I hadn’t counted on the new Michael Moore movie affecting me so much. Sicko not only resolved my opinion of the US Healthcare system, it explained a lot about my self and left me emotionally exhausted.
To say that I’m a cynic would be an understatement, but like someone once said of being a cynic, it’s just a difficult way of seeing the truth. Even so, Sicko made me feel like all of my cynical thoughts had been too gentle, my conspiracy theories naïve and not far reaching enough.
The movie constructs a picture of social engineering on a grand scale, with the media obediently broadcasting propaganda designed to inoculate the average American to the idea of universal healthcare. The conclusions arrived at equate with nothing less than a corporate state working hard to provide as little health care as possible, to add loss of health coverage to the list of fears facing the average American worker. In this scenario, all corporate parties and their puppets on Capitol Hill benefit while the citizens of the US get fucked from every angle mercilessly and repeatedly.
Among the many revelations I had during and after the movie, the biggest was clarity of vision about myself. I’ve always avoided buying too deeply into the “American Dream,” the whole mortgage, marriage and kids trip that so many people think is the right and proper way to go about spending your time on this planet. I’ve always rejected it for so many reasons, not the least being the fact that the more you buy into it, the more it starts costing you your quality of life. Paying the mortgage, having benefits, taking care of the kids—they’re all things that employers know people need to worry about. I’ve never liked the idea of buying into a system based on fear.
Down deep I’ve always know that there was another way to do it. Down deep I knew that there was a Big Lie being told in order to keep a small group of people rich and in control. Universal healthcare is possible if your government isn’t handing all of your nation’s tax money over to defense contractors and oil companies.
They’re doing it in Europe, in Canada, even in Cuba. They have universal healthcare, their colleges are free, and they have social services to make sure nobody falls through the cracks of society. People give a shit about each other enough to make sure that the lowliest of citizens gets top notch care. It was hard to watch all these doctors and associated people smiling with the knowledge that they were being taken care of by their government in the most basic ways. It was hard because I envied them. It made me feel ashamed of my country and the way it’s decided to sell its citizens out to demons wearing suits. It made me angry that these corporate fucking assholes have done such a good job controlling the behavior of the American public. Like a national case of Helsinki Syndrome, the citizens of the US agree with its captors, believing that universal healthcare and education equates with communism.
The movie made me want to move to Canada. Or the United Kingdom. Or anywhere where I wasn’t going to have to worry about coming up with the money for the healthcare I will surely one day need. A quick look on the internet showed just how hard it would be to score a job anywhere else in the world with the meager skills I have. And then there are all the people that I love here that I would miss if I were to move to someplace else like Canada, or Britain.
Don’t get me wrong.
I’m not saying that the movie is perfect.
And I'm positive that it's not as easy to live in some of the countries Mike visits without already having some kind of money behind you. There are a couple of points where he’s just yanking heart strings.
But the fact remains that these people he’s talking about are real people.
They’re real stories about HMO’s fucking over the little people, letting them die or suffer in the name of saving a few bucks.
The tears are real and the problem has been brought on by greed at the highest levels of our government.
They’re slowly creating a prison state based on corporate rule, fear and lies about the rest of the world to keep us thinking
America is our only choice.
