For perspective on the issue of skepticism when it comes to dealing with problems in life, let’s look at a definition for the word “un·for·tu·nate”

adjective

1. having or marked by bad fortune; unlucky.

Sometimes it pays to examine the root meaning of a commonly used word to better understand the nature of life. The term “unfortunate” is one of those words. I love seeing the somewhat archaic term “bad fortune” as part of the definition. The word “unlucky” is also a vague reference to anachronistic beliefs that somehow the “fates” are involved in a person’s efforts and outcomes.

We often hear even world champions admit that their victories required a bit of “luck.” When a runner gets boxed in during a middle or long-distance race, yet finds the inside lane open during the last one hundred meters because all the other runners drifted into outside lanes, they might be prone to say, “I got lucky and passed them all on the inside.”

The term “bad luck” works just the opposite way, of course. A runner who has the lead going into the last fifty yards but looks to his right while a competitor passes them on the left is deemed “unlucky” or having “bad luck” in that circumstance.

As a competitive athlete for forty years by the time I turned fifty and had been in the workforce since the age of twenty-one, I’d seen my share of good and bad luck over time. Some of that good “luck” was the result of persistence. Some of the bad luck was my own damned fault as well.

The bookends of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ luck define the extremes. The term “unfortunate” falls somewhere in between. I’d been lucky to find a new job with an agency that paid well once the situation at the Daily Herald turned sour after seven years at the newspaper. Yet deep inside there were harsh doubts that the new position would work out at all. The signs were there from the start. Being dumped at an open desk with a half-assed chair rather than having an office was the first bad sign. There I was, the Chief Marketing Officer of the company sitting in the open spaces with junior sales executives, one of whom was the agency director’s son. Not exactly a construct of high respect or esteem.

By the time I was finished with that job in late 2007, I’d been through my late wife’s complete emotional breakdown after her cancer came back, and trips to the hospital with her to drain liters of fluid out of her abdomen to save her life during repeated bouts of cancer-driven ascites. Eventually, the chemo knocked those cancer sites back but it was rough taking care of her.

Then I lost that job and had to pay COBRA insurance to the agency that had just fired me. Writing monthly checks of $1700 to the company after I was let go felt like bitter irony from my perspective. What kind of country forces people to live like that? Yet without that coverage, her medical expenses would have broken our finances (and us) in two. As it was, the bills would top $50K owed to hospitals (even after the insurance coverage) before that round of treatments was completed.

Blessedly, we appealed to the non-profit hospital where the treatments were taking place and they approved a 90% reduction of all medical expenses. They wrote it off, in other words, and covered it through their foundation. My appreciation for what some wealthy people do for medical care in the United States grew quite a bit. That also made me realize how insanely bad our largely for-profit healthcare industry really is.

It was “bad luck” that my wife got cancer in the first place. But it would have been far more manageable for me to handle if health insurance coverage were not so corporatized. I spent hours and even entire days chasing down doctors that fit within our HMO plan, for example. Buying PPO coverage was always possible, but also considerably more expensive. The idea that medical care in the United States of America is determined by how much you can afford to pay is one of the most Darwinian dynamics imaginable. I found it enormously ironic that Republican criticism of the Affordable Care Act claim that there would be “death panels” deciding which elderly people got to live or die when it was Republicans seeking to block people with pre-existing conditions from getting decent coverage at all.

The principle at work up to the year 2007 was that health insurance was largely dependent upon being employed. In that construct, and this is still largely how it works––employees are dependent upon an employer to negotiate the best plans and rates. The entire system evolved out of companies originally offering health insurance as a “perk” to attract candidates. That became the “norm” in America but it is not “normal” compared to dozens of other countries where nationalized healthcare is a provision of citizenship, not a byproduct of being employed.

While reading Crain’s Chicago Business one afternoon during my late-2007 job hunt, I noticed an article that outlined a painful truth. Health insurance premium costs had risen 96% during the eight years President George W. Bush served in office. Essentially, the costs of healthcare had doubled during his dubious reign. Within a year, President Obama would win the election and soon after that, the Affordable Care Act would be introduced and passed despite ardent resistance from Republican opponents. One of the key provisions of the act was removing pre-existing conditions clauses from insurance coverage contracts. Health insurers could no longer discriminate against people with prior health issues.

Yet the ACA was itself victimized by conservative ideology claiming that it was unconstitutional to require people to get healthcare coverage. The absurdity of the claim was obvious in the fact that car insurance was already a required statute in order to drive a car. Conservatives love to ignore such facts in favor of neo-liberal ideology. The same holds true with the Second Amendment interpretation that ignores the qualifying phrase “A well-regulated militia, being necessary for the security of a free state…” to emphasize and proclaim “the right to bear arms shall not be infringed.”

The political Right goes after Social Security under similarly specious premises because it ostensibly constitutes “socialism” in their minds. While many Americans just want some money securely set aside for use in old age, Republicans want that money dumped into risk-driven investment markets where people can lose it quite easily, especially when Republicans control the government and its power to impact the economy. Most major recessions have taken place under Republican rule. The Right cuts taxes on the rich and doles out corporate welfare on the Reaganesque belief that these measures will fuel super-growth and make everyone rich. But it never turns out that way. And never will.

Republican policies are at best an “unfortunate” take on how things really work, and Americans are right to be healthily skeptical of their nonsense. By contrast, Democrats create and protect programs that provide social and fiscal security for Everyman. In turn, those people support the American economy. It’s that simple, but Republicans are too often arrogant, simple-minded, and driven by extreme ideological zealots ranging from Grover Nordquist to Ayn Rand. Throw in the grifting brand of Jesus favored by the Christian evangelical sect and America follows the example of the sins of Sodom depicted in the Bible. For centuries legalistic Christians have gaslighted gay people as the sinners of Sodom. In truth, the actual sins were much more like the ideologies of today’s conservative political and religious bloc:

As in Judaism… Later Hebrew prophets named the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah as adultery, pridefulness, and uncharitableness. Rictor Norton views classical Jewish texts as stressing the cruelty and lack of hospitality of the inhabitants of Sodom to the “stranger”.

No one in 2007 could predict how far this fascist ideology would spread or what it would ultimately become. But by 2016 the racist reaction to a competent Black President in the person of Barack Obama led to the hugely unfortunate election of Donald Trump. The cancer of that man’s complete lack of moral character and abusive intent spread through society like a Stage Four cancer.

That is not to say that the age of George W. Bush was any better. If anything, his fealty to Right-Wing religious nutballs set the stage for the rise of Trump. Add in the toxic impact of Dick Cheney with his snarling dismissal of governmental balance and love for the concept of the Unitary Executive and the GOP created the mold into which the slime of Trumpism could flow.

I had my share of unfortunate circumstances in 2007, but I also accepted my responsibility for my exhibited flaws and salvaged what I could to move on. I came to accept that for the time being, my main job was taking care of a wife with cancer, my father with a stroke, and and looking after my family and kids in college. It frankly stunned me that some people my employers could be so immutably insensitive during those years when I was under the gun with my wife’s first cancer treatments.

After I’d parted ways with the agency I even received a letter telling me that they were kicking me off their insurance. I’d eventually learn that many small companies fear having anyone on their plan with any kind of perceived health problems. That was a lesson I’d have to learn several more times in the future. Unfortunately, as in my case, bad luck has a tendency to follow people around. (insert bitter laughter here).

What can you take from these experiences of mine? That’s a legitimate question. So here’s my answer. I don’t write this as a “woe is me” script as much as an attempt to share the truth about how the world works, and how it often doesn’t. If what I’ve gone through helps people better understand how to compete in this world, that’s what I’m after. When it comes to your personal welfare, my advice on that front is sound and clear: never assume that people have your best interests in mind. Be happily surprised if they do, and consider yourself fortunate if that happens. But a healthy amount of skepticism is always healthy. That’s all I’m saying.