New Years Resolution: Solve Americas Biggest Problem, End up Bitter and Cynical
Page 1
Lose Weight, Save Money, and Really Reduce Greenhouse Gases,
Text Copyright 2017 Stephen Simac
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Table of Contents
Introduction: Working as a psychiatric crisis clinician. Season of Mania sets in. Writing about Solutions to America's Biggest Problems in a style that conveys the delusion of believing in rational systemic transformation in the U.S.A.
Chapter 1: Beautiful Dreamers for a New Millennium Our hero makes a New Year's Resolution: Solve America's Biggest Problems, or at least the ones he can. He's never kept a resolution before, but this time he can't sleep. His first mission Fix the Health Care System.
Chapter 2: Affordable Housing, An Idea Whose Time has Past Hexagonal homeless cells, reinforced trailer parks and reengineering an ancient miracle of concrete for a modern world. CrapKrete makes a house a home.
Chapter 3:The Siren Wails for Thee: Safer Roads for All Traffic's a mass killer nobody wants to think about. Except for our hero transforming the carnage of our roads. His safer car morphs into enclosed tricycles with electric motor assist.
Chapter 4: Viva the Velorution! The SafetyCycle! Rides Again A short history of cycling and transportation trends in the 20th century. Peter Pan bus trip to Washington D.C.
Chapter 5 The Peter Pan Principle in D.C. It's hard to make headway in a sea of apathy. Walking breeds ideas for better sidewalks, crosswalks and PR stunts.
Chapter 6 Despair sets in. Fear and Self Loathing. Then our Hero strikes paydirt as a lobbyist for Clean Coal. Not really, but it's what sells in Foggy Bottom.
Chapter 6: Derailled in Washington. Be the Change! Despair sets in. Fear and Self Loathing attack but are beaten back. Striking the Mother Lode in Foggy Bottom. Off to the Rainbow Gathering.
Introduction:
I wrote this series as an amusing rant by a visionary idealist with one crackpot idea after another. He sets off on a manic trip to Washington D.C. to solve America's Biggest problems, but ends up bitter and cynical. He's all about saving the planet, changing the world and transforming America into a healthier, cheaper and friendlier place, until he realizes that Americans just aren't into that.
In serial fashion he lays out his grandiose ideas about health care, affordable housing and safer transportation as he follows his bliss into the . The originals appeared in the Coastal Post, a Marin county monthly newspaper in 2005 the months listed, still viewable on line the last time I looked. They say nothing is ever lost on the internet, unless you stop paying your host.
The CP was an icon of the Free Press in the SF Bay Area that published my articles and columns from 1990, until its untimely demise as print edition in 2010. I had begun writing for Don Deane, the publisher editor of the Coastal Post when I lived in Bolinas, the hometown of the paper. He was a great publisher, but a horrible editor, as most are. It's hard, unappreciated work but someone's gotta do it. And not that Bloody Brit who purposely mangled my copy for the Florida Alligator at UF, and The Phoenix of Broward Community College before that. I barely restrained myself from breaking his "brolley" over his head.
I tired of the old school, just the facts journalism before I even got through J school as we budding reporters called it. This was back during the Carter presidency, post Watergate, post Hunter S. Thompson. Supposedly the Golden Age of investigative, gonzo journalism, even then it was clear the industry was going to be the next buggywhip. One of my professors for a class on the future of journalism, said we'd be reading newspapers on computer screens someday. This was way before the public internet and even personal computers. I asked how they were going to sell ads, and he went blank. I switched majors, but it didn't help my career arc.
The CP didn't make any money, even though it did sell ads. It was a free tabloid that covered the environment, local and larger politics, health care, transportation, science, religion and topics in between. Don published all letters to the editor, which is how I'd gotten my start. His attitude about subject matter and article length were inversely proportional. You could write about anything you wanted if you kept it short and made it funny or pissed powerful people off, preferably both. Getting an angry letter to the editor in response to an article was a blessing in his eyes. In the end that feisty, pull no punches over it's weight attitude is what spelled its demise. Or it could have been the anti-semantic thing.
The coastal Post had been online with its own website since 1996, thanks to Jim Fox our homeless hi tec guy. I don't know how many people actually read these articles online or in print, but my sister said it was the funniest stuff she ever read, or was that my series Harry Pothead: Homeless in Marin? Now that's a blurb. I believe in the power of satire to start velorutions. More on that later.
I wrote this series as a Walter Mitty/Hunter S. Thompson adventure tale in a stream of consciousness style based on several manic clients I'd evaluated as a psychiatric crisis clinician in western Massachusetts, having moved there from California. Thanks to the wonders of the internet and electronic transmission this series was written on the east coast and published on the west coast. My J school professor never saw that coming. They were always the most interesting and quotable in my case notes, with their pressured speech, quick slants down field, leaping receptions and absolute conviction about their concepts. You might say that sounds like all my writing, but this was deliberate. It helps if you read it as fast as Jack Kerouac typed. I birthed several concepts in this series that would emerge fully formed over the next ten years.
The first article in this series was the seed concept for my book on reforming health care, Save Trillions with Universal Health Care. This New Year's health care solution is a little more twisted than my book's, as are those for Affordable Housing, the SafetyCycle! and the CycleTrain! More on those in my book, Lose Weight, Save Money and Really Reduce Greenhouse Warming, from another expanded series first published in the Coastal Post. That was also the year I mocked up a new graphic logo for my original 1982 Share the Road with Bikes sign, and created the Look Twice for One Less Car bicycle/pedestrian awareness sign.
I've edited the series from those articles, tweaking it to punch up the humor. I haven't added anything to make me seem more prescient than I am. My best ideas have usually been about twenty years ahead of the time, (which isn't really helpful), so these decade old ones still aren't in play. I had taken to breaking up grey space of text in my Coastal Post print articles with out of context quotations in boldface. This series started with a mashup from popular songs, then Grateful Dead lyrics, and after our hero takes a trip to Washington on a Peter Pan bus, (actual busline in the New England area) directly from J. M Barrie's classic,
BEAUTIFUL DREAMERS FOR A NEW MILLENNIUM
January 2005
Health is the number one concern for Americans, more than any other issue, except for money. They often coincide. We say we have the best medical system in the world because it's so expensive. We spend almost $3 trillion a year on medical care in America, but we are one sick country.
Measured strictly by basics like life span, infant mortality, teenage pregnancies, infertility, rates of disease and disabilities, our medical system is no bargain. We're way down on the list of industrialized nations for these indicators of health, all of whom spend far less money
on "socialized medicine". Dollar for dollar, even places like Jello Biafra compare favorably.
The U.S. also has socialized medicine, but we don't call it that. Medical training is government subsidized and regulated through Medicare payments and tax breaks for hospitals and bastions of conventional medicine. The medical field relies on socialized medicine as a foundation to support the spires of private payer care.
Medicare/Medicaid for congress (preferred providers), the elderly, the poorest and assorted others (take what you can get) is socialized medicine that treats