America The Baffling

Americans baffle me. (And I was born one, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I’ve lived here all my life.) I have understood Arabs, many tribes of Europeans, black Africans, some Orientals and a few Australians. I’ve even met a few Frenchwomen I liked. (Moderately.)
I confess I do not understand Americans. There is something about our society that has always left me feeling like an outsider looking in—in total bemusement. It may have something to do with my inherent Calvinism—and the fact that this nation has not only tried to expunge its Calvinist roots but now lives with the guilt of feeling there’s something back there we’re forgetting.
I often sense, for example, that I understand the Constitution better than our Supreme Court justices do simply because I was raised as much a Calvinist as most of the writers were. (Don’t be fooled by labels such as “Deist” or even Anglican—the former were all raised Calvinists and the latter was shot through [since Elizabeth I] with Calvinism—and the guy who came up with the Virginia Plan that was mostly followed was educated as a Presbyterian Divine.)
But , if the Constitution doesn’t baffle me, Americans do. Two instances come to mind, both having to do with our attitude toward government. One has to do with health care, the other with the new electric light bulbs.
We’ve known for years that fluorescent lights are not optimum for eyestrain and health. We tolerate them in schools and offices because they are cheap. But we all know that if one breaks, poisonous gases flood the air—and you’d better not get cut by the broken glass.
We use incandescent bulbs at home because they are far safer and more eye-user friendly. Yet when the government mandates that we MUST all switch to fluorescents in every light socket in the country, we don’t even peep.
Europeans were stuck with the same regulations, and they practically rioted in protest. Stores sold out of the last stocks of incandescent light bulbs in days. People stocked up for years to come. (I’m stocking up, too.) Cost trumps safety and health every time.
(Remember how auto manufacturers screamed and whined at the cost of putting in seat belts and air bags? They might save a few thousand lives—we lose more on the road each year than we’ve lost in most of our wars. But, the cost! Oh, my, the cost! Better a cheaper Chevy than a live driver, such seems to be the accepted reasoning.)
Then there’s health care. Unlike Europeans who accept health care as a government cost of doing business—just as we accept unemployment insurance, disability insurance, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid for the elderly as government costs and responsibilities—we shriek at the very thought of having that same government involved in health insurance.
Government runs our schools, our state colleges and universities, plows and paves our roads, provides the police and public health services that protect us, keeps our libraries open, and determines whether we shall have digital or analog TV, etc. etc. etc., and we don’t protest.
But, oh woe, oh dearie me, let government suggest ways of cutting our medical costs and insuring even the unemployed, and how we bellow! (If I were Obama I’d be tempted to say, Okay we’ll pull government out of your health care.
We’ll delete Medicare as a government cost. You pay your own premium. That way government will “keep its hands off [your] Medicare”, just as you asked. Want to watch an entire major strata of voters do an about face with bone shattering suddenness?}
No one would dare suggest THAT!!. (It’s such a good thing I’m not president!) So we’ll continue in our own bizarre version of double think. The amazing thing is that it didn’t take a Big Brother to make us this way. We got here by ourselves.