Jimmy Kimmel comes on the air each and every night to help America find laughter in even the most difficult situations. But on Monday, the Jimmy Kimmel Live! host took time out of his show to share a deeply personal story and a plea with the U.S. government: Please save Obamacare.
Kimmel shared in his opening monologue that his wife had given birth to their second child, a son named Billy, one week ago. The joyous event soon took a turn after a nurse discovered Billy had a dangerous heart defect and needed emergency surgery.
“We had atheists praying for us, ok?” Kimmel joked. “And I hate to say it—even that son of a [expletive] Matt Damon sent flowers.”
Luckily, the story comes with a happy ending, and Billy is already home with his parents and his loving big sister. But what Kimmel wanted to stress more than anything in his monologue is that parents have to worry about affording the care needed to save their child’s life.
“President Trump last month proposed a $6 billion cut to funding to the National Institute of Health. And thank God our congressmen made a deal last night to not go along with that,” Kimmel noted, adding that more than 40 percent of those affected would be children, and that just a few years ago, millions of Americans went without health care.
“If your baby is going to die, and it doesn’t have to, it shouldn’t matter how much money you make,” Kimmel said. “I think that’s something that, whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat or something else, we all agree on that, right? … This isn’t football. There are no teams. We are the team—it’s the United States. Don’t let their partisan squabbles divide us on something every decent person wants.”
Currently, The White House and congressional Republicans are shopping around their latest health care bill, which would repeal and replace Obamacare. "I want it to be good for sick people. It's not in its final form right now," Trump told Bloomberg News. "It will be every bit as good on preexisting conditions as Obamacare." However, as CNN reported, they do not have enough votes to pass the measure and no vote has been scheduled.
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Robin Williams performs for military men and women as part of a United Service Organization (USO) show on board Camp Phoenix in December 2007
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Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.