Driving lessons

[madamesilverspurs]

When I learned to drive the first rule I learned was that any hint of misconduct behind the wheel was met with, at the very least, the loss of the keys for a month. Dad owned the keys and the car. We were taught how to drive the vehicle, and we were taught to respect what damage that could be done if we didn't drive it correctly. If we wanted to drive, we drove by the rules. And we were told that if we did something wrong and somebody got hurt as a result, we'd lose the keys, period. Eventually, we all grew up and got our own cars; between the four of us we've probably gotten less than half a dozen tickets over the years. Because we were taught to respect the vehicle's purpose and its potential for harm.

In a larger sense, we own the keys to the healthcare bus. Heck, we own the bus but we're being told to keep our hands off it. And the people with the keys tend to have a rather variable disposition; as we're boarding they're all sweetness and light and promises of a smooth ride, and by the time we make it to our seats our pockets are much lighter than they were. Hmmm. And sometimes the driver comes stomping through the bus and accuses someone of having sat in the same seat before, so off they go! Every now and then the bus stops for no reason that we can discern, and some of the passengers are plucked from their seats and told they can't ride ever again, then they're tossed out the door and the bus rolls on. And if the bus crew doesn't like the looks of a potential passenger, they just pick him up and toss him right under the bus.

Finally, I stood up and objected when someone was booted out the door with the bus rolling through the middle of nowhere. I allowed as how the fella had paid for his ticket, and he needed to be back on the bus. "Matter of fact," sez I , "I'm one of the owners of this bus." The driver glares at me, and points at me and screams "Socialist!" Then he turns to his buddies and a couple other drivers and asks them, "Who do you want driving this thing, me? Or the crazy lady who wants all the other people to ride?" They scream for the driver, cheering him on while glaring at me and occasionally repeating the "Socialist!" scream. Then he gives one of those snarky sneers as he tosses the keys up and down on his way to the driver's seat.

Meanwhile, here in the back of the bus there's more of us than him and his buds. We all just look at each other, nod to each other and smile a bit grimly. They know we own the bus, they know we own the keys. And they know that WE know that they've been filling their pockets with the contents of ours. And they're starting to get worried. They've had a long and profitable venture driving the bus to places that were bad for us but very lucrative for them. They've been bad. Very bad. Sometimes they've been so bad that people have died. So, now it's time for us to take the keys away. It's time to get the bus back on the correct road.

We'll start by bringing back on board those who were so capriciously tossed off. And to make sure there's room for them we'll offload those nasty drivers (right after we retrieve our stuff from their pockets, that is). Oh, don't worry, we won't totally abandon them. We'll leave them with some very nice bootstraps. So what if they're barefoot? As long as they have bootstraps they can figure out how to pull themselves up, right? Right.