Not god's gift to the world.

We Americans are idiots. Or at the very least, we put up with idiocy. For long, long times. Take slavery, for instance. We tolerated it from the founding of the nation. Until the Civil War. And even then, we didn’t eradicate it in practice. We had the Jim Crow treatment of blacks. Really lasted well into the 20th century. There are still subtle traces of it today. We must have known from Day 1 that slavery was immoral. A heinous crime against humanity. Equal to the Holocaust in the toll of human lives. Totally unsuitable in a self-proclaimed democracy. But yes, we’re idiots. Immoral idiots. We tolerated it. Made it part of our social fabric. Even today, we continue to be idiots. By denying ourselves universal health care. Because it might be too like socialism. Give me a break. We have a far less than adequate health care system because the private insurance companies want to make a killing. Obscene profits. And it doesn’t matter that 44,000 Americans die each year in large part because they don’t have health insurance. So they don’t get medical care. Doesn’t bother our consciences enough to do something significant and morally right about it. The Republicans want to leave the system pretty much just the way it is. Grossly inadequate. Yes, it’s idiocy. We have an idiotic America. We just traipse along. Twiddle our thumbs. Look the other way. And pretend we’re the finest nation on Earth. Believe me, we are not god’s gift to the world. –Jim Broede