Jeremiah Tolbert

You may have noticed that I don’t blog much any­more except to share the occa­sional pic­ture or pile of links.  When I do blog, it’s typ­i­cally a very short entry about some other project I’ve done.  If you look back at my old blog, you’ll find a very dif­fer­ent blog­ger.  What changed?

When I built this site, I built it with the inten­tion of being a pro­fes­sional.  I was going to con­duct myself in the most pro­fes­sional way pos­si­ble, try­ing not to ever com­plain, and intend­ing for my entries to be some­thing of sub­stance, rather than fluff.  The truth is that there are a mil­lion inter­est­ing blog­gers out there.  I got tired of just adding to the noise with my inane bab­bling.  I decided that I wouldn’t say any­thing if I didn’t feel that it was some­thing truly interesting.

I’ve done this before in my fic­tion writ­ing too.  I resolved to only write the best things I could. In both sit­u­a­tions, the real result has been that I don’t write much of any­thing at all.

There are two ways I could choose to look at this.  One is that I sim­ply don’t have any­thing pro­found or inter­est­ing to say.  I imag­ine a few of my friends would agree to this if pressed on it.  The other way is that when you put pres­sure on your­self to only do great things, then you sti­fle your­self so much that you don’t do any­thing at all.  Rather than attempt­ing to do the best you can, you set the expec­ta­tion of doing bet­ter than you can, which doesn’t just hap­pen.  You do bet­ter than you usu­ally can by doing lots and lots and some­times hav­ing a breakthrough.

I’m going through a rather early mid-​​life cri­sis right now.  Probably an accu­rately mid-​​life given the aver­age lifes­pan of men in my fam­ily.  I’ve been laid off from two jobs in the last year.  The last one was a job I thought I could do for a very long time.  It gave me pre­cisely the free­doms I wanted from an employer, and while the stress was at times rather high, I didn’t feel trapped in the posi­tion, which was a wel­come change after some of the jobs I’ve worked.

I’ve toyed with try­ing to go free­lance writer/​designer/​photographer, given that my wife pro­vides our insur­ance now.  Again, I have to set these goals aside because it falls upon me to pro­vide our insur­ance ben­e­fits so that Sarah can go to school full time to receive her teach­ing degree.  This will pro­vide her with great ben­e­fits and a ful­fill­ing career.  I’m in full sup­port of it.  It just means that ulti­mately, I _​have_​ to get another job. Which I have been look­ing for, of course, but the pres­sure wasn’t on then like it is now.

The health sys­tem in this coun­try is pri­mar­ily respon­si­ble for killing my entre­pre­neur­ial spirit.  If you go ANY period of time with­out health insur­ance in the U.S., all of your med­ical con­di­tions become labeled “prex­ist­ing” which means that when you DO get health insur­ance, they won’t cover any­thing they think you were sick from before you got cov­er­age.  And even if you have insur­ance, and apply for pri­vate insur­ance, you get turned down.  Why?  Because you have prex­ist­ing con­di­tions and they would actu­ally have to spend money on your health. The only peo­ple who qual­ify for med­ical cov­er­age are those who are so healthy they don’t need it.

No mid­dle class American can afford basic med­ical neces­si­ties like pre­scrip­tions with­out health insur­ance.  I have to take a cou­ple of med­ica­tions every day.  For instance, I take an acid reflux med­ica­tion.  Without it, I become rather vio­lently ill.  Imagine throw­ing up in you mouth.  Now imag­ine doing that all day long, for your entire life.  That’s my acid reflux.  There’s no cure.  All I can do is take lit­tle pills the rest of my life so my stom­ach acids don’t boil over and give me throat cancer.

Me and the stom­ach don’t get along very well thanks to this.

With insur­ance, these pills cost me $20 a month.  Reasonable.  It prob­a­bly costs the man­u­fac­turer 25 cents to make a month’s worth.  However, should I go with­out health insur­ance, that same pre­scrip­tion becomes around $300 a month.

I take a generic, which shall remain name­less.  It’s $10 a month on a health insur­ance plan.  Without insur­ance, it’s $150 a month.

To put this in per­spec­tive, I lived in the ground floor of a small house with two very cramped bed­rooms and a liv­ing room which can barely take a couch and a TV at the same time.  My rent is $1000 a month.  If I were to not have health insur­ance, two of my pre­scrip­tions would be equal to nearly half my rent.

And that’s not even tak­ing con­sid­er­a­tion of Sarah’s med­ica­tions for asthma.

Even with­out the risk of cat­a­strophic health issues that could cost hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars to be treated, just basic health main­te­nance stuff, the stuff that makes me not vomit blood all day and makes sure that Sarah can breathe would put us on the street.  We’re two intel­li­gent, col­lege edu­cated adults, and we’d be forced to choose between pay­ing the rent and pay­ing for our med­ica­tions.  And because I don’t like the taste of stom­ach acid, I would prob­a­bly choose homelessness.

Good qual­ity of health should be a fun­da­men­tal right.  I would gladly pay more in taxes if they burned our med­ical sys­tem to the ground and replaced it with one that didn’t have out­ra­geous rules of prex­ist­ing con­di­tions.  I’ll PAY for insur­ance.  Do you hear me, you con­ser­v­a­tive lib­er­tar­ian ass­holes?   But the sys­tem is flawed, and it’s keep­ing me from build­ing amaz­ing things.  Countless oth­ers are chained to jobs they hate, filled to the brim with ideas for ways to change the world, busi­nesses to launch, but they can’t leave their employer for fear of  trip­ping and break­ing a toe and receiv­ing a $5000 emer­gency room bill.

Our sys­tem crip­ples us finan­cially.  It’s either be crip­pled phys­i­cally or give up every­thing to pay the bills.

If you don’t believe in uni­ver­sal health­care, if you think all peo­ple don’t deserve it, then fuck you.  Fuck you, fuck you, FUCK YOU.  I hope you lose your job and then have a health prob­lem and your COBRA insur­ance is more than half your unem­ploy­ment pay­ments so you can’t afford it.  I hope your child devel­ops a cough late at night that won’t go away, and you lie awake in your bed lis­ten­ing to it, doing the math over and over again about how you can pay for a doctor’s visit and still feed the fam­ily.  FUCK YOU.  You have no human­ity and I hope you con­tract leprosy.

So to answer the title in my post above?  Why so silent?  Because I’m so angry, when I start to write, this is what comes out.  I’m so angry with the world right now, all I want to do is scream with rage at every­one around me.  Capitalism has failed us and the coun­try is crum­bling all around us and some ass­hole on TV is whip­ping up fury directed at peo­ple who got raped by uneth­i­cal bankers who might get some help so they don’t have to live in a fuck­ing card­board box.  That man is a pop­ulist piece of shit.  Many of us are angry right now, so angry that I worry about what hap­pens when some­one comes along and finds a way to tap into that anger for power.  Power derived from the anger of the peo­ple is too dan­ger­ous for even good men and women to wield.  It back­fires every time.  It ends with streets slick with blood and heads in bas­kets.  With peo­ple lined up with gun bar­rels to the backs of their skulls.   I don’t want that in my future.

I just want to set out on my own and inno­vate and cre­ate a busi­ness with­out hav­ing the taste of stom­ach acid in my mouth from dawn to dusk.  That’s all I want.

I’m done being “pro­fes­sional” here.  I’ll cre­ate a new pro­fes­sional per­sona else­where.   Because if I don’t find an out­let for my frus­tra­tion, I will burn up like a microwaved potato in tin foil.  I’m not going to be quiet any­more.  If that keeps you from hir­ing me for a job, then I didn’t want to work for you anyway.

The Angry Bastard is back.