Right - I joked about voting for Cthulhu in my journal recently, because the whole process feels to me like "election year theater". Any number of candidates pretend to promise things, we make ritual marks on paper or signify our participation in other ways, two candidates get picked as potential winners, we go through the ritual again, and then one candidate gets the office in question.


I'm comfortable paying taxes on the fuel I put into my car, because I see it as supporting the upkeep of the roads I drive on, and I expect that the various governments that I live under will build and maintain roads connecting different parts of the country / state / city. But when I heard that a very ill friend of mine had finally gotten on Medicaid, it didn't fulfill any expectations I had - it went contrary to my expectations and I was surprised and pleased.

I guess I meet the profile of an American who doesn't really know what socialized-anything would look like, like you said downthread - I think of "socialized medicine" and I think "the government making something that barely works stop working even that much", not a system more or less like the one I'm used to except with the government stepping in to pay if someone legitimately can't afford to do so.