The Alternative

By: 
Fritz Groszkruger

Honor Him
 
     On the way home from the Hampton Municipal Airport where we were loading cover crop seed onto an Air Tractor, I tuned into NPR for an alternative to, uh I’m not sure what; 10 second news stories?
     There was a young gal on there complaining about “old white men wanting to control my health care.” She said, “Planned Parenthood is so much more than abortion.” From the phony conservative from National Review to the regular leftists of NPR, they were all aghast at the prospect of a government shutdown.
     It is mighty disconcerting to know that the vast majority of Americans now believe they don’t have enough stake in their world to take care of it themselves. They would rather foist their own health care off on some faceless unaccountable blob funded by old white men with no say in how their money is spent. Well guess what? Accountability only comes from a refusal to pay or a return for further service.
     It is presumptuous of this girl to expect something for nothing when those old white men have no control over her lifestyle. How are they supposed to control costs when they don’t even know this person?
     I hope this is a simple enough explanation of why medical costs have gone through the roof. By the way, I finally found a statistic on spending of Medicare that seems to indicate the tip of a huge iceberg: about 30 percent of all Medicare spending goes to patients in the final six months of life. I have yet to find Medicare as a percentage of total health care spending. Let me know. Anyone who blames the free market for high medical costs should note, there hasn’t been a free market in medicine since 1965. It is time to abandon a failed system, not expand or protect it.
     On to a trivial break from life and death struggles, for fun. What morons we are for thinking government should have anything to say in who signs a marriage contract. What a waste of a courtroom, the air conditioning, the walls, the security guards, all of it. If this woman doesn’t want to do her job she should seek employment elsewhere. But that is a minor issue compared to why taxpayers forgo a steak dinner or shoes for their kids to humor this woman. The case should never have been heard or the county clerk’s time wasted issuing marriage licenses.
     Travis’ most important point in last week’s column on Kim Davis is this: As long as we haggle over details relating to which liberty government can restrict instead of the restriction of any liberty at all, our liberties will be at risk as those who oppose our views use precedent we fought for against us. The line should be drawn at any government power, not which government power.
     Still heavy after all, eh? My friend Melba’s mention of “diligently watching news casts” immediately brought to mind one of my most influential books, “1984.” In it, the population is controlled through “telescreens,” now called newscasts. The world is kept in a perpetual state of war with slogans such as “WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY,” and “IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.” My stepmother often suggests I don’t know what is going on because we don’t watch TV news. I believe the opposite.
     At the risk of being branded as a part of the “blame America” crowd, I will instead doubt the actions of our politicians as being anywhere near the actions of the patriotic heroes they portend to be. In the recent string of foreign policy disasters, we see evidence that it must stop.
     Before the neo-cons thought they could either make the Middle East an oil colony or a democratic utopia, it was much more stable than it is now. Migrants were people too productive in the Middle Eastern culture so they fled to Western countries to better themselves (and the countries they adopted as their own). Now they flee for their lives. But have you noticed 90 percent of them are young males? Think of the possibilities, not that I am suggesting anything in particular.
     I would also not suggest that we not be vigilant in our relationship with Iran. But the tough guy posturing by so-called conservative pundits and politicians is just more newspeak showing they are in the pockets of oil interests and war profiteers. It has nothing to do with keeping America safe. To have such sweeping acts of war as we have perpetrated on Iran be based on some rhetoric so similar to our own, is not in keeping with a country guided by morality. The billions of dollars we are supposedly giving Iran was taken from them in the first place. Sanctions are an act of war in anyone’s book outside the Ministry of Truth.
     Like the gay wedding issue, the ultimate solution is to keep our noses out of other people’s business and reserve aggression for when it is warranted. Anything else creates more enemies and diminishes our ability to address a real crisis when it arrives.
     How all this relates to cover crops is this: The soil is a living thing. Any time it spends without cover kills some of the life in that soil. We take for granted God’s gift of life in so many ways. Unborn babies, Iranian people; they are all created by God. To destroy them is no way to honor Him.
     Any discussion relating to this column is welcome at 4selfgovernment@gmail.com, or you may be entertained with various posts at www.alternativebyfritz.com. A letter to the editor would help share your views with our community as I appreciate the efforts put forth by Melba.

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