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That is why they’re bringing out the guns. It‘s not just the right-wing gothic imagination run amok (though it is that). It’s war.

The healthcare debate in a nutshell: declining revenues + rising costs = growing competition for shrinking resources. And on one side of that conflict, an aging segment of the population, weaned on and wedded to the postwar cult of youthfulness, painfully aware that as its ideals fade its healthcare costs will rise. They’ve grown fat on a diet of screwing younger people out of everything: cognitive capture through branding empires imprinted (literally) from diapers onward, consumer culture that’s cheap in substance only (young pay old), the compounding bloat of educational costs (we skipped out on our student loans therefore you can’t), the abyss of debt culture, the wilderness of mirrors called credit reporting, skyrocketing housing costs (lease-to-own mutated into default-to-turns-out-you-rented-sucker), the infinite proliferation of unaccountable “fees,” dwindling pay (and the threat of endless “internships”), the informalization of work (and destruction of labor), a ubiquitous cult of waste (whose roving shrine is the “SUV”), and social safety nets as frail as the generations that benefited from them. The old-timers are terrified on two fronts that granny really will be unplugged: first, because they secretly identify with “granny” and, second, because they (also secretly) know the values they’ve inculcated in their young all but guarantee it.