The efforts to either get rid of the Affordable Care Act or make it useless have picked up lately. As usual all I can think about is myself. Me, me, me.
One respected magazine published a list of about 50 medical conditions that insurers could soon regard as pre-existing conditions, justifying much higher premiums, and selfish me had to go through and count all the pre-existing conditions I have.
Let’s see, arthritis, mental disorders including this one and that one. Obesity? What does that mean, obesity? Skip that. Acid reflux, asthma, heartburn, high cholesterol (both kinds, good and bad).
That’s at least seven. If each one doubles my premiums, I’ll be paying 128 times what “normal” people pay for insurance.
Who are these people who don’t have any of these conditions?
My worst pre-existing condition: I personalize everything. It’s my worst flaw. No, it’s the worst flaw of any human being. If you personalize everything, too, that’s OK, because that’s you. It’s only horrible that I do it.
Stephen Hawking is now saying in a new BBC program that he was wrong when he said human beings have 1,000 years to find a new planet and leave Earth.
Now he says they have to get off Earth in about 100 years. And all I can think is, that’s not enough time to pack, and I don’t have any planet to go to yet, and I’ll never afford the movers. I’ll need at least an extra 30 years to save up for the space fare.
I’ll have to have a sleeping cabin. I can’t possibly fly coach in my condition.
What do you mean, I won’t have to worry because I’ll be dead by then? I’m going to be dead by then? It gets worse and worse!
Speaking of everything being about me, I’ve been noticing more and more these days that people are eating while walking down sidewalks, a thing I like to do.
In the past when I have chowed down on a hotdog or a cheeseburger while strolling along city sidewalks, I have been told I was rude to do so by total strangers, evidently authorities on what sidewalks are for.
I have often been told that I am rude, uncouth, socially maladjusted, improperly socialized or unfashionable, so I shouldn’t mind. But what if it’s true? What if I do deserve to be an outcast?
So I am thrilled to see that so many other people are eating while walking because that takes the pressure off me and I can go back to doing it without thinking about it.
Still, I find myself thinking, what’s going on here? Just for the sake of being ready for the next possible impact on my life, why are other people rudely eating on sidewalks?
And the only thing I can think of is that more and more people are taking advantage of food trucks and not eating in sit-down restaurants, because the restaurants charge too much.
And why do they charge too much? Because they can, because the city has too few places to sit down, people pay just for that.
So if you don’t feel like you can afford to spend money just to sit down to eat, you buy food at a food truck and you eat it while you walk back to work. Or wherever.
So, to recap (this has been going on for years): Seattle has done away with all sorts of amenities that I liked, such as benches and public toilets. Restaurants took advantage of that and made themselves the places to get treated right.
Fewer and fewer of us can afford that good treatment all the time. Especially those of us with pre-existing conditions who require tons of meds that eat up our disposable income.
So now the sidewalks are full of arthritic, asthmatic, mentally ill wheezers with mouths full of tacos, burritos and pork jowl sandwiches, stoking their chronic heartburn and acid reflux, which require them to carry bags of meds with them everywhere they go. Pills that rattle as they walk to warn the others of their approach.
Finally I am fitting into society. At least until we are all evicted from the planet, I have become just like everyone else who has been made to feel they don’t belong here.
Dr. Wes Browning is a one time math professor and three times homeless. He has been involved with Real Change since he supplied the art for the first cover in November of 1994. This is his regular humor column, Adventures in Irony.
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