Middle Class Warfare

The Herald also noted that Nugent’s efforts to avoid the draft make President
Bush look like a war hero.

(Nugent claims) that 30 days before his Draft Board Physical, he stopped all
forms of personal hygiene. The last 10 days he ingested nothing but junk food
and Pepsi, and a week before his physical, he stopped using the bathroom
altogether, virtually living inside his pants caked with excrement and urine.
That spectacle won Nugent a deferment.

Dig a little deeper, and it becomes clear that “freedom” for the Right offers most of us anything but. It’s the freedom for companies to screw their workers, pollute, and otherwise operate free of any meaningful regulations to protect the public interest. It’s about the wealthiest among us being free from the burden of paying a fair share of the taxes that help finance a
smoothly functioning society.

The flip side is that programs that assure working Americans a decent existence are painted as a form of tyranny
approaching fascism. The reality is that they impinge only on our God-given right to live without a secure social safety net.
It’s the freedom to go bankrupt if you can’t afford to treat an illness; the liberty to spend your golden years eating cat food if you couldn’t sock away enough for a decent retirement.

Until today, I couldn’t really
understand why this case was framed as a discussion of “liberty.” This case
isn’t so much about freedom from government-mandated broccoli or gyms.
It’s about freedom from our obligations to one another, freedom from the
modern world in which we live. It’s about the freedom to ignore the injured,
walk away from those in peril, to never pick up the phone or eat food that’s
been inspected. It’s about the freedom to be left alone. And now we know
the court is worried about freedom: the freedom to live like it’s 1804.

As the medical industry has advanced in the past century, so too has the recognition that a person’s thinking – including prayer and a spiritual understanding of life – is key to one’s well-being. About 38 percent of Americans use alternative or complementary means to traditional medicine, according to the National Institutes of Health. And the use of prayer for health rose by more than a third between 1999 and 2007, according to a study published by the American Psychological Association.

The mandate – which threatens a penalty for those who don’t comply – runs counter to such a trend.

This is the best of the dissent I have read so far.