Our neighbor, Mike, has returned home. He walked into his home Sunday night to find no internet service and therefore no phone service. Like us, his cell service is degraded to the point of uselessness by the surrounding mountains and the narrowness of our valley. He walked up Monday to borrow our phone in order to call Comcast to report his loss of service.
His repeated loss of VOIP access provided by his (and our) ISP is the reason we still maintain a landline separate from a VOIP house number. Our cells also are useless here without the use of an internet booster to move our cell signals up and down.
This morning’s Hike with Mike provided the answer to his service outage. His home took a lightning hit that fried two hard-wired phones and melted the cable outside of one phone jack. As with our pool heater switch burnout, it is impossible to fix the exact time damage occurred. Also, as with us, he is very fortunate that no other damage happened.
Today’s walk ended at his mailbox arguing things political. Mike is a 2nd Amendment voter who tends to follow the libertarian bent. He believes that my support for universal government funded health care for all American citizens is “demanding something for free.” My contention that I paid premiums for Medicare and Social Security seems to fail to register. He is horribly concerned that with the advent of universal health care he will wind up paying for care for illegals. He acknowledges that he is already doing so but refuses to concede that we can impose a fair and reliable citizenship gate for any other than emergency care.
We argued today about rationing healthcare. Mike insists that there is no rationing of health care in the United States. I insist that we ration access to health care in the U.S, by affordability while other nations may use availability as the determinant factor in providing a procedure or diagnostic. Mike’s counter, “If you can’t afford to pay for it you’re not supposed to have it.”
I should add that Mike is 65 years of age, single with no dependents or pets, and his home and vehicles are paid off.
There exists not the ghost of a chance that our relative political positions will change as a result of something one of us says to the other. However, these morning arguments never result in animosity and provide a degree of wonder when I consider how someone I otherwise like so well can be so enamored of seriously wrong political thought. I’m sure I invoke the same frustration in his mind. Good neighbors are invaluable.
No comments:
Post a Comment