Not Good, Accentuate the Negative, Eliminate the Positive

Maybe I’ve been watching too much TV, scanning the Internet too obsessively, and reading too many newspapers, but I have the impression the public and our presidential candidates are stressing the negative at the expense of the positive, and the past instead of the future. 

As one sage observed,   pessimists see the whole, optimists the donut.   It’s the old glass half-empty, glass half-full story.    I see the situation through the eyes of Pogo pungently noted, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”   America is at war with itself, and with bureaucracies or at the TSA, the VA, the ACA, and at the capitol of the USA.

Consider health care.  If you view our system through technological lenses, we have the world’s most advanced health system, with excellent results among those receiving joint replacements, receiving stents for clogged arteries, and waiting for specialty care.   

Sure, we have our problems -   high costs, unaffordable deductibles,  9% of our populace still uninsured , a growing shortage of primary care physicians, and an access mess as more physician s no longer accept Medicare, Medicaid, and subsidized ObamaCare patients because of low fees and  interventional hassles.     

But we have well-trained and well-intended physicians,    widely dispersed life-saving and life-style enhancing technologies, excellent medical researchers, and, not to be discounted, the most productive economy on the planet.

And as a nation with a creed of freedom, choice, and opportunities, we still have positive choices.   

We can either accept the notion, advanced by Hillary Clinton, that the status quo with a few fixes will make things OK.  

We can believe Bernie Sanders’ free lunch theory, that there’s always somebody rich out there who will pay the freight.  

We can take Donald Trump at his word that he can make America great again if we only negotiate better deals with other nations, blow-up the D.C.  establishment, and blow ISIS to hell.

I believe once we rid ourselves of bureaucratic and political deadwood,   return to our traditions of individual choice and freedom,   rid ourselves of extreme ideologies,   free ourselves of mandates, respect our physicians, and swing back to the center, we will right the nation’s ship.