The health care debate has revealed a lot about our national character, most of it not very flattering. I’ve watched the clips on YouTube, and I’ve attended two town hall meetings – one of which I wrote about here -- and nothing sums up the prevailing mood as well as some unforgivable demagogic remarks made by Senator Chuck Grassley:

“You have every right to fear…We should not have a government program that determines that you're going to pull the plug on grandma."

In a time of soaring unemployment and record deficits, I cannot for the life of me understand why this vision of elderly people kept alive on respirators is so compelling that people act as if it should be the central organizing principle of society.

Go to the ICU and see the elderly patients with tubes shoved down their throats, and their hands tied to the bed to keep them from ripping the tubes out, and it should be painfully obvious that this is not something we are doing for them. It’s for us – the spare us from having to confront the harsh reality of our own inevitable demise. Too many of us act as if there is always one more procedure, one more operation, one more miracle drug that will keep us alive a little longer. But it is not so.

We all have to die.

The fact we, we are an insanely overmedicated society. This is the main theme of my writing on OS, so I’m not going to bother re-hashing all those arguments here. Interested readers are invited to scan my posts and make up their own minds about this.

There is an old adage that any two sides that fight long enough will switch positions. Wasn’t there a time when conservatives were supposed to believe in self-reliance, in personal responsibility, in limited government? Wasn’t there a time when it was the conservatives who were the ones saying, “Hey, we don’t have an infinite amount of money to spend?”

Nowadays the self-styled “conservatives” don’t seem to believe in much of anything besides the uninterrupted flow to themselves of unlimited taxpayer-funded medical interventions via our socialized healthcare system for the elderly – without even bothering to ask whether those interventions are doing any net good.

These people railing at the town meetings remind me of whiny little babies, discovering for the first time that you can’t get everything you want.

Both of my grandmas are long gone. My mother has been dead for four years now. If she were still alive today, she would be eighty years old. Suppose that were the case, and suppose she were hooked up to a respirator, and some “government bureaucrat” asked me if I wanted to “pull the plug.” Know what I’d say?

HELL YES! PULL THE DAMN PLUG AND LET HER DIE IN PEACE! IN FACT IF YOU DON’T, I’M GOING TO SUE YOUR ASSES OFF! WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU PEOPLE THINKING?

Fortunately, that will never happen. My mother knew there are more important things than clinging to life at all costs. They don’t make ‘em like that anymore.