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I suspect Obama said what he said, meant what he meant, and communicated what he communicated. Have a trio of tautological observations, if it please you. He spoke poorly and any rationalization of his statement is at best weak. If anything, it's simply an ingrained expression of materialism and evidence that society is post-moral. It probably speaks less about the man, his politics, or administration than the arguments you guys are having do about the fundamental disarray and gelatinous nature of contemporary existence. The United States is sick. The developed world is sick. We have an illness that we can buck. We live in a society that demands the strictest of determinism while science, knowledge, and instinct scream against the rigidity of our lives, desires, and deaths.
If you think success is only marginally dependent on the individual, you will never be successful. If you think the collective contribution of history and contemporaries dwarfs the individual, you will never understand contentment. And, finally, if you think such comparisons are objectively quantifiable without some sort of material reduction, you are willfully oblivious to the ultimate truth of existence: resources are finite; access to resources is more finite; and useful implementation of resources even more so.
Conversely, transactions generally require more than one party, although the parties involved may or may not always be a person. It's kind of curious to here a President demeaning hard work and sacrifice and whatever else it takes to be president, especially a demagogue such as Obama. It's a neat counter-rhetoric for Romney's marketing of Romney's investment and capital management achievements. Both are swords that cut both ways. Both can be manipulated, spun, interpreted ... and neither has substantive value or meaning. It's theatre, and Obama delivered a line poorly.
But we're talking about the fate of the free world and the death of America; we're talking about an unmentioned Depression; capital flight; war; insurgency; political neigh-saying; we're discussing the most important election ever in a country where every election has been the most important. The only things that have changed lie in the society which wills it way forward on gadgets, status, and commodity expressions of worth -- a society so predicated on external validation and social acceptance that we can't see the ludicrous reality of solving problems created by complex, bad policy by introducing more complex, bad policy.
Why don't we have commodity medicine for run of the mill health care? Why don't we have clinics with a flat $25 a visit fee for colds, various mundane ailments, tests, procedures, and preventative medicine? Why do we keep increasing the regulatory cost of healthcare at the expense of access, performance, and safety? And, if the problem is that hyper-marginal risks, such as certain cancers or highly improbable trauma histories or complex terminal or lifelong conditions, are too expensive and require insurance, then we should perhaps nationalize that risk pool instead of one wherein the majority of people have some sort of needs or expense. Let the market solve problems wherein supply and demand are not an issue. Find an elegant way to minimize the cost and distribute the risk for the marginal problems instead.
But we don't, and this really isn't about healthcare; that's just of an example of trying to fix bad policy with more bad policy.
And it speaks volumes about the dissociative waves rippling through our collective knowledge base. Common sense is exceedingly rare; the ability to understand opportunity costs and actual scale is disappearing. The majority of people now think in two dimensional spaces; they live on a cloistered moon in a starless galaxy; they have not seen the blinding beauty of the universe with the naked eye. They can barely see the moon -- a flat object matted against a depthless sky.
_________________ Corolinth wrote: Facism is not a school of thought, it is a racial slur.
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