America Can Be Better!

Living in Viet Nam does not insulate me from receiving the incessantly forwarded "hate speech" emails touting the penultimate experience of being an American. I trust many readers may understand.

Photo: Centers for Disease Control
One such recent email forwarded to me entitled "Middle East Mystery" contained the following: Everyone seems to be wondering why Muslim terrorists are so quick to commit suicide. Let’s see now:

No Jesus
No Wal-Mart
No television
No cheerleaders
No baseball
No football
No hockey
No tailgate parties
No Home Depot
Rags for clothes and towels for hats
Constant wailing from the guy next door because he’s sick and there are no doctors
Constant wailing from the guy in the tower...

And the list continues with more derogatory and pejorative statements about Middle Easterners.

For a brief period at the beginning of her history, America was defined by a moral ethic and a sense of compassion around the world. America once stood for protecting civil liberties and ensuring a press free from government intervention. America was once a beacon of independence and liberty and a model of democracy around the world. That is what America was.

From What We Were, To What We Have Become

America is rapidly becoming a nation of politically-oriented Jesus followers ready to inconsistently interpret a book, based on 2,000 year old legends and re-written close to 1700 years ago at the direction of a political leader, to justify personal prejudices. America has become the Wal-Marts and Home Depots that destroy the economic sustainability of local communities, exploit workers in developing countries and cheat workers in their weekly pay packets all for an erroneously perceived lower price.

But, hey! They have a smiley face and that should make you feel good. Home Depot and Wal-Mart takes community money and sends it to distant corporate capitals. Congress also approved $38 million of your tax dollars to help ease traffic congestion into Wal-Mart headquarters.

When has America been the leader in television? Here’s some examples as seen from the outside:

Photo: Reuters

Fox News (A propaganda machine of Rupert Murdock for the Republican Party)
Average Joe
Who Wants to Marry My Dad?
Fear Factor

And Baywatch, to name a few. The quality of corporate controlled commercial television programming has quickly eroded and replaced with senseless crap, for want of a better word.

I suppose Muslims could be jealous of America because she has baseball players who will go on strike, demand higher seven-figure salaries, are unable to control explosive behaviors and become involved in on-field brawls and suffer from drug and gambling addictions. They’re jealous of football? See the comments about baseball players and add to that sex crimes, drug crimes and weapons charges.

American Values: Real As Bullets

I believe the reason for all of the violence in the Middle East has been a direct result of America’s "weaponization" of the area, the calculated interference in political stability, and arrogantly forcing countries to adopt its values while being completely unable to practice those same values at home.

Some of the values that America models are:

Forcing an invaded sovereign nation to adopt a consitution on America’s time frame

Ignoring the right of self-determination of independent countries

Invading and conducting war in independent countries without provocation

Gaining the support of people for war on the home front based on calculated lies

Pitting groups of Americans against each other to take the attention away from the numerous American deaths in Iraq

Appointments by a dictatorial Executive Branch without consent of Congress

Ignoring the grief-stricken families of soldiers killed in Iraq

Unilateralism in regards to environmental policies and human rights violations

Mostly progressive and liberal readers will see this brief article. However, as Americans, you are charged with making America better. It is time to join and support third political parties. The Democratic Party and the Republican Party have worked to the detriment of the America that was once respected.

A Third Way

Only third parties have an independent voice and the courage to speak out against the injustices that are committed. Join a third political party. It sends a clear message to the Republocratic Party that, as Howard Beal stated in Network, "We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore!"

While you’re at it, when you get "hate-speak" emails, reply to the sender you don’t appreciate their sentiments. I certainly do.

Next week: Thomas Sowell is wrong! --Thom

Healthcare For All

(Saigon, Viet Nam) I laid sweating on the drab white sheeted gurney in the emergency room watching the ceiling fan slowly stirring the tepid morning air.

I was just another uninvolved person who suddenly became involved in the Vietnamese healthcare system. I couldn’t hear or see the 45 year old man who was only a few feet away and dying, but I heard his 3 young daughters pleading for him to live.

The four had traveled from Cambodia to Vietnam to attend a festival. There are many Vietnamese living on the other side of the border, much akin to many Latinos living in California. This farmer had a history of high blood pressure and suffered a massive brain hemorrhage.

Doctors Counsel Family Members

The daughters were pleading for his life and pleading with the doctors to operate or transfer him to another hospital in Saigon. The doctors explained to the grieving girls nothing could be done except to let him die peacefully and painlessly there in the emergency room.

There is no "confidentiality" or "privacy" in the Vietnamese general hospital in Tay Ninh, a border area witness to so much hostility during the French Indochina War and the American War in Viet Nam. Everyone in the emergency room becomes family, everyone becomes aware of the connectedness to another human and everyone helps each other--even the dying.

Comfort Is The Same In Every Language

The 18 year old girl who was attending her grandmother came to my bedside to comfort the foreigner who needed help. She offered a calm hand and a smile. We spoke in Vietnamese. I couldn’t help but smile with her. An older man with his aging mother also visited. He didn’t say much. He saw the sweat pouring out of my shirtless chest and used an old woven fan to cool me. He also smiled with me.

When there is a problem in the emergency room, it is easier for the doctors and nurses to quickly respond. No buttons to push, no waiting for someone to pass by a door. You are simply another involved human needing care, as it was for me.

The level of healthcare in Viet Nam’s rural area is sometimes considered primitive in comparison to the healthcare in the city. The striking difference is that healthcare, anywhere in Vietnam, is affordable. People are able to access a doctor for a few dollars and the doctors provide the best care they can.

People Helping People On Low-Cost Basis

Here, there is more of an emphasis on people helping each other. The wealthy help with fundraisers, overseas Vietnamese come to pledge assistance and everyone is involved in providing healthcare.

Healthcare is very affordable. Full time monitoring with a cardiologist, 3-day hospital stay, ambulance transfer from Tay Ninh to Saigon and all the IV’s and medications amounted to a mere $391. No mistake, it was three hundred ninety-one dollars.

How California Can Help It's Own Health

Californians can also help each other with the California Healthcare Insurance Reliability Act. This act will provide affordable and reliable healthcare for all Californians and much better yet, is it will provide for health-oriented healthcare, not "for profit" healthcare. Wouldn’t California be better served with a healthy workforce? It is the responsibility of all in California to pull together for better health conditions in the state.

I would urge everyone to support "Healthcare for All."

After my medical emergency, which the doctors agreed would have been fatal had I been nearer the Cambodian border, I became more interested in healthcare here. Following my return home from the half-week stay in the hospital, my neighbor had a medical emergency at home. I was summoned for help by the housekeeper. They had already called the doctor and while I was there, the doctor came literally running around the corner with his black bag in hand.

In the United States where profit drives healthcare this would never be seen. In Viet Nam where healthcare is patient oriented, it is a common site and affordable. Which is better? --Thom

A USA EXPATRIATE Act

I enjoy an unusual status as an American citizen living overseas, specifically in Viet Nam. Those of us who have opted to live outside America's boundaries are referred to as "expatriates."

There are just as many reasons to be an expat, as we are usually known, as there are people who chose to abandon the confines of their homeland. In the immediate instance, my leaving America can be referred to as a USA EXPATRIATE Act.

Ex-pats Have Their Reasons

The act of my leaving the US to become an expatriate was related to various reasons, which most expats, will not usually discuss. What one is escaping from or going towards is not a topic freely spoken about in expat groups. The fact that one has already made the step in living overseas, that is unless one has chosen Canada or Mexico, is accepted and reasons become moot and quite usually uninteresting.

For as long as most living today can remember, the United States has been involved in an ideological struggle with communism. I am a veteran of the Cold War with the Soviet Union and the American War in Viet Nam. Viet Nam is a socialist country under the one party rule of the Viet Nam Communist Party.

Some of my Republican Christian family members have difficulties reconciling the fact that their socialist-leaning Buddhist liberal brother's has chosen to live in a country that America considered its enemy for over a dozen years. Not only was Viet Nam considered an enemy, but it continues to be a communist party-ruled country.

A Tale Of Two Countries

Communism was generally viewed as an economic practice that also included limiting civil rights, giving the state power to pry into the people's private lives, redistributing wealth and taking the property of individuals for the state's good. In comparison, one can argue quite reasonably that the only difference politically between living here and in America is the food and the language.

On July 18, 20045 the Supreme Court decided that the State can take personal property under eminent domain when it serves the community's need for economic development. Under the Kelo decision by the U.S. Supreme private property can now be taken by the state only to be handed over to private developers for their private gain, and the U.S. Constitution offers no protection, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled.

I'm still wondering where the conservatives are who fight and yell so loudly for private property rights are hiding now. The predominantly conservative court that appointed George Bush president in 2000 has decided government can now seize your private property. Funny, the communists have done that also. Where is the US headed?

The State Grows Ever More Powerful

On Thursday, July 21st, the House of Representatives voted to make permanent the US government's right to limit the civil liberties of its citizens. The USA PATRIOT Act, not to be confused with my own EXPATRIATE Act, was rushed through Congress suspiciously soon after September 11, 2001 and passed by Democrat and Republican alike.

The USA PATRIOT Act, as many already know, allows the government to intrude into personal lives under the guise of fighting terrorism. The Act allows roving wiretaps, monitoring of emails and internet usage without being limited to an individual or specific phone. It also allows for government agents to obtain business, library and medical records all without the individual being aware of being the subject of an investigation.

It is illegal for custodians of records to advise the individual that personal records have been obtained.

One Senate Republican sponsored bill proposes to give the FBI, who may be watching me from afar, expanded powers to subpoena records without the approval of a judge.

Another interesting Senate proposal is establishing a new crime of narco-terrorism, which is usually defined as supporting terrorism from drug profits. If that were to pass, I propose America investigate itself. During the French Indochina war, the French government sold opium and heroin from Laos to Marseilles criminals to finance their war against the Viet Minh, the precursors of the Viet Cong.

Narco-Terrorism Finances War

Later, the US CIA, which also may be watching me at a much closer range, continued the practice of using profits from opium and heroin sales to finance the US operations in the region during the US war. As the Geneva Convention of 1954 prohibited foreign personnel to operate in Laotian territory, America's actions of more than 600,000 bombing sorties in Laos can be considered terrorism, under new definitions.

I challenge the US to investigate those Americans and government officials who traded in opium and heroin to finance that war.

Another similarity to communism is the Republocratic Party. The voting of Democrats has been closely aligned with the Republicans, both funded by major corporations. Let's face it, both parties voted for the USA PATRIOT Act, the War in Iraq, the World Trade Organization, GATT, tax cuts for the rich, a burdensome federal budget, increasing the federal deficit, the new bankruptcy bill that prevents people to get out from under excessive debts that may have been caused by divorce, critical medical care or other emergencies and the Republocratic Party is once again voting for the USA PATRIOT Act again.

What Have We Become?

Many should face reality that America has finally become what it has hated for several generations. She now lacks moral leadership in the world. Her government has acted cowardly in supporting dictatorships, providing them with training, weapons and even selling weapons to enemies (Iran) to finance Contra rebels in Nicaragua (Iran-Contra scandal).

The US helped Diem and Ky in Viet Nam, Noriega in Panama, Patrice Lamumba in the Congo, then had him killed, Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets, and Saddam Hussein when he was fighting the Iranians who were using our weapons we sold to them.

For me, I like my own version of the USA EXPATRIATE Act. I'm not encouraging others to leave the country, but it seems, I am beginning to experience more liberties here than in America. Here, at least, expats don't live in a paranoid surveilled state.