Jackson
During Monday’s Republican presidential debate, CNN moderator Wolf Blitzer posed an interesting scenario to the candidates: If a perfectly healthy young individual without health insurance gets in an accident, who should help pay for his medical care?
The candidate’s answers didn’t matter to me, I was too busy listening to the audience’s reaction to the hypothetical death of another human being.
For the death of another human being through no fault of his own, the Tea Party crowd cheered.
The next day, there was limited outrage. Mainstream media chose to cover other narratives, and people had chosen en masse to watch Monday Night Football instead. That moment will be an important one later, though, because it revealed the ugly, purely selfish nature of the Tea Party. The feeling of “screw the other guy, I know I’m fine” shouldn’t be our first instinct as humans. We grew beyond that when we started outthinking wolves.
We don’t cheer death, we mourn and we sympathize.
I understand the philosophy of personal responsibility, embracing the idea of keeping what you feel you deserve and being unwilling to support those you feel don’t deserve it. I understand not wanting your freedoms to be infringed upon by the government.
There’s a fine line, though, between keeping what you have and cheering the demise of those who don’t. On Monday, the Tea Party movement bulldozed over that line, and that’s why I’m worried about this upcoming election.
I realize the 2012 presidential election probably will be mainly about only one thing: kick-starting the economy. That’s the biggest problem in this country right now by far.
Realize, though, that rocketing health care costs come a close second in the “massive problems department,” and that is why there’s immediate need for health care reform. I’m just saying when the jobs are back and we get around to health care reform, it should be done with humans lives — not balance books — in mind.
Health care is not the same as taxes or social issues; it’s not a zero-sum game. Where taxes boil down to either taking more from those who pay or making more people pay, and social issues are by nature black and white — pro-Choice or pro-Life, gay marriage or not, etc. — health care is, at its core, about helping people live, then worrying about the cost.
Walk into any emergency room in America with a bullet in you, and you’ll see what I mean.
There literally is no price you can put on a human life. Being only concerned about your coverage, choosing not to encourage the saving of a life goes against the core of what taking care of people is all about. Rooting around in someone’s pockets for their insurance card to see if they can afford a defibrillator is selfish and wrong, and that’s something that the Tea Party apparently doesn’t understand.
When I was little, my grandmother taught me a lesson about selfishness. She gave me a quarter, and like any kid, I closed my fist around the quarter, wanting to hold onto it. Then my grandmother pulled out $10, and showed me that because my fist was closed, I couldn’t lose the quarter, but I couldn’t receive anything better either. In order to get the $10, I had to open up my fist and let the quarter go.
This isn’t the time for our fists to be closed. Times are tough, but this is not the time for Americans to be selfish, to not care about how their neighbor is doing as long as they’re fine. It’s the same time its always been; time for us to all be concerned with the health and well-being of our fellow Americans.
Lazarus Jackson is the State News opinion writer. Reach him at jacks920@msu.edu.
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