I’m
no expert on baseball. Really. I know who Bob Murphy and Ralph Kiner were, but
unlike a globe full of sports enthusiasts, I’m game illiterate. However, there is one very basic principle
about the cherished sport that I’ve learned only from the resigned disillusions
of elders at the end of their worn-out theoritic conversations: It’s not a game anymore.
That
one returning truth is a disrespectful reality that will spray any enjoyable
sports discussion to death on contact like Raid. The best athletes, the most colorful
managers, the greatest writers and broadcasters, none will dissolve the
piercing reality it all seeks to blanket.
It may seek to entertain and engage, and it had better. But it’s
certainly not an honest game, the organic creation it once was well more than a
century ago.
Food
in these United States is no different.
To hear the historians tell it, bread didn’t exactly begin as some synthetic
biochemical sponge in a plastic bag, ingestion of which can lead almost
immediately to various stomach and autoimmune conditions. But there is in fact a reason the product
today successfully exists in name as an almost entirely non-food-based product
on every store shelf in the country.
The
earliest television programs gracing the earliest wooden-housed tubes in the
late 1940s in the U.S, mostly along the East Coast, where signals were very
much alive, were the only offerings the founding communes could invent: Live,
original dramatic creations, stage plays made exclusively for television. Some of the greatest American 20th
century drama saw it’s premiere on those screens, and would be further
immortalized in silver-screen adaptations.
Within a year or two however, as the medium advanced, along with
audience size, the drama anthologies were eradicated and replaced by
predictable little numbers, neatly timed and produced film productions on the
Hollywood lots, action and adventure movies in convenient prime-time increment
formats. You wouldn’t hear the name
Paddy Chaefsky again for twenty-five years, when he’d surface as the
screenwriter for an acerbic satire called Network.
The
string tying all these historic ornaments is the coaxial cable that binds our
nation: The Industrial Complex. And why
should it begin and end with the arts..?
How about our health..?
Of
course, to say that our personal health has been arbitrarily farmed out to
profit-seeking industry is probably kind of hyperbole. We generally in this day and age however tend
to misuse the term “health” as an abbreviation for what we’ve been trained to
rely upon in our modern culture, which is “health care”.
In
itself, that’s a term too broad to instantly analyze, except to readily
acknowledge the fact that we don’t own it. It’s long been made clear to us American
civilians that in no unconditional way are we ever to be in command of our personal
and intimate health effectively, without the arbitrary aid of what we can now
call the Health Care Industrial Complex.
How
long has this been going on..? Well, let’s
go back to early civilization and see if we can trace it. The Greek societies of B.C, the ones we read
about, but no one’s great grandparents were quite around to live in, were presumably
not too unhealthy. People ate only sparingly, subsisted on what we now define
as Mediterranean diets, little meat and plenty of Omega-3 based nuts and
vegetables. Most every citizen was in a trade or applied skill of some sort and
was actively building or creating every day, being physical and working up an
appetite they had no time or willingness to sit down and merely feed. Work and repetition-based inflammation and injury
meant therapy and occasionally some medical advice from the trusted
neighborhood sage, who likely maintained the plant-based tinctures and exercise
directives necessary to get the injured up off the bench post-haste.
Sure,
when I was a kid, we had hospitals, and they were full of patients, my folks
among them. But it wasn’t until somewhere
in the early 1990s that the essence of medications and illness talk moved from
the bedsides of the elderly into the enchanted land of prime-time television
continuity, full-time. That cherished landscape of cars, colas, shampoos and
fragrances, models in jeans and frozen-food jingles were now invaded by scrolls
of prescription fine-print and mysterious consonant-heavy medication names,
with no definition on what they do, except that you should “ask your doctor”.
The
iconic image of the American Male by the mid 90s was oddly no longer a slim-jeaned,
forest-headed contemporary. It was a
crew-cut, balding, overweight chap visibly beyond his years, clad in loose khakis
and a tent-size untucked plaid short-sleeved canvas top. He would often be seen in print ads in a
solitary tearfulness, the surrounding copy questioning if this is true sorrow,
or a testosterone crisis..? This, by the dawn of the Millenium, was the all-new
lasting paradigm.
What
drove the creation..? Supposedly an
abundance of convenience foods had rendered a society too fat, electronic
convenience leaving our constituency clinically unexercised, and a casino of mis-prescribed
ask-your-doctor pharmaceutical panaceas autoimmune deficient. But wherein was the benefit of this movement,
was it in fact premeditated, and who actually made out like bandits..?
Whatever
windfall came to the pharmas would ultimately lead to a run on the health care
industry….hard. Quiet voices would begin
to remind us that our own precious health begins only with our own proactive awareness
and practice. Hospitals and M.D.s alike
might stand by that philosophy, but they can’t enforce it. They can only treat what’s put before them,
and for that, the minibar gets rung up accordingly.
Enter
the Health Care Crisis. Unaffordable deductibles
put to people whose wage job-provided packages are leaving them with less and
less rent money in the bank each month. And those are the privileged ones.
Of
course, at a time like this, no one’s any different from anyone. If you want to stay alive, health care
coverage of any sort is a basic requirement, right..? In order to beat the fierce demons our
parents couldn’t slay, you need each and every annual test and exam, unconditionally. We’re not living in the Dark Ages
anymore. This isn’t 1959.
What
could possibly deter a health care subscriber, even one far behind the
eight-ball of affordability, with an unapproachably high four-figure annual deductible,
from indulging mightily in those preventative exams, that the insurance package
gallantly covers at one-hundred per cent…?
A friend of mine shared with me her reluctance based upon one
significant and immediate economic factor:
Were anything untoward to be discovered or arbitrarily acted upon as a
result of said preventative, the coverage ends right then and there. Let the out-of-pocked deductible begin. She said it was just unaffordable right
now. Hence, prevention loses out to the
economic caution of fear.
But
at least however, she does have health care.
What would she do without it…? I never really questioned that postulate
until I learned the stats on just how many middle-incomers in the cities have
in recent years been all but forced to forgo health care coverage entirely, in
the wake of Obamacare laws. The very
provision the old laws were meant to provide people with for their own good
managed to fail and haywire into a movement eradicating that provision for
many. Many of these folks will manage to
save a few bucks until of course something serious flares up, or an injury
happens. And when it does, the payout
will probably amount to little more than the deductible costed to the friend of
theirs with their job’s health plan.
Hence,
at the skyrocketing rates we’re seeing now, supposedly the result of laws, lobbies,
corporate buyouts and payouts, political war games, malpractice suits, NASDAQ
indexes, and people having to simply pay their rent and utilities (Food..?
There’s plenty of banks around, and good neighbors never let their brethren and
their children go hungry….it’s perhaps the last vestige of civilized society we
know, and thank God for it..), perhaps this trendy, industrial product known as
Health Care isn’t necessarily as critical to our lives as coffee or social
media, and just may be on it’s way to becoming the bourgeois, boutique item the
print and online ads make the providers out to be, handsome and attractive
young practitioners beaming through their medical-blue scrubs, just waiting to caress
your panicked arrythmia. A return to the
truly proactive society held by the primitive Greek cities may be our educated destination. We might even get to the theater a little
more often for some good entertainment.
And see a ball game. The real
kind. Without analytics. That’ll go back into the schools, where it belongs.
Noah F.
