Who needs healthcare, anyway?

Since I just graduated from the University of Iowa in May, I'm currently on the alumni insurance plan. This plan is $90 a month, and actually gives me better coverage than my old plan, which I had through my parents.

This week, I opened my insurance bill to discover the shocking total of $113, which is due this month. I promptly called the University, and was informed that all health care plans have undergone rate increases. I inquired as to why I was not informed of this change, and was told that there was no formal announcement, and that University employees have found out through word of mouth.

As I hung up the phone and took my dog on his afternoon walk, I started thinking about health care. I mean, seriously? $113? I tried adding up all of my monthly healthcare expenses related to medication (birth control, etc.), and decided that I'm better off with the insurance. But still, when did our country get like this? I know this has been an issue for quite a while now, so this isn't a revolutionary question or anything, but I still have a right to ask it. How the heck are we supposed to be a happy, healthy country when only the rich people can afford to be well?

My research into the economy (mostly done because of my blogging job at CollegeStock.com) shows that American companies are losing money across the board - and I mean a LOT of money. General Motors lost a total of $38.73 billion last year. So everyone is taking a hit, and that means higher bills for us all. I know that I've been feeling particularly squeezed this month as a result of wedding planning. Engagement party invitations: $125. Engagement picture prints: $400. Wedding dress: $1200. Dear God, where does it end?!

But I digress. My point is that I know the economy is in a slump right now, but it seems that healthcare should still be a top priority for our country, regardless of how the stock market is doing. I still don't understand why we have to spend billions of dollars on guns and none on cough medicine. It seems a bit backwards to me. Oh yeah! It's because all of the members of Congress get their health care for free, and that's why they don't really care about the rest of us. Glad we cleared that one up.

Idiocentrism

I happened to stumble across an interesting site the other day called Idiocentrism. What is idiocentrism, you ask? It is a

version of generalism. Because no one can know everything, generalist knowledge is inevitably partial, contextual, particularist, perspectivist, and idiocentric. ("What is Idiocentrism?")

Basically, it is one guy's version of academic methodology, created from the idea that modern academic studies have become flawed in their attempts at specialization. University fields are focused on exclusion and fragmentation, while generalism is focused on integrating a diverse knowledge base into a series of theories and hypotheses.

During my time at the University, I always despised how every paper I wrote was supposed to be about One Thing. Academic papers, as they currently stand, are structured by stating one main introductory hypothesis, and then supporting that idea with a series of proofs. However, my papers never followed this structure, because they were drawn from so many different sources. This always served to confuse my professors. Examples of my subject matter:

• Vegetarianism as Love
• Running as a Form of Zen Buddhist Meditation
• Feminism Within the Soto Sect of Zen Buddhism
• Bisexuality in America: The Search for Identification

I always thought that I was just really bad at organizing my thoughts. But the real problem was that I saw everything as interrelated, and so I couldn't reduce my topics down to one main line of reasoning. This is similar to Alan Watts' theory of polarization, in which he suggests that "opposites" are not truly opposite, they are just different poles of the same thing. For example, "good" and "bad" are not entities of their own, they are simply points along a continuation of "goodness." Therefore, "good" is just "gooder" than "bad," and vice versa.

Another problem I encountered as a result of my generalist philosophy was having my papers universally misunderstood. For example, I was working on a double major in Women's Studies and Religious Studies, and assumptions that were taken for granted in the Women's Studies field were considered false in the Religious Studies department. Therefore, a paper such as "Feminism Within the Soto Sect of Zen Buddhism" would be praised as traditional methodology by my Women's Studies professors, and criticized as radical idealism by my Religious Studies professors.

How can there be different truths within what is supposed to be one overarching truth? How can something be Wrong in one academic course and Right in another? This is the problem with University specialization. I think we need to go back to more generalist philosophy and be more accepting of scholars that refuse to limit themselves to irrelevant categories.

Stuff White People Do

A huge portion of my Women's Studies degree consisted of examining racial issues, and I thank God that it was. I'd like to make some sort of statement connecting my lack of racial knowledge to my time spent growing up in a small town in Iowa, but that would imply that if I lived in a larger city, I would have been educated about such matters. Obviously, racism in all its various forms is an American (and global) issue that blinds everyone equally due to its pervasiveness, and that's why it's still such a problem.

Learning about race and sociology at the University completely changed how I view the world. Obviously, I still participate in the benefits of white privilege, because all white people get those whether they want them or not (which, by the way, is an important thing for all whites to recognize, lest we run around with the attitude of "I'm not racist, so therefore solving racism is about changing those other racist people"). But the thing that really gets under my skin is when people assume that racism is a dormant problem that is either already solved, or an issue that we can't do anything to change. The blog Stuff White People Do looks at the effects of white privilege from the point of view of a white dude named Macon D, in order to help people understand the ways in which they're participating in the continuation of racism.


Examples of stuff white people do:

• think they can save the world by buying diapers (those annoying Unicef ads)
• sit quietly in movie theaters, and shush those who don't ("spectatorship is nonparticipatory, silent, and white")
• adopt non-white children ("to express their magnanimity")

I also found it interesting that Macon D states that his goal in producing the blog is to write explicitly about whiteness. He says that

I’ve noticed, for instance, that when I ask white individuals to talk about whiteness, about what their being white means for them, they usually have very little to say, and they eventually end up talking about non-white people instead. White Americans are usually unaccustomed to talking directly about their own whiteness, and when asked to do so, they often shift to discussing it in relation to other races, and then end up talking almost exclusively about those other people instead. ("sit quietly in movie theaters - part two")

Personally, I think the reason that the reason white scholars try to stay away from examinations of whiteness is because they don't want to appear to be reducing the discussion to a white viewpoint. As in, "even though minorities have endured centuries of enslavement and abuse, racism is really all about white people in the end." But if white people are racist, and especially if they are unknowingly so, doesn't the solution to the problem lie in getting them to recognize their behavior as racist, and then encouraging them to change it? It seems to me that instead of white people "learning" to "accept" minorities, racism should be dealt with by demonstrating to whites that they are the ones that are flawed, because they buy into the idea that minorities are "different" in the first place.

Blogs such as Stuff White People Do are so instrumental in drawing attention to the blatant privilege present in our society today. It's good to see that readers are getting all riled up in the Comments section of the posts, because it gives me hope that perhaps there are still some individuals out there who are engaged in an ongoing discussion about racism and classism, and are committed to making a change.