In the Making

GOOD:

Two weeks ago Verone walked into a bank and robbed the place of $1. He then sat down and waited for the police to come. After applying for early Social Security and being denied, and struggling to stay healthy with no insurance, Verone decided that going to jail was the only way he could get the help he needed. “The pain was beyond the tolerance that I could accept,” he told his local newspaper.

Consider Verone the latest casualty in America’s battle over health care reform. Even as conservatives try to roll back the expanded coverage provided by President Obama’s health care bill,  that expansion isn’t enough to cover everyone. The result is poor people who get sick and can’t afford to get better, and who then become dangerously desperate. In a nation as rich as the United States, Verone’s story is a tragedy.

A tragedy indeed.  Click through to read the whole article - the final sentence alone is worth it.

Perfect, three word summary from Daring Fireball:

NBC News:

That’s right, James Verone says he has no medical insurance. He has a growth of some sort on his chest, two ruptured disks and a problem with his left foot. He is 59 years old and with no job and a depleted bank account. He thought jail was the best place he could go for medical care and a roof over his head. Verone is hoping for a three-year sentence.

Only in America.

This is almost too much for me.

From GOOD:

Though the social networking behemoth continues creeping toward 700 million global users, six million Americans quit the site in the month of May. That’s the first time Facebook has lost U.S. users in over a year.

I have noticed a growing trend… And also:

What Facebook initially had going for it was exclusivity—it was for young Ivy Leaguers. Now that moms and grandmas are on it, it’s lost some of that early cachet.

For those of us who were on Facebook before it opened its doors to hordes of OMG/LOL-ing high-schoolers and their moms…we know this to be true.

So I found out the other day that, apparently, a whole bunch of my Wheaton friends have been posting this same article on Facebook.  Interesting how the same things resonate with us. After a conversation with Ariel, I couldn’t help but add just this little bit more:

You can all supply your own favorite, most nauseating examples of the commodification of love. Mine include the wedding industry, TV ads that feature cute young children or the giving of automobiles as Christmas presents, and the particularly grotesque equation of diamond jewelry with everlasting devotion. The message, in each case, is that if you love somebody you should buy stuff.

A related phenomenon is the transformation, courtesy of Facebook, of the verb “to like” from a state of mind to an action that you perform with your computer mouse, from a feeling to an assertion of consumer choice. And liking, in general, is commercial culture’s substitute for loving.

There is so much depth, beauty, and insight packed into these three (Internet) pages of an article.  Pease go read it, and read it again - it will be well worth your time.

An astute article on the interplay of love and technology, originally titled Technology Provides an Alternative to Love.  One small snippet:

Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.

The big risk here, of course, is rejection. We can all handle being disliked now and then, because there’s such an infinitely big pool of potential likers. But to expose your whole self, not just the likable surface, and to have it rejected, can be catastrophically painful. The prospect of pain generally, the pain of loss, of breakup, of death, is what makes it so tempting to avoid love and stay safely in the world of liking.

And yet pain hurts but it doesn’t kill. When you consider the alternative — an anesthetized dream of self-sufficiency, abetted by technology — pain emerges as the natural product and natural indicator of being alive in a resistant world. To go through a life painlessly is to have not lived. Even just to say to yourself, “Oh, I’ll get to that love and pain stuff later, maybe in my 30s” is to consign yourself to 10 years of merely taking up space on the planet and burning up its resources. Of being (and I mean this in the most damning sense of the word) a consumer.

Those are some wise, wise words.