Written on the road: matters of definition.

[alexandraerin]

Whenever liberal judges or politicians bring up the state of justice overseas in discussing the laws here, a certain segment of the far right tends to go into a tizzy.

"New World Order!" they say.

"One World Government!" they say.

Pish, I say.

We're just taking stock of the world and our place in it. If we happen to notice that we're engaging in a practice that only countries Bush 43 identified as members of an "Axis of Evil", we wonder about the company we're keeping, you know?

We're not interested in giving up our sovereignty. We're interested in using it... using it to better ourselves as a nation, to form a "more perfect Union"... more perfect today than it was yesterday, we hope, and possibly even better still tomorrow.

And at its heart, that's what this health care debate is about: how we define ourselves as a people, how we define ourselves as a nation.

Is it enough to be a free people and a powerful nation? Does it not matter what we do with our power and freedom?

Is it enough that America is great?

My thought is that greatness is okay, so far as it goes, but it's better to be great and good than the alternative.

Those who are against reform say that there's an effort underway to change America, to redefine what America is and take it away from our roots and traditional values.

Folks, that's going to happen anyway. It's happening anyway.

A shining beacon on the hill? Not when we lag behind every other developed nation in how we treat our citizens.

A Christian nation? Not with how we do unto the least of us... and I don't know exactly who shall know us by our works, but probably not anyone we'd want to be seen with.

The land of opportunity? Face it, we've had a mixed record on that one. Unavoidable, really... if success doesn't bring rewards then "opportunity" is worthless, but if the rewards are meaningful then the rich hold advantages over the poor that carry across generations, resulting in unequal opportunities.

But even if we've never been perfect in an area, we can still do better or worse and right now we're doing much worse than we should be. The rising cost of health care shackles people to jobs by making a lot of traditional opportunities... entrepreneurship and education, for instance... too risky for the rewards.

The land of the free and the home of the brave? It's hard to be brave when you have to choose between food, rent, and medicine. It's impossible to be free when your choice is death from untreated but preventable conditions or a lifetime of onerous debt.

America is redefining itself by degrees. Like a satellite in a decaying orbit, the great and soaring dream of the world's first Democratic Republic will come crashing down if we're too afraid to make some necessary course corrections. We will become a third world country with scattered pockets here and there of breathtaking privilege. Within one hundred years, we may not be one nation indivisible, but two nations divided: a permanent underclass of workers who find that both the simple necessities of life and the opportunities for advancement are rigidly controlled and rationed in order to keep them in bondage, and an upper class that pats itself on the back and congratulates itself on having "made it" while exhorting the teeming masses to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

(Hopefully somebody among the underclass will be educated enough to appreciate the irony when the ruling class identify themselves as John Galt and claim the millions whose labor supports them are parasites and looters.)

And you know what? Eventually I think the underclass will pull themselves up... and it will be ugly. When our descendants some centuries hence read about "The American Revolution", they won't be reading about George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. They will be reading about something that would make the Bolsheviks blush and Robespierre go "Oh, my."

Because that's what it would take to upend a social order that entrenched in a nation so large, so great, and so powerful.

And with that, the redefining of America will be complete.

Call this speculation. Call this hyperbole. Call it a bit of fiction dreamed up by a purveyor of the same.

But don't be afraid to look at the path we're on and see where it's leading... not where you want it to lead, not where you think it should lead, but where it actually is leading: the gap between the rich and poor... the increasing barriers to opportunity... the almost pathological gutting and cutting of any tool we give ourselves to use our collective might and wealth and freedom to help our fellow citizens.

Making access to our leading edge health care system a public concern, a national concern isn't so much about "redefining America" as it is about examining our existing definitions and seeing how we measure up.

I think we can do better. I write this without irony: we can put a man on the moon. We can split the atom. We wrapped a continent in bands of iron and a world in bands of information.

Anybody who says we can't provide health care is underestimating us. Anybody who says we shouldn't... well, with as much respect as I can muster, I disagree with their definition of America.

Comments

Re: That or...

[sage-blackthorn.livejournal.com]

Funny you should mention that, because this is a subject that my group of friends and I have discussed at length. My friend Ron once pointed out there is a predictable cycle for Democracies/Republics that history tends to bear out. First you start with people living in a Tyranny or Despotism who eventually get fed up with being "Have Nots" and take it out on the "Haves". This is the next stage: Revolution. If the Revolution is successful, everyone is feeling great and wonderful at finally being free of tyranny and they set about re-ordering their society. There is a great sense of belonging and national pride which supports a time of prospertity and expansion. But eventually this plateaus into a state of Contentment. After many generations of Contentment, and people not having to struggle for their most basic needs (which often leads to appreciating what you earn for yourself), a nation will fall into a sense of Entitlement believing that what their great great grandfathers and grandmothers worked hard for should just be given to them by the State. (Some of my friends believe this is the stage America is currently in, as it is characterized by the beginnings of a growing gulf between rich and poor). When these things are not forecoming for any variety of reasons, the nation begins to sink into Apathy as the citizens begin to feel that they leaders have failed them. This creates a climate where anyone offering relief developes an almost fanatical following. In order to curb the growing unrest, leaders start to restrict the freedoms their citizens enjoy, eventually resulting in Martial Law. As the generations become more and more use to having less and less freedom, the nation once again sinks into Tyranny, and the cycle begins again. All of this tends to take between 250-350 years according to the historians, and they use the Roman Empire as an example. Some of my friends think that this is the fate of all Democracies/Republics.

There was one ray of hope in the discussion, however, and that was from some of us who study history and anthropology. I had pointed out that there are many cultures in the past and the present there everyone enjoys a comfortable lifestyle, and they are generally, as a whole, happier than we are. Another friend pointed out that such culture grant social rewards and esteem not for acquiring more and more wealth, but for taking care of those less fortunate. These are tribal cultures. In many such cultures, leaders were followed because they had demonstrated the qualities the people admired: Courage, Compassion, Self-Sacrifice, Honor, Wisdom.....to name but a few. Often times it's found that the "chief" or leader of a village was materially the poorest person there because as leader they were expected to take care of their people and would often give away everything they had to those who needed it more. But in doing so, they gained the esteem and respect of their people, and their people took care of them.

Even with all the examples we put forward, the discussion still goes on in one for or another to this day....and I've been talking with these folks for well on 15 years now...... I'm not sure we're ever going to settle the debate. But I think it's not a matter of money, or resources, or government....I think it's a matter world view. I think we are stuck in a way of life, a system, that encourages exactly the kinds of problems we see happening. A few people enjoying luxury and lavish oppulence as more and more wealth is concentraited into the hands of a few people who become idolized for it, instead of using it to take care of those less fortunate than themselves.

I've been reading and learning about tribal societies since I was 17 and of all the types of cultures I've learned about, they seem to work the best for their populations as a whole, with the least amount of difference in lifestyle between the "leaders" and the general population.

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

You could have made this comment about the wonderful virtues of communism or direct democracy or anarchy just as easily as you did about tribalism, and it would have had the exact same flaws as this comment.

It's easy for a small society to get along with itself, relatively speaking*. If we reduced our population to the sort of size where that was viable, we could be a tribal society with a gifting economy or we could be anarcho-syndicalists or we could rule through direct democracy or we could even have a theocracy and things would still be pretty great (because even if the leader's title was God-King Who Must Be Obeyed, at that size a population the leader would be pretty well in touch with what people needed and wanted and would be obligated to provide it in order to maintain power).

But it wouldn't work so perfectly for a society of our size and complexity. We would have to give up a lot to make it work... so much so that I'm not prepared to say that it qualifies for any reasonable definition of "solution".

But at the same time, there are lessons to be learned from this. In our society, the people who clamor the most for higher taxes on the wealthy include some of the wealthiest people in the world and some of the people who give the most money to charity as it is (I'm thinking of people like Warren Buffett and the Gateses)... the people who are against that aren't the Haves so often as they're the Wanna-Haves... the people who think that they're inches away from actually pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. (I'm thinking of people like "Joe the Plumber" here, and much of the Republican base.)

The phenomenon you're describing in the tiny closed economy of a tribal society is the same thing that the far right is stirring up fear against in our economy: "wealth redistribution" and "collectivization". Everybody comes together and throws something into the pot. Those who have the most, have the most to give. We all take care of each other. And so on.

Re: That or...

[hnmic.livejournal.com]

The base problem with the argument for tribal society is that by nature (modern) tribal societies are rather small populations, generally isolated in some way. It's just not realistic to expect a tribal society to work on such a large scale. Tribal leaders literally know each of those s/he's responsible for leading, and you can't have that on a national scale. It just doesn't work.

It's a shame... but it's the truth.