Another wave of President Obama-bashing, affordable care-scoffing crests again. What has he been trying to accomplish that is so reprehensible? Not furthering his own political career, not making the rich richer, not protecting the treasured perks of the relatively well off. Instead, he tried to behave as a leader who believes he is serving all the people of the United States, as a reasonable, caring individual who realizes that the state of health care in our country is a travesty. Insurance companies, drug companies, and various medical providers rake in profits from the ample to the obscene while millions go broke trying to pay for care, or simply go without.

It’s so terribly easy to sit behind a computer keyboard in a comfy space, secure in the knowledge that a doctor or hospital visit is simply a matter of making an appointment or calling an ambulance. It’s so tragically easy to make everything about politics and systems of government. It’s so easy to be smug about one’s sense of independence and gleefully debate the virtues (or lack thereof) of capitalism and socialism. And all the while, human beings keep falling through the cracks between all the arguments and egotism and jingoism and self-centered pandering for votes and sound bites. All the while, real people ache and suffer and die.

What makes it all so much more heartbreaking to me is that, in all the jibes and snide comments and rigid generalizations, I read nothing of genuine compassion, true humanity…no hint of understanding that life is about people, human beings…not “issues.” Sadly, as long as the Tea Party-ers and their ilk have their way, the health, general welfare, and happiness of the American people will continue to come last in the pecking order of priorities, and be of considerably lesser importance than backing the agenda of the NRA (background checks aren’t fair!), eating away at women’s absolute right to make their own health care decisions, trying to get everyone to bea “Christian” (according to their standards), teaching creationism in schools, getting those darn poor people to stop whining about their lot in life, and ensuring that those one-percenters stay fat and happy.

I believe, and will continue to believe until my last day, that our real purpose in coming into this life is to learn that we are connected to each other, that we owe each other compassion and kindness and care, and that there is nothing material that matters more than human beings, and no power great than love. Frankly, I don’t care what system of government works to accomplish this evolution in consciousness, as long as it does, because until we as a culture, a society, and a nation, shift our priorities to what matters, we are stuck in the half-dark, half-light world in which the ego mind thrives and the soul withers.