Leftist rant no. 2673: The True Believers

It doesn’t happen all that often, but sometimes I long to once again live in Western Europe.
I emigrated to the USA 10 years ago and consider myself half-American by now.
I talk, or rather Skype, with my parents in Amsterdam every week.
Usually this is done on Sunday morning, with a cup of tea next to me and my hair still in disarray from last night’s sleep.
We chat about current events and what is going on with the family and friends, and every few weeks I inquire about the well-being of ‘aunt’ Katie.
She’s not really an aunt of ours, but she was my dad’s late sister’s best friend.
Katie is 93 and as demented as a doorknob.
She lives in an institution for the mentally ill and has no more living family or friends.
The only visitors she gets are my parents.
If the truth be told, Katie wasn’t particularly likeable before dementia turned off the lights one by one.
She was rather egocentric and shallow.
One minute after my parents leave her she has already forgotten they were ever there, and she barely recognizes them anymore.
Such is life. The end often isn't pretty.

I asked my mom why she keeps visiting her, even though Katie never was a friend of hers and Katie doesn’t remember the visits anyway.
She said that she felt duty-bound to visit her because Katie has no one else left in the world.

I feel homesick today because in this shiny nation I am regularly confronted with human toilet brushes -all of whom dwell on the far-right of our political spectrum, where they blabber on about Adam Fucking Smith and this deranged nonsense about invisible hands - who proudly state that they feel no responsibility towards anyone but their own kin.
One would think that a recrudescence of this kind of malefic psilosophy would be unlikely considering the financial malaise that the greedy and selfish have inflicted on the world’s economy, but nothing could be further from the truth.
The True Believers still obstreperously defend their turgid Objectivist piffle.

I miss Holland.
No one there ever speaks such abysmal nonsense about the benefits that selfishness is supposed to bring to the common good.
But then again, what do these Dutch socialist peasants know?
They live in that Hellhole where all sick people actually get medical care without going bankrupt.
They bought into that ridiculous and un-American idea that it is not OK for a CEO to make 300 times more money than the employees on the work-floor.
They waste their money on affordable education for all who want it and they have an absurd economic model in which not many people are extravagantly rich or poor.
They even have the gall to waste precious tax Euros on the full-time care for the mentally ill, like Katie, who didn’t have the good sense to prepare for such an event by saving up a million Euros.
On second thought, I am no longer homesick.
What a wretched place Holland is.
I will Skype my parents this Sunday and inquire why they are wasting their time on a senile old bag who isn’t even family.