America continues to struggle with its class confrontation of elitism versus inclusivism. As a lifelong Republican, I hold many or most of the conservative values, but for the life of me I cannot understand how so many Americans oppose health insurance for everybody rather than a select minority. It sounds like those early Colonialists who believed only property owners should be allowed voting rights, (thus the development of the current electoral college voting system). Btw, many of them believed it was perfectly okay to give the black man only 3/5s of a vote because he was not equal.
For eighty years now, health insurance has been an issue and we still can't get it right. FDR backed his version; Harry Truman supported it, plus numerous others on both sides of the political aisle, including the now infamous Richard Nixon, whose health plan was little different from what is being offered today.
This is not Obama’s battle; it is our--America’s--battle to overcome elitism; it is not a battle against Socialism; it is an attempt to bring everybody into a process that citizenship should allow--a process we still have not achieved.
Many of the same forces that oppose Health Insurance Reform are those which opposed Integration, when the Southern States Rights bloc protected the rights of the white majority for so long. Remember Orval Faubus and George Wallace? I remember Richard Russell and numerous Dixiecrats who opposed “civil rights for everybody”--I call that elitism.
One simple solution to Health Reform is for Congress to give everybody what Congress gave itself--at our expense. As columnist Bill Ellis points out, we did not vote for Congressional health care, but we pay for it, and a lot of other unnecessary stuff. All Congress has to do is give us equal rights to the same health care; we already pay for it, like we do everything else.
Republicans and others who oppose this because of Budget costs etc are not at all backward about charging us for their military spending for a war the public did not vote for but still pays for. Iraq only cost us about $1.9 million per minute during 2008, and we didn’t even have a choice. SO, I have no problem at all in demanding equal health insurance to that of my Congressional Representatives--health insurance is not a right for a guaranteed few and should not even be “for profit.”
If the health issue is held up because of certain “moral” issues--abortion--as one friend challenged me, then I wonder … When “half” of our school children are on food stamps, what does that tell me about our country and its "sense of morality." It tells me that a few people in our country are living tolerably well (or better) while a whole segment of our country finds itself below economic par. What is “moral” about that? What is “moral” about launching a war that was not really necessary to the defense of our country? What is moral about my being forced to support an immoral war?
Such issues are no more moral than segregation was! (As for abortion: if I had my way, the government would not be meddling in that either way; I do not believe in abortion but neither do I believe the government has a right to dictate to me what should be a personal--civil rights--issue of morality.
Someone challenged me that “if those lazy bums would get off their ‘blessed assurance’ they would not have to be on the dole; if they would work they could buy health insurance, but I personally know too many people of whom that is not true. That is simply another ploy by those people who prefer to cut the safety net out from under people in order to cut taxes and maintain ideological purity.
I know people who believe that; yet they think little of unethical skimming of business profits and/or avoiding paying taxes when they can get away with it. Out of touch with reality, they certainly understand little of God’s concern for the impoverished and those most vulnerable, as the Bible views them, or of their own accountability for their blessings. We don’t talk much about our stewardship of life these days--that's a whole other moral issue.
Let’s make this ballgame called democracy work for everybody! That obviously includes the New York Yankees who have dominated the game by reaching the World Series some 41 times. But there is no “baseball sport” unless those other teams all have the same equal rights and opportunities to reach the World Series. To allow limits on one, or a few, is to stunt the quality and achievements of the majority, and ultimately to spoil the game for the fans without whom there would be no World Series.
I like Derek Jeter, an area product, but I value the game and support all those underdogs represented by the Philadelphia Phillies…………Oh, btw, someone suggested that all we need do is for all of us to "properly behave." Well, the nature of this human beast is to be myopic, self-serving, and greedy (the Bible calls it sinfulness,(it surely has got us in quite a global mess). It leaves us needing adequate refereeing in all of our economic and political ballgames, and that concern for the common good is a major role of government--of the people, for the people, by the people.
From walkingwithwarner.blogspot.com,
This is Wayne
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