This explosive BBC documentary, unlike anything you’ll see on American MSM, shows how bad the healthcare situation is in America. You’ll see a charity originally set up to deliver healthcare to third world countries, drawing hundreds of clients in Kentucky. The clip effectively shows the enormous chasm between rich and poor in America. You’ll see rich Republicans who think our system is the greatest in the world, and who are fighting to keep the status quo. The political situation is spelled out as well. The last segment interviews a woman who is getting chemotherapy while living in a tent – she had to choose between rent or medicine.

Several thoughts (feel free to add your own):

We used to have a functioning media in this country that would take risks and report on this kind of thing. Now it distracts, silences, and shapes public opinion, instead of being challenging or revealing. While never perfect, who the media is supposed to serve has changed over time.

The victims in this documentary – the ones too poor for health insurance – come from states that usually vote for those whose policies overwhelmingly ensure the perpetuation of their victimhood. How these people were bamboozled into voting against their own best interests is explained in Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas?

Maha wrote earlier about the delusions of the very wealthy. The healthcare situation in this country is a symptom of the same. At some point, all of us choose to shut out the plight of others from our awareness, and we come up with rationalizations for this act – liberals to a lesser extent, conservatives to a greater extent. So much of the political battle is consumed by efforts to cut through defenses of this sort. Keeping explosive documentaries such as this out of the public eye is hugely strategic, because an angry public won’t put up with excuses. Documentaries like this, that have the potential to foment public anger, torpedo all the defenses.

There is a spiritual dimension to this that all contemporary writers and documentaries show or talk around, but which can never seem to directly discuss. It’s as though we don’t have the language for it, or we’re not permitted to directly speak about it – which by itself silently screams obscenities against our culture. We simply feel the moral outrage that some deep spiritual laws are being violated. But without a common language to articulate and address this outrage, this energy is stymied from changing anything. It’s the result of conservative efforts to trivialize and confine spirituality to personal matters, such as who you’re having sex with, blastocytes, and so on, and to keep spirituality away from anything that would seriously challenge the conservative worldview.

Part 2 is here.

Part 3 is here. You’ll want to watch all three.

Link to the original BBC program is here, but viewers outside the UK can’t see it.

h/t to nyceve

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