When I was practicing medicine and saw everything going down the tubes, I got out. It all started when a poweful BUREAUCRAT told me I had to do things the way THEY wanted me to, not the way I had always done it, not the way I was TAUGHT to do it, not the way I KNEW would work…the way THEY wanted it…didn’t take a Ouija board for me to decide. Our house was paid for and we had enough to live on…so we got the hell out of Dodge. And…you know what? It hasn’t been nearly as tough as I feared. With my lady always there to support me…even when she was frightened, I KNOW we did the right thing, and I can only love her more for what she’s meant to me during such a disturbing and difficult time.
The sad thing is…afterward, I realized I had been practicing medicine at the pathetic end of medicine’s golden age in America…and on Earth, the end of good and promising things. Think about THAT, you overweight guys, or you people with stains in your genome or a bad family history. Today’s merciless actuaries consider you EXPENDABLE! Insurance companies, medicare toadies, government bureaucrats, and the tyranny of their paid, true-believer “nurse co-ordinators”, will see to it you haven’t a prayer. I hold those nurses in greatest contempt…traitors to a beautiful, promising, and incredibly useful profession. If you ask me, those women (and a few men) have a LOT to answer for.
Almost singlehandedly, they stepped in line, sat down, picked up their earpieces, and killed a magnificent and successful health care process.  I’ll leave it to history to tell them what they’ve done, but to tell the truth, most of them will probably be dead long before that. I bet they got a lot of perks and raises, and in the eyes of their overlords, I’m sure they earned them. Killing a system isn’t easy, but they figured out just how to do it…with a LOT of oversight, I imagine. I’m sure the most enthusiastic got ENORMOUS bonuses, but they better pray they don’t develop a debilitating disease. Even those huge rewards won’t be enough…and the system they and their masters left in place won’t cover it.
These days I’m also beginning to believe I’ve lived through the end of America as the shining beacon on a hill. When I think of how many people DIED to preserve that concept, it sickens me, particularly when I see how many now clamor to suck on the biggest government tit they can find, attach, and keep sucking voraciously no matter what happens, no matter the cost, no matter the debt incurred. Almost all of us live on a budget. We KNOW if we spend more than we take in, there’ll be a reckoning, but that’s only us at the bottom of the political food chain…not governments caught in the endless spiral of ever-increasing, unpaid-for largesse, mostly to cream their opponents in their next election, I suspect.  Just now, I think it’s time for a little Shelley…and Ozymandias…one of my FAVORITE poems.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Most scholars believe Ozymandias was another name for Rameses the Great, who ruled Egypt through at least five generations of his subjects. Absolutely powerful, rich, prolific, and successful, he was revered as a god, but he could NEVER have seen how he, too, was living at the pathetic end of a good thing. After Rameses II, there was a succession of increasingly weaker pharoahs, ultimately leaving the door open to invaders from the north culminating with the ROMANS, the rapacious Romans, who killed Cleopatra, the last pharoah (pharoahette?), locked the whole place down, and sort of kept Egypt as their own personal larder…which they sucked DRY. Old Ozzy didn’t see it coming, but it was out there nonetheless…waiting to destroy what he had built, planned, hoped for, and thought would last FOREVER.
Dazzled by endless reassurances of his primacy, Rameses never saw it, and you know, to me he sounds a lot like those idiots in Washington. Like him, they don’t know or see it, but it’s out there…and IT’S COMING! I’ve lived through the end of so many good things: the end of innocence, the end of trust, the end of social civility, the end of freedom to proclaim your beliefs without scorn, the end of common, proper English, the end of FAMILY as a central, stabilizing hub, the end of excellence as a goal for education, the end of promise, the end of fiscal responsibility…and the end of hope.  The ”lone and level sands” are swirling in; I just pray there’ll be another poet like Shelley somewhere out there in the future to document our fall so eloquently.

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