How can you be proud of being an American if your country doesn't even care if you get sick...

[AZ Progressive]

...and suffer or die? IMO this individualism that Americans have bought into for so long is extremely anti-patriotic. Aren't the most patriotic things that people have done is when they have gotten together and cooperated in a collective manner, for instance WWII? (rationing, war bonds, women working to build military equipment, anything else to help out the effort.) Nowadays, people only care about themselves and not even their fellow Americans or even their country anymore.

P.S. this is in response to the apparent rejection of ACA by the Mainstream Public, which apparently believes that having no healthcare system and letting insurance companies be barbaric is better than having one that is flawed but at least with critical protections.

[RKP5637]

1. I've lost respect ... in many ways. Didn't use to be that way, but anymore,

too much is a WTF anymore.

[mdmc]

2. tscotus will fix it up

They know that the aca is legit..

[AZ Progressive]

3. BTW, if society cared about the people, wouldn't the people reciprocate it back...

and care about society and thus the country more? I'm talking about helping everyone to succeed, making society more equal, standing up for the people who are mistreated, etc... People well treated are more likely to treat others well, and to feel good about where they live. A lot of the bad blood in society is caused by inequality, which is caused by selfish individualism and shortsighted thinking, because if the people were more united and cared for and helped one another, this country would be far stronger and a far nicer place to live.

[RKP5637]

4. Exactly and well said. And at one time I thought we were improving over the

years, but anymore it just seems to be going backward. I noticed much of this starting in the 80's. Money at any cost, me me me, and lots of corps walking over people, for one example. I also think it's the result of "out of control" capitalism. The hoarding of wealth, pyramiding, king of the mountain and basically the destruction of a working together society.

And the notion of individualism is crap in this country. If one wants rugged individualism they need to go off and live by themselves and leave civilization alone.

[Igel]

5. There was an article recently about Scandinavia.

It asked the oft-asked question about the order of precedence in the Scandinavian social safety net.

Did they get a safety net and learn to trust society and government because they liked the benefits? Or did they set it up because they already trusted society and government to be able to provide it in a fair manner?

Result: They had high levels of social trust before the safety net went into place. It was welcomed and popular because of social trust. As social trust has decayed, it has decayed.

The US had higher levels of social trust, once upon a time, but mostly local.

Fukuyama would have something to say about this. As would Russian research on having a single interpretation of historical events shared by different ethnic communities forming a basis for social cohesion and cooperation.

Research a few years ago looked at community groups and social trust as a function of ethnic homogeneity. Their experiment considered "lost" letters: If you find a stamped envelope and there's a mailbox a few feet down the sidewalk, do you mail it? Surprisingly ethnic homogeneity mattered. The results from that experiment tracked neatly with the formation and extent of social groups in the neighborhood, with the caveat that different ethnicities tend to have markedly different levels of social trust.