Musings on What’s Wrong with the World

It’s tough to be positive sometimes the way things work in the early 21^st century. I really try to live the motto “Do onto others as you would have them do onto you.” I smile at cops. I hold my tongue when people I know and care about do silly, selfish things. I try very hard to keep my promises, even pushing my poor crippled back past its point of tolerance.

Which brings me to today’s bitchfest. I’ve been waiting for THREE months for approval on a procedure on my back which will allow me to walk more than half a block and not have to take pain medication every six hours (needing it more often than that, but ever-mindful of my family’s history of drug abuse). A couple of weeks ago, I received a denial notice in the mail. Why was the procedure denied? Because my doctor, a man with 30 years of experience in delicate spinal surgery, did not chart the specifics of how improved I was after the procedure. Nope, it’s not enough for him to say “She’s better and has less pain” after the rhizotomy. He’s supposed to go into a narration of specifics—for example, “When her back doesn’t hurt so bad, she can drive or sit in a car for more than five minutes without pain,” or “When her back doesn’t hurt so bad, she prefers to take the light rail to work and walk a couple of blocks to the office” or “When her back is better, she can go for 12 to 16 hours without needing pain medication.”

Because he failed to do that, some physician who has never met me has ruled I don’t need the procedure. Furthermore, this same god has ruled that narcotics for pain is bad, bad, bad, and that I should not take them, and that I need to be drug tested to make sure I’m not buying anything on the street or having multiple doctors write multiple prescriptions, or using multiple pharmacies.

This crap is a result of new worker’s compensation law here in California, something I voted for and still am in favor of. There was so much abuse in worker’s comp when I was hurt and worked in the industry in the mid-1990s. But taking a case that has been settled since 1996 and deciding someone with a back that’s been cut on three times is NOT in need of treatment or medication is taking things a bit far.

I have not yet had the energy to fight back yet.

Bitchfest #2: attorneys. They are all that is wrong with the world.

Don’t get me wrong. Some perform very necessary functions, like estate planning or prosecutors or defense attorneys to protect the public or wrongly accused individuals. Imagine this: what if everyone managed to live by “Do onto others as you would have them do onto you,” and we were kind and honest and ethical toward each other? And by “ethical” I don’t mean lawyer ethics, because those aren’t anything close to the ethics I believe are in the Bible. I guess if lawyers went by biblical ethics, defense attorneys could not defend their clients by shifting blame to others.

Attorneys run around wielding power and threatening action against people who have different beliefs than they do. There are some who choose to blog and share their own rants and irrational thoughts, and go on to read other people’s blogs and threaten the writer if they write something the attorney disagrees with. Many love to toss the terms “libel” and “slander” about to silence people who disagree with them.

I guess what ties these two thoughts together is truthfulness. Just be truthful … treat people the way you want them to treat you. If you disagree strongly with someone’s opinion, don’t threaten to hurt them physically or legally. Unless it’s life or death (and it seldom is, really), just shrug and forget about it. Don’t lie about the person whose opinion you disagree with to make yourself feel superior. Throwing around terms like “You are an uneducated trailer trash bitch,” or “You are stupid and delusional” are childlike and show a lack of rational thought.

Chose your battles carefully. And let people fight their own battles.

And to end this with something positive: in the race for California senator, a fiscal conservative, Tom Campbell, is polling ahead of the incumbent Barbara Boxer. I pray there are enough intelligent Californians who understand that today’s fragile economy is the most important thing we are dealing with, and that the democrat’s answer of “tax and spend” simply doesn’t work. It’s time government enjoyed some serious belt-tightening, and that elected officials start living like “regular” people and not elected royalty with bottomless pockets!