Since I have been writing for this paper for more than 20 years now, I figure if I need to get a personal plug in about something, it’s okay. So I’m plugging Staxtacular, the largest fund-raising event of the year for the Stax Music Academy. It’s a way-cool party hosted by Memphis Grizzlies Rudy Gay, Mike Conley, and Zach Randolph, and it’s this Friday night, March 26th, at the Stax Museum. You can get more info and buy tickets at staxtacular.com. And let me just say that there will be a lot of food and a lot of booze, along with auctions and live music by the Bo-Keys, which includes former Bar-Kays horn man Ben Cauley and “Shaft” wah-wah guitar player Skip Pitts. I see the Stax Music Academy students every day, and you can be certain that if you attend the party you will be helping out some fantastic kids. So there. That’s my plug. Come to the party. You’ll have a blast.
Now onto more pressing issues, like the fact that the government is now forcing health care down your throat so they can give health care to all of the lazy poor people in America. Ha! You know good and well we are going to hear so much about that in the coming campaign months that we’ll all have to have even more health-care benefits, because we’re all going to need brain surgery to put up with it. Either that or Rush Limbaugh will have to share some of his stash with his listeners. I have to admit that I have never heard one of his shows and just catch the craziest of his remarks in the headlines. I loved the one recently about the 11-year-old boy in Washington state whose mother lost her job, lost her health insurance, and then died. Seems Rush thought that was just a Democrat “sob story,” and he said he wanted to tell the kid his mother would have died anyway. Nice. Maybe he thinks she was on her way to one of Obama’s “death camps.”
I also want to know what Glenn Beck thinks about all of this. See, I have managed somehow to have never seen or heard this man. I hear about him all the time, but I’ve never seen him. Probably because he’s on that network I never watch. But from what I’ve heard about him, I bet he’s thinking cha-ching, cha-ching. This issue has high ratings all over it, since the Tea Partiers and their ilk will be glued to any and all right-wing coverage of how this is going to destroy America as we know it. Like that would be such a bad thing. Actually, I don’t even know if I agree with all of the new health-care bill, but certainly something needs to change. You shouldn’t have to go without medical help just because you’re bankrupt or have lost your job and your insurance.
Now it looks like health-care reform is going to happen, but I skipped most of the articles and went straight to the reader comments, which I love because it gives so many lunatics a venue to vent. Some of them are priceless. All the people who are against the bill in a very vehement way seem to imply that if everyone just got up off their lazy asses and went to work at McDonald’s we wouldn’t have to be going through this living hell of having Barack Obama succeed at getting legislation passed — which is what most of the opposition seems to boil down to. And now they are really worried about their guns. I think if they worried less about their guns and didn’t eat at McDonald’s all the time, they might not have as many health issues.
Seriously, if you haven’t experienced needing medical attention and not being able to afford it, you should just shut up about the new bill. When you have cancer and you don’t have a job and you don’t have any health insurance, it’s not like a band of do-gooder doctors are going to treat you for free. I know people go through this situation, and they probably died sooner than necessary because of the financial stress. If you really think the country is going down the tubes because we passed limited health-care reform, you’d better go to the doctor and get some tranquilizers. You’re going to need them.
