With less than 24 hours left, there’s only $135 to until my Kickstarter hits its goal!  Please help out if you can, either by contributing or spreading the word. You might end up being the one who puts us over the top!  It ends at 12:28 pm on Tuesday, September 2nd.

One of the things I talk about in the KS page project description is how working with people from other countries informed this project.  A recent example of that was a conversation I had with a colleague from the UK about his summer.  He goes back there with his kids to stay with his parents for most of summer vacation.  When I asked him how his vacation was, he said he wasn’t too happy to be back.  As an example of why, he talked about taking one of his daughters to the doctor when she had a scrape of some sort.  He was worried about having the proper paperwork, and when calling to make the appointment with the doctor’s office, had trouble finding his passport.  “Hold on,” he said to the secretary, “I’m not sure where my passport is…I’m sorry …”  Hearing the anxiety in his voice, she stopped him short.  “Look,” she said, “This isn’t the United States of America.  We don’t care about the paperwork or the money.  Just bring her in and we’ll see her.”

There’s a song on this record called Stock Up All the Prisons that winds the topics of prisons, hospitals, schools, guns, and drugs together over the course of 3 choruses and 4 verses.  It’s sung in the first person from the point of view of a fictional president, who promises to “lock hospital doors” because “HMOs have bottom lines that we just need to pad.”  My colleague’s story about the real story of life under socialized medicine brings home the point that it doesn’t have to be that way, even in today’s age of international austerity.  Last year, he asked me “How do people here do it?” while telling me about his kids’ eye doctor’s bills, which ran into the thousands of dollars for routine stuff that would be free in the UK.  As we talked about the reasons things are so screwed up here, he said “I don’t think it’ll ever change.”  Here’s hoping he’s wrong, but you do wonder sometimes.