I Have All Sorts of Thoughts About Health Care and Denzel Washington

I love movies. It doesn’t really matter what kind of movie it is. As long as it was committed to celluloid, I’ll watch the shit, but only so I can relate to my peers through the shallowest of shared experiences. Let’s get that straight: you could be my brother but unless you can name three reasons why Data from The Goonies would totally own Short Round from Temple of Doom in a backyard, bare-knuckle, Thunderdome-type situation, our friendship will probably be short lived.

Ergo, I can’t help but see the world through my very narrow prism of pop culture ties and references.

Example: Does anyone remember a not-very-popular or good Denzel Washington movie called Fallen? No? Alright, well, in this movie Denzel plays this detective who is investigating this series of deaths. And turns out these murders are being committed by this vengeful ghost-demon thing that was killed can now possess folks simply by touching someone. So the ghost-demon-killer-Glenn-Beck thing inhabits you, takes over, you kill someone and touch someone else and bam, its into this other person and you have no knowledge of what you have done.

And this stupid, stupid movie is the only way I can understand health care protestors.

I mean, they don’t want universal health care, fine. So they hoist themselves off their sisters and squeeze their lard-full asses out of their trailers and round up the most learnded folks in the county which (purely coincidentally, of course) happens to be a the sweetest, most adorable seven-year-old girl who suffers from chronic asthma, which is totally manageable and treatable if the girls parents had health insurance. Which they don’t. Also the little girl has a lisp and uses crutches. Feel bad.

So they round up this asthma-riddled, crutches-bound, lispy ball of cuteness, pigtails and hand-me-down Mary Janes, and tell her to write them a couple of signs that pithily explain their oppositions to "that there commie thing that hurt’s ’Merica and cancels every show Chris O’Donnell tries to star in."

They get their signs made, and their water bottles (rage parches the throat, guys, seriously), and their tea bags and whatever. And then one of them, because he’s a genius, decides to confirm the stereotype of every other person in American and the world and packs a fucking gun.

And you know what? That's fantastic! Seriously, well done, America. Free speech, even if it is guttural and probably a signifier you were strangled by your own umbilical cord inside mother-cousin’s womb, is a fantastic, beautiful thing. Free speech, to me, is pretty much the equivalent of Scarlett Johansson wearing a loin cloth, riding Falcor from Neverending Story while fighting the mechanized minions of Hitler bin Laden Vader. In other words: FUCKING AWESOME.

But the gun thing... I mean, that guy took a huge fucking leap of logic. Like he clearly fucking vaulted over steps B – F and landed on N was like “Firearms! Yes! Nothing says patriotism like Yosemite Sam!” But whatever. It was an anomaly.

Until it happened again.

At that point, I lose the plot. Because, literally, when I heard that more than one dude has deemed it appropriate to bring a loaded weapon to a health care rally, my brain went, “Oh, dude, no, no. See, it’s just like in Fallen. There is a literally a crazy gun-loving, pro-privatization ghost-demon making its way across the United States and possessing some of the less educated folks of this fair land and convincing them that nuanced arguments are no match for loaded automatics.”

This is my brain, people.

Because you just know, exactly like it plays out in Fallen, that these people are eventually going to go home unpack their signs and their shit and sit around the table in the special kind of afterglow that only dawns on the most self-righteous and the one dude is going to take out his gun, put it on the table, chuckle a bit, stop, look around and go, “Seriously, guys, what the fuck? Why didn’t someone stop me? Todd, c’mon, remember that time in ninth grade when you were loaded on margarita mix and wanted to go go-karting? And remember how I stopped you by telling you that maragarita mix doesn’t actually contain any alcohol and then you didn’t look like a complete asshole? YEAH, WAY TO RETURN THE FAVOR, TODD!”