I’m one of millions of priority candidates for a Covid vaccine. I can’t get one because American health care is broken.
Ignorant racists are storming government with lies and getting attention. When will you and I flood the streets peacefully for truth?
Mine is the same story as that of millions of us:
The city and state where I live, forced to come up with their own vaccination system during a lethal pandemic because we have no federal health care system for a nation of 300 million people, notified me that I could sign up for an email alert for when vaccine appointments would be available for residents in my ward of the city.
I did. Two weeks later I heard that the vaccination in my Ward had happened. I’d received no alert.
So I got proactive. I learned on my own when my next window would be. That morning when the portal opened I jumped on it and started filling out my application. It crashed.
I tried again. It told me all appointments had now been taken.
I had already been warned by a very nice, honest Covid hotline worker that the system was a mess and that she was nearly as in the dark as I am about what to do. She advised me, truthfully, to just keep calling and checking the website and see what it says.
My own conscientious and caring doctor, exasperated, basically told me the same thing.
I’m advantaged, in a prosperous neighborhood in the richest country in the world, a nation that has had nearly a year to wield its vast resources against catastrophe. But health care for me, and for you, is broken.
Polls continually show that a large majority of Americans want a national system of free government healthcare paid for by our taxes.
But the private health insurance industry uses campaign donations to bribe federal politicians to ignore this strong public desire. So we’re stuck with crazily exorbitant health coverage (if we have any at all) that uses scams like yearly “deductibles” to avoid giving us the coverage we buy.
It’s been like this for decades. We citizens know it. Most of us hate it.
We do nothing.
Meanwhile, for a year, hordes of Americans who believe an autocrat’s racist lies on social media have stormed state capitols with guns, threatened governors with death, swarmed the streets screaming lies about a stolen election, carried out a U.S. Capitol siege that killed five people, and have scared nearly every Republican senator in the country into pretending to agree with them.
In other words, the whacked-out cult members get noticed. Because they act.
But the truth-based, law-abiding citizens get ignored. While a pandemic decimates us. Because we do nothing.
Why do we sit here — like me right now, typing this to you — instead of acting?
We could fill the streets. We could walk outside (masked), and sit down (socially distant) on the pavement in the streets of every major city in America and refuse to get up. Millions of us. Shutting down the entire country.
We could do that every day for a week or a month, and fundamentally change everything about America: our spectacular racial double standard for policing; our deadly joke of a health care system; our ridiculous minimum wage; our near-vertical tilt of income that slides practically all the money to the rich; our cash-driven campaign system that ensures that only people with money can shape public policy.
We can do this. Today. Or tomorrow afternoon.
Any time now, we can step outside, together, and do it.
But we don’t.
When will we?
I am asking myself. I am asking you.
When?