I spent the last week on sick leave from my job as an English teacher.

I have no more sick time remaining – but that’s ok.  Here, without a union, we donate our leave time to one another, finagle our annual or personal leave and, most of the time, we just don’t stay at home when ill.

I pay $500 per month for my wife’s health insurance, as I carry her on my state policy.  I pay nothing for myself, but that doesn’t make me feel any better.

I’m not angry, not really.  As I tell my students, “I don’t get angry, just disappointed.”

Yes, disappointed.  That’s it.

I have refrained from becoming involved in the health care debate, if it can be called a debate, mostly due to the fact that I feel it has been sufficiently covered, both more succinctly and impressively, by my fellow OSers.

I am not, by my nature as a writer, a political writer.  I have too many blind spots and too little time to do extensive research into some of the more exquisite aspects of the current maelstrom of self-righteous indignation and victimization. 

But I do know my own personal experience.

I don’t want to be the man standing up during the town hall meeting – discussing my personal woes and financial troubles due to the burden, or lack thereof, of health insurance.

I despise socialism and have lost a great deal of faith in democracy.  I do not prefer anarchy, monarchy, corporate oligarchy or theocracy.

All I know is that our government is a bizarre mixture of laissez-faire relaxation and overregulation, heavy corporate interference and religious monopolization, pseudo-socialism and libertarian philosophy.  Our government, and yes, it is ours, resembles some sort of dozen-limbed Stretch Armstrong – each new administration or congress pulling it in different directions.  Sometimes an arm or leg is cut off, though usually it’s only a digit or two.

What this has given us is what we see now.

Christians claim that America is Christian while those who are less theistically inclined claim that America was founded, at most, by Deists.

Ayn Randists and Tea Partiers (known in the 90s as militiamen) stand on the streets and may as well lay themselves in front of the great tank of compromised pseudo-socialism that they claim is going to gun down all the “real Americans”. 

Liberals are mostly confused.  Most of them, I would think, feel that they should be enjoying the fruits of a liberal, progressive administration coupled with a similar scene in congress.  Of course, this is not the case.  What liberals have been given is a continuation of militarism and domestic policy that seems, at least to me, like the work of Dennis Miller’s entire, lifelong political persona boiled down into one human being.

So liberals are confused when ‘grass root’ conservative protest movements take to the streets in hyperbolic numbers to “take back the country” – because it seems, at least to some liberals, myself included, that the country hasn’t been taken from the previous administration.

This confusion coupled with a bizarre and impotent rage has created the great quagmire that I think textbooks of the future (which will most certainly hover and be implanted into the heads of students) will call “Clusterfuckhealth”.

I tend to make most things complicated because, most of the time, I enjoy dealing with more ethereal subject-matter than healthcare.  But, gun to my head (Obama’s coming for those, too), I would say that my opinion boils down to a few conclusions:

• I pay $500 per month because my wife has endometriosis
• I don’t like paying $500 per month – my rent isn’t too much more than that
• The Republicans, conservatives, baggers, whatever they are – have offered no solution
• “Obamacare” is not, at least if you ask any actual socialist, socialism
• Do it, or don’t, but soon