Recently, while scrolling through TikTok, I came across this video: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMJaFfQrt/
In the video, the woman discusses how the impending confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett and the upcoming election could impact how young people (between 18-26 years old) are receiving and have access to healthcare. As someone who relies upon their parents' insurance plan, as they are not in a position where they can afford one or have one offered through their employer, this is terrifying.
This year has been difficult. The pandemic imposes constant health risks, and with the impending doom of Amy Coney Barrett, the risks for women's healthcare to be set back is also on the line. With all of this in the air, the idea that healthcare coverage and access could be taken away from or limited to thousands of young people is nothing less than a reckless abuse of power.
Something that frustrates me about this issue is that older generations (aka the boomers) seem to fault the younger generations for wanting affordable healthcare. What do you think about this? Why does it feel like we are in a constant struggle to maintain basic rights?
My sense is that older generations refuse to accept that they had a better economy when they were our age and after reaping the benefits of that economy, refuse to give up their wealth. They fear anything that comes close to a tax on their retirement plan. They feel as though they don't have to worry about the younger generations anymore. We as a society have not seen the pendulum swing away from natural rights to classical republicanism - I would argue - since about WWII. And it shows.
ReplyDeleteThe potential repeal of the ACA and Roe v. Wade isn't even the largest issue I have with the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett. It's actually the rhetoric - or convenient changing of tune - that Republicans have had about the nominating of a Supreme Court Justice in the last year of a president's term. When Antonin Scalia passed away in FEBRUARY of 2016, Republicans shut down nomination hearings and refused to sit in nomination hearings for Merrick Garland in MARCH, you know, 8 months before the election (not weeks). Countless Republican representatives denounced Obama for trying to seat a judge in the last year of his candidacy, most notably Mitch McConnell.
I think this is definitely a downside to the hypermediacy and distraction that characterizes the public screen, as proposed by DeLuca and Peeples. It leads to a public with a very short attention span, but also an even shorter memory.
PREACH. It's also frustrating that supporters of the Amy Coney Barrett nomination can't accept that the role of religion in the public sphere is, and should be, very different from its role in private life. Any mention of her fundamentalist ideology is painted as religious persecution. She cannot be trusted not to impose her ideology on the rest of us--which we know not because she's Catholic, but because she's done it before, here in Indiana. The issue is that the religious right doesn't see anything wrong with that.
ReplyDeleteI'm reminded of Pat Robertson's claims this week that God told him that Trump would win the election and that it would bring about the end of times. Sharon Crowley warned us in 2006 in "Toward a Civil Discourse" that activists on the religious right were stacking the courts and legislative bodies with fundamentalists because they believed it would bring God's kingdom to earth and speed up the rapture. It's sort of chilling how right she was.