I feel sick...

Am I the only one that felt sick after watching Michael Moore's Sicko? For those of you who have not seen it yet, it is a documentary that exploits the privatized health care system in the United States by exploring universal health care systems in Canada, England, France and Cuba. The atrocities that running health care like a business have allowed evokes the question, "How and why did we get to this point?'

Michael Moore answers that question by playing recorded conversations between President Nixon and Henry Kaiser. Nixon basically says he's not too keen on medical programs and Kaiser says there is a way to privatize insurance so that less people are treated and more profit is made. The idea that profit is more important to this country than human lives is so fucked up and backwards it makes me wonder whether I am living in the right country. ...

It's like the U.S. is so far in shit that we don't even know what it looks like, smells like or how we got in it to begin with. We have a history yet most of us don't know it. We're like a country run by children, fascinated by toys and games; we want all our wants and needs to be satiated here and now with complete disregard for consequences. We don't think. We don't even know how to think and therefore can't possibly think to think.

Thinking in this country is only used as a means to an end. But with thinking there is no end. So we create ends, false ends, wrong ends, regrettable ends.

So who is the big culprit? Capitalism. As Americans we live in one big Monopoly game. We are a country run by children, raising more children to stay children so that we can all keep playing this little game. But the game runs us in circles, and confines our lives and minds only to the game board. EVERYTHING is a means to an end in the game or it has no value. EVERYTHING must be a means to keep the game going. The winners need the game to keep going or everything they have loses value. The pastel colored currency means nothing. And the losers, well they need the game to keep going because according to the rules of the game their lives have no value without the pastel colored currency. So they cling onto the hope of one day becoming one of the winners. And they keep rolling the dice. And they keep waiting their turn.

But it's all just an elaborate game. A game for children. Children who will stay children their entire lives as long as they keep playing. It's like Never Never Land. Once you're in, you stay young forever.

So a part of me wants to leave and move to another country. A country of adults. A country of my peers. After all, neither of my parents are even from America. It was simply their hedonism that brought them here. And their hedonism that has prevented them from growing up. Deep down inside my mother is still the 14 year old girl who left Mexico for the "freedom" to do as she pleased. And my father is still the egotistical, power-hungry 17 year old he was when he left Pakistan.

But then I think maybe I'm here for a reason. If everyone like me left America then I am quite certain the children would start playing with explosives again and kill us all.

Choices, choices, choices.

We can play the game, win it and bask in our pastel-colored prizes.

We can play it, lose it and contribute to the miserable masses.

We can overturn it, start a revolution and create international chaos.

Or we can play it, transform it and make it a game for adults.

What to do, what to do...