THE TRUTH ABOUT OLD MEN - Chapter 15

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

This chapter of our helpful compendium of insights seeking to illuminate citizens on the thinking of venerable gentlemen was months in the making. It will only take a few minutes now that the writing has begun. The months of preparation have been spent in pursuit of a word. It must be just the right word. There can be no room for ambiguity or misinterpretation if the gravity of this issue is to be made clear.

Until just now, the word needed to describe the insidious characteristic this chapter addresses has escaped the writer. The word will be used to identify a characteristic exhibited by certain groups of people who influence our quality of life, chiefly government agencies, politicians, corporations advertising products, political action committees who seek to shape our thinking and news organizations.

The illusive word is EFFRONTERY.

Before choosing “effrontery” other choices such as brazen boldness, presumptuousness and impudence were considered and rejected. They didn’t quite hit the mark in the struggle to express the angst suffered by the old man when he is treated by these groups of people as if he is wholly unable to think. The way in which we are spoken to by people who presume to shape our thinking is rife with examples of this effrontery, but nowhere is it better demonstrated than in the debate about health care.

New numbers out today...according to CNN's "Anderson Cooper Live" over $200 billion a year in health care is "wasted" on obesity. The reporter just announced this is wasted on such obesity-related medical problems as heart conditions, and another astronomical figure is "wasted" on lung diseases related to smoking. The NEWS reporter says, "If we would just take better care of ourselves, this money could be saved."

This makes perfect sense to people under 60-years old, despite the fact that the “reporter” should be admonished for inserting his naive conclusion into the story. Reporting it as "news", especially when it's done by the network's anchor man, alleges the statement is considered to be a "fact" by the reporter. That's a weighty statement coming from a venerable news gathering unit such as CNN. It causes viewers to actually believe a substantial savings could be realized in health care costs if people would just stop overeating and smoking.

However, Cooper's opinion peddled as a fact makes perfect sense to an UNenlightened mind. Regrettably, the old man is getting no such comfort.

It’s hard to tell if some of the human units spewing the following nonsense are surreptitiously organizing their arguments in a way that intentionally hides and obscures otherwise obvious truth, or if they are really as profoundly stupid as their argument suggests.

Personally, I don’t think anyone this thick should be allowed to walk around free on the planet, so I believe they are intentionally twisting reality in order to profit from what they believe is the stupidity of the American people. That is true effrontery.

When a public figure is heard suggesting obesity should be taxed because it leads to a strain on the health care system, the speaker is guilty of this effrontery. When he says cigarettes should be taxed for the same reason, he is, again, guilty. To be sure, such behavior as over-eating and cigarette smoking results in doctor visits and any visit to the doctor for any reason places stress on the health care system. By the logic these public figures are using, a tax on dangerous behavior of all types should be levied or, perhaps, applied according to severity.

What this argument does not consider is that dangerous behavior not only results in visits to the doctor, but it shortens the life span of those exhibiting the behavior. The argument also presumes that those spared premature death by smoking and obesity will live forever without visiting a doctor or die while healthy. It can happen, but what happens to the argument about smoking and obesity when it does not?

Heckle and Freckle were identical twins, doing business at the same DNA bank. Heckle lived a clean and sober life practicing all potentially dangerous behavior in moderation. He did not smoke. He did not drink, except where his wife made it impossible to resist. He did not drive over the speed limit, avoided extreme sports and never shouted obscenities at other drivers during rush hour. Heckle did his best to live as long as possible.

Heckle’s brother, Freckle, was a reckless thrill-seeker. He smoked a pack a day, got drunk wherever it was possible, did drugs frequently and enjoyed romance without the interference of Polyurethane or latex third parties. Freckle drove up the cost of health insurance with doctor visits about his lung cancer, rotting liver and sexually transmitted diseases until he finally died at the age of sixty from a drug overdose.

Meanwhile, Heckle was healthy through the same sixty years, stressing the system with nothing more severe than an annual checkup. But in the twenty five years after his brother’s premature death, Heckle ran up thousands and thousands of dollars in doctor visits for the brain tumor that would have affected Freckle if he’d lived long enough. The “system” took care of additional thousands of dollars in assisted living care as Heckle became frail and infirm. Taxpayers and health insurance subscribers paid for years of Heckle’s treatments for Alzheimer’s disease as he entered his eighties. It paid for special doctors, clinics, social workers and expensive drugs his brother did not live long enough to need. At the heart of the twin tragedies of Heckle and Freckle is one inescapable reality. Both eventually died as surely as they lived. And the truth about health care is that the longer one lives the greater stress he will put upon any system of health care.

The glaring reality, the undeniable truth cloaked in cleverly constructed arguments that punish people for dangerous life styles is that the quicker the citizen dies the smaller burden to the system he is. If we wish to relieve the burden on the health care system we should not punish smokers and heavy drinkers or discourage snow-boarding and bear wrestling. We should give tax breaks to smokers and drunks.

In the pale light of uncompromised reason it is plain that the more frivolously and dangerously one lives, the more savings will be enjoyed by insurance companies and, therefore, policy holders. And until at least one of us manages to completely escape death and the infirmity that precedes it, this fact trumps all the inglorious effrontery demonstrated by morons and branding wizards arguing otherwise.

An old man who has sorted all this out in the twilight of his thinking life may stare at his television and the twelve year old commentator beaming at him through perfect teeth while spewing arguments about how heavy smokers over-tax the health care system and mutter, “You monolithic idiot. Are you entirely incapable of sober deduction?” He may wonder how the government allows this person to spread such twisted thinking on public airwaves, which it presumes to safeguard from things as innocuous as dirty words. But this is an error made by the old man. He leaps to the generous presumption that the speaker does not understand how absurd his thinking construct is. He believes the speaker is merely stupid.

But what’s to be said about the millions of morons who support such muddy thinking? The answer is that they are composed almost entirely of citizens who have not lived long enough to make their way through the fog of confusion that youth produces. How does the old man, twitching with uncontrollable shakes, slobbering all over his bib and hitching up his diaper address an audience of bewildered sheep and explain they are only stupid because they have not been thinking about the problem long enough to reach the truth that resolves the rebus.

Instead, we climb aboard our wheelchair assisted SUV (made possible by a tax payer supported program for the elderly), drive to the grocery store and park in our special space (paid for by government mandated considerations for the handicapped,) mount our motorized shopping cart (financed through higher prices for the food being sold there) buy our vitamin supplements and other drugs with the assistance of insurance money supplied by young people paying premiums and pay for our food with stamps supplied by confused tax payers who think they have profited by helping us live longer. We need the stamps. Our worldly goods were auctioned off years earlier to pay doctors for health care that would never have been required if we had died of lung cancer at sixty like our infinitely more patriotic twin brother.