Frankly, I’d want the person serving Sloppy Joes to my child–whether full- or part-time–to be able to have that cough or that fever or that diarrhea checked out immediately.

Now that I’m home, I continue to be amazed at our national inability to grasp the connection between germ theory and health policy. If we’re surrounded by people without access to good health care, our health will be negatively affected, something that is abundantly clear living in the developing world, but is equally true here.

That basic truth of public health implies that there are corporate responsibilities, which immediately collides with the conservative tenet that we’re all only responsible for ourselves. Which wins?

So who is pitting one against the other and controlling the purse strings anyway? How could we be so docile as to let them distract us like that with some two-bit shell game.

We must be mice.

Got any room for me on that trip?

I can’t wait to move back to New Zealand PERMANENTLY.

Once I built a railroad, I made it run, made it race against time.
Once I built a railroad; now it’s done. Brother, can you spare a dime?
Once I built a tower, up to the sun, brick, and rivet, and lime;
Once I built a tower, now it’s done. Brother, can you spare a dime?

Once this nation had the power to achieve the ancient dream of actually touching the moon. Now we have to worry about lunch ladies wanting health care, because it might diminish the pittance we’re allowed to allocate to feed schoolchildren, which we have to do because we’re incapable of running an economy where their parents can have living wages? Third-world, indeed.