I sat down to dinner recently with the family of one of my oldest and dearest friends. His sister came with her husband and their two young sons. Somehow the state of healthcare in America came up. The eldest son, speaking on behalf of his moron father – ex-Navy – stated emphatically that healthcare is not a basic human right because “it isn’t in the constitution.”

Since I didn’t want to make a scene at the table and point out to a 17-year old kid how utterly absurd his argument was, I chose to keep my mouth shut.

But I mulled over that statement in my head and realized that a) he has probably never actually read the constitution; and b) when you think about it, there is a lot of shit that isn’t mentioned in the constitution: things like indoor plumbing, electricity, the stock market, highways, automobiles, public schools, the internet…pretty much anything created after 1789 isn’t covered in the constitution.

So if we apply the same simple-minded logic of the neocon Trump-loving cretins (or in this case Marco Rubio loving) at the table, all of these things and much more should be abolished from American life for good.

The USA is the only nation on earth where people believe only those who can afford it should have access to healthcare.

It’s a culture of cruelty.

Misguided little bitches like “J” need to understand that he is no better than that homeless guy he mocks every day on his way to school. In fact I would argue that the homeless guy is probably a better person.

Single payer healthcare is not well sold or understood by the vast majority of Americans. No surprise there. The simple truth is that most of the civilized world understands that healthcare is indeed a basic human right, despite what ignorant, brainwashed Americans think.

In this country the only rights are those of private insurers who demand a piece of the action and dictate what services people receive and for how much. We’re spun the myth of the government standing between doctors and patients. What a crock.

Why can’t America join the rest of the civilized world and lose the profit-driven middle-men? Why not simply provide health services to everyone without corporate insurance and big-pharma interference?

We have the worst of all worlds here: insurer welfare – not health care for actual people.

The US is getting ever more irrelevant to the rest of the world, it seems. Nobody wants to copy our outdated and overly rigid constitution anymore: a ‘sacred’ document to many Americans – not just the know-nothing wingnuts. The US Empire is declining exponentially in large and important measures.

Overall the per capita wealth, health and education measures for the US are pathetic for a highly industrialized nation.

The quality of basic services is sliding, too: the US economic system has grown so unfettered, so predatory, so exclusionary that it has become a society sustained almost exclusively by crony capitalism. The most dangerous signs include the rising income and wealth inequality which slows growth and creates instability.

The US is overstretched militarily, ill-prepared technologically, at-risk financially and lacking any dynamism in the face of new global competitors.

Because in America™, nothing is more important than short-term profit: not a clean environment, not children’s education, not infrastructure, not decent available-for-all healthcare. Not anything.

Certainly not world peace or global stability. Not by a long shot.

So go ahead and elect Donald Trump or Marco Rubio your 45th President, America. Solving the great challenges of the future will be something the rest of the world will just have to tackle collectively without the help of the United States.

The US is already a global pariah and the civilized world will just have to deal with it at arms’ length.