is only one response: perseverance. Only through perseverance can we do what is necessary to win, unleashing hell upon our enemy as no time before. We have the might, and we have the resources. As such, knowing the desperate measures to which the terrorists are resorting, it is time, as even Shakespeare knew in his day, to "cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war."

Otherwise, what are we fighting for? 

©2009 Steve Sagarra

Light Up the Darkness

The cry calling for an end to tyranny and oppression has been expressed considerably throughout history, almost to the point of saturation. Mankind has gone “once more unto the breach” so often, marching off to war in search of a world without such conditions, that it seems a continuously hollow crusade. Eventually, perhaps inevitably, new generations of “band of brothers” consistently revisit the Jungian conflict of man’s duality. How many rousing speeches, how many campaigns and how many lives has, and will it take, until the sentiment indefinitely holds?

According to several sources – Mayans, Nostradamus – humanity is exactly three years from the end of days, a foreboding “Age of Apocalypse.” Curiously, neither source specifically mentions the world ending, each predicated more upon a major change to the world as we know it. Whether this change will indeed be an apocalyptic event or a revelatory revolution is anyone’s guess. In either case, the real question is will we be prepared when it occurs.

Nonetheless, the problem lies in molding that “brave new world” before casting off the impediments of the old:  humanity’s insatiable malevolence notwithstanding its own destruction. Certainly, a scan of any particular day's headlines give no indication of that happening any time soon; rather, they are evidence of history’s sadly repetitive theme. Until that time when we do, we will never truly “light up the darkness” as Marley implores us.

©2009 Steve Sagarra