Or "How A Bloody Stool Enlightened Me to the Ways of the Conservative"

Warning: This post is pretty much the epitome of TMI.

On Friday, I had a revelation. It happened in the bathroom. As I was pooping, I looked down into the water and noticed a red tint. I got up a bit to get a full view and noticed that the middle of the toilet was a bloody bright red. Obviously, something was not right. But what happened next woke me up to The Right. I suddenly felt a kinship with the conservative way of thinking.

The thing that shook me was that after President Barrack Obama put forth a health care reform so revolutionary that it cost him control of the Congress and might still cost him a second term; after he risked his political future so that there'd be health care coverage whenever I had a medical issue, my response to my own personal medical issue was to sit back down, pull out my phone, and go to WebMd.com. I'm sorry but I think there is something to be said about that. There's something to be said about people like me who might not really deserve my fellow's taxpayers money to keep me healthy. I eat like crap, I don't exercise, and when my ass is bleeding I take the path of least resistance and even less effort. It's hard to me to think that my neighbors should potentially foot the bill for my long term care when my own personal first line of defense is to google, "BLOOD WHEN POOP."

But questioning Obamacare wasn't where it ended. Once I got to WebMD, I got the standard You're going to die-agnosis. I believe it was something like I had a cancerous tumor in my colon and said tumor had lupus.
Now, this is the beauty of the internet. Because if this had happened 20 years ago, I would have had to call or search out probably three people (who would have told me to go to urgent care or at least call my own doctor) before I stumbled upon the one knucklehead who said, "Ah yeah, it's probably nothing. Don't worry about it. Just wipe enough so you don't bleed through your trousers." To which I would reply, "Yeah, that's what I was thinking," and go back on my merry way. But with the internet, I just have to scroll down the google search result until I find the answer that I'm looking for. Quick and clean (in other words, the opposite of my bowel movements that day.) So after not liking the WebMD response and not being thrilled with the synopses from other medical sites, I settled on Yahoo Answers to ease my worry. I went to a place that didn't even pretend to have credentials or people who actually could be trusted. I listened to the diagnosis of Butterworm91 or something. And it set me at east. And I went back to work.

This is how the majority works. When you wonder how people can ignore experts and scholars in favor of loudmouths who just say what the people want to hear, even if it isn't true or in the people's best interest, they were thinking what I was thinking. People don't want to know what is wrong, they want to know it'll be alright. And it'll be alright without them having to actually do too much or make any sacrifices. In the bathroom of life, liberals would be someone in the other stall, nosing in and telling me everything that could be wrong and how, even if none of those things were actually wrong, why I should change my life to prevent the things from going wrong. Conservatives, meanwhile, are the warm glow of Yahoo! Answers, potentially leading me astray but telling me what will make it easier for me to make it through the day. I often look at conservatives and think they're as dumb as shit but when I looked at my own bloody stool, I was struck dumb myself.

And this is the lesson that liberals have to learn. When faced with their own issues and their own mortality, people want to hear first and foremost how things are going to be OK. They don't want to hear how we're going to hell in a handbasket and that they are part of the reason why. You need to take the truth and dress it up so that people who are tired from working all day and aching from the fact that they're just going home so they can wake up to go back to work like what they here. Liberals seem to recognize that we all think childishly at times but they never handle the voters with kid gloves. Ironically, the type of blunt, tough love parenting that they'd probably shake their heads at when it comes to actual children, is how they treat the voters that they think are childish.

But if there's a big difference between my reaction and the majority groupthink, it's that most of the issues don't personally affect people like my crimson feces did myself. For the People, it's a lot easier to push away what's really true. It's one thing to not want to hear the truth about something that you're dealing with directly but when it's something that is kind of out of your hands and only impacts your life tangentially, people are going to be far less likely to embrace the ugly truth, especially when a perky half-truth is dancing around right next to it.

Be it anuses or the Presidential race, people want comfort, even if it means not engaging with the cold hard facts. This is the lesson I learned in the bathroom, and one that I hope President Obama and his people take to heart. If that makes any sense. Which it might not. Admittedly.

EDIT: I wrote this last night when I was under the influence of a little alcohol and a lot of Louis CK but I think there's something here so I'll post it. I could work on it more but, honestly, I don't really want to invest more time on a post about my bloody stool. The only thing that could be worse than me spending such little time on the diagnosis of my bleeding butt would be for me to instead spend the time on a blog post about it. But, honestly, such is my life.

Oh, and I'm better. Bleeding-wise. It seems. Clearly the bigger issue is rattling around in my head.