Reporters gone wild

  It’s really not nice to joke about an attempted bank robbery. Especially one where the robber comes in with a shotgun. Especially one where the alleged robber is a former Savannah Morning News employee.

I’m trying to control my sardonic tongue. It’s hard, because any number of jokes come to mind:

Such as: Well, that’s one way to get a decent Cost Of Living increase.

Or: Good thing he didn’t do that while he was still employed there, or he would have received a verbal reprimand.

Or: How will Gen. Lynch write about this in his next column as evidence of progress in Iraq?

I seriously doubt the former reporter in question, Mr. Lowery, is a hardcore criminal. It seems to me that more likely, he’s one of millions of people in this country who desperately need mental health care but have almost literally no place to receive it. One of the most underreported stories in America today is the almost total lack of even marginably affordable mental health treatment. It’s a big reason crime rates stay so high.

(Please note I’m not suggesting criminals should go unpunished. Mr. Lowery did the crime, and he should do the time. What I am saying is twofold: A) perhaps this incident would never have happened if he’d received adequate treatment; and B) it would be nice if in prison he could be treated for his obvious mental health problems so they don’t reappear if/when he gets out.)

I hate to make this all about politics, but there’s a clear and obvious political element. Hillary Clinton, as well as I think every other Democrat running for president, is putting mental health care on a parity with physical health care in her proposed reforms. This is long overdue, and I can’t stress enough how much such a move will positively impact crime statistics in this country.

Not that I think any of these candidates, if elected, will be able to change anything. Americans simply have too big a soft spot for getting screwed over by big corporations. We can’t get enough of it. It’s in our DNA.

In many quarters willingly letting yourself be abused by your employer is literally a hallmark of patriotism. Go ask some miners in West Virginia or Utah about the need for increased oversight and the need for their bosses to spend more money on increased mine safety. They’ll look at you like you’re crazy, reminisce about how much harder their daddy’s daddy had it, and go back into those mines to continue breaking their backs and destroying their lungs so the company they work for can make a few extra bucks to go toward a new Gulfstream.

I’ve learned much to my chagrin over the past couple of decades that the vast majority of Americans would rather that they and their families live in utter misery than deny a large multinational corporation even a penny of profit. No amount of evidence that every merger and every acquisition that’s ever been made results in higher costs and decreased service will convince them otherwise. Sure, they moan about it, but when they get an opportunity to actually do something about it — such as to vote — they go back to their old indentured servitude ways.

This ideological blind spot approaches the level of theological dogma. Our blind attachment to advancing corporate profit is on the same absurd level of the Byzantine Empire arguing for centuries over icons while the Ottoman Turks slowly encroached from all sides.

So anyway, all this means you’ll probably continue to see crazy guys with shotguns going into your corner bank. Oh, well — that’s got to be better than “socialized medicine,” right?

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