Nowhere is the fact that all order must arise first from chaos more obvious than in the realm of our nation's (lack of a) health care policy. This subject is one that is bound to come up in any but the most superficial of contemporary conversations. Fayettevillians Hilly & Billy were catapulted into their present residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on the hopes and fears of a People quite literally sick and tired of being ripped off by the protection-racket tactics of giant insurance companies, the country-club dues for the A.M.A. and the crimes against humanity perpetrated by the real drug cartels - not Colombians or Jamaicans, but the suits at Dow and Union Carbide and their ilk. The People of the United Snakes are also annoyed at living in the only industrialized nation on earth that has no national health care system. Amerika simply does not have, and has not ever had, a national health care system. There are three, and only three reasons; the insurance industry of course, the Amerikan Medical Association, to no one's surprise, and the manufacturers and purveyors of pharmaceutical products. To pretend that there is a health care system that simply "needs to be fixed," rather than take on the task of developing a real one, is an insult to everyone who voted to end the dynastic republican rape of America.

Instead of actually implementing a national health care program, Hilly &;Billy declared that they were going to "reform" health care. It's surprising how many people fell for that line, as if there was something to reform. Plans to remodel some non-existent Lunar or Marshan colony would have been no less fantastic! Now the Hilly/Billy is pushing for "coverage" of all Amerikans and promising "benefits" to everyone. "Coverage" and "benefits" are not medical terms, though. Most amerikans would dearly love to have health care; but many refuse outright to have anything to do with the insidious insurance industry. By only slightly modifying the Selective Service Act, the need for any intrusion of the insurance industry into the realm of health care would become an obsolete and anachronistic concept.

Instead of a compulsory stint in the military, why not, instead, create a mandatory G.I. Med &;Ed militia? Not a serve and protect police state, but a bona fide walk-in, get-fixed and walk-out (free of charge) public health system with door-to-door dieticians, diagnosticians, therapists, nurses and educators in every neighborhood in amerika twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. By offering young amerikans the option of serving a two year tour of duty in lieu of their senior year of high school, a national medical corps could be built into the existing education and/or military system! Every participant in such a program should be guaranteed that they would come out with nothing less than a teaching degree or the know how and experience to set up and maintain an updated "free clinic" of the sort that somehow disappeared over the course of three consecutive Republican administrations. Give motivated students a year of intensive training in classroom and lab environments and then turn them loose on the streets for another year under supervision and then watch them remediate entire communities in language and math skills while providing free preventative health maintenance and monitoring!

Preventative health maintenance doesn't mean drug company kickbacks to the A.M.A, either. Consider that Traditional Chinese Medicine has a proven record thousands of years old and that acupuncture is the primary method of health care for more than a quarter of the world's population. Peruse the available documentation compiled by the World Health Organization and the National Institute of Health regarding the use of acupuncture as a treatment for AIDS, cancer, diabetes,and other "incurable" diseases, then determine for yourself why the pharmaceutical cartels and the A.M.A. have fought so hard to prevent all but a handful of states from adopting legislation for the licensure of acupuncturists and T.C.M. practitioners. The A.M.A. may fund billions of dollars in research investigating the recuperative powers of shark cartilage as a cure for cancer, but they refuse to admit that such research is based upon not centuries but millennia of empirical documentation and practice in China.

The legal and medical professions are similar in that they both require a great deal of formal education, they both require practical, hands-on experience and they both deal primarily with the suffering of humankind. The great difference is in that last category, for while the legal profession exploits the suffering of humanity, the medical profession seeks to alleviate suffering. Today, when seven out of ten college graduates plan a career in law, one wonders whether their time and energy might not be better spent training in nonintrusive, holistic methods of health care. The secondary role of the Amerikan military has long been to train a skilled work force in various trades and crafts. Flexing the global muscle of fissionable plutonium has been the primary concern. Some might say that's Bolshevik fodder, but the reality is that a course for the constructive redirection of national priorities lies well within the creative abilities of Chelsea Clinton, or practically any contemporary amerikan boy or girl of her age group. They would be nearly unanimous in telling the adult legislators that the best place to learn problem solving is in school!

Genetic engineering to change the characteristics of unborn children might be extreme, but it can serve as a fine example of how the prioritization of education could improve the human condition: The technology exists, we lack only the trained personnel to make that technology available to the masses. There is no excuse for our government not to provide such training and to further provide the service itself - all free of charge. Any controversies surrounding the subject have either been fabricated solely to elicit emotional response or they are, at best, based upon that most deadly of demons from antiquity; the three headed dog of ignorance, fear and superstition. While presumptuous individuals may deem themselves possessed of a higher consciousness than their contemporaries (and therefor capable of taking upon themselves the enormous task of setting moral values for society at large,) for the rest of us to yield to the societal machinations of the mob mentality that results when any two or more such egomaniacal (albeit well meaning, I am sure) individuals gather together in the name of their own perceived moral superiority is to invite a future of famine and disease to a world that might otherwise eliminate those very words from her vocabulary - through just such application of science and technology as genetic engineering represents. One need not be prescient to envision a generation of disease resistant, well formed children capable of using both cerebral hemispheres at once and with equal proficiency. For us to sit idly by and watch children die at birth or in infancy, or to (leave the womb and) enter the world destined to die of heart disease or cancer - when the means are at our disposal to allow them to be born as veritable super-humans - is a crime so hideous in nature as to guarantee that future generations will view the sanctimonity of the late twentieth century in much the same way that we now see the torture and murder of midwives and herbologists by the Spanish Inquisition.