It’s 3 am, and your neighbor’s house is on fire
… found this great little diatribe on a friend-of-a-friend’s Facebook profile.
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Last summer, in my first excursion here into politics, I wrote about the experience of hearing reason shouted down at a town hall meeting. I had gone there with my teenage daughter to speak for my hearing-disabled wife, who is unable to work and can only hear at all because of the medical benefits I bring home with the proverbial bacon: as a cancer survivor, she is permanently uninsurable on her own. This time I will mention only my cousin in Tennessee whose monthly premium for himself and his two diabetic daughters was just raised to over $3000 a month, with a $2500 per person deductible, and my friend whose father is dying of brain cancer while struggling to keep up his Cobra payments, and will be rewarded for his efforts by leaving his wife uninsured until she is old enough to qualify for socialized medi–…uh, for Medicare. I’m sure everyone reading this knows people in the same boat, or worse.
I know all the arguments against the current health insurance bill, and I share some of the reservations myself. But be honest. You may have strong moral objections to the way your town obtains its water supply. You may be disgusted by the cumbersome, outdated fire engines it owns. But if you see your neighbors’ house burning down with the family asleep inside and you use those reasons as an excuse not to call the fire department, you are not only a poor neighbor but a moral coward.
I’ve heard that we can’t afford it, but that’s nonsense. We’ve been perfectly capable of paying for all sorts of knee-jerk responses to 9/11 that, frankly, do not have half the moral force or justification of even the weakest argument for health care reform. Which is more noble and more compelling: to strike out in anger, or to heal? It’s the priorities, stupid, and they’re wrong, oh so wrong (when you just have to pass it along!). Anybody out there old enough to remember Leonard Bernstein’s Candide? Thought so.
The reason I’m writing this is that it’s time for us children of the 60s to make our voices heard. It’s time to let our congresspersons and senatepersonae, and the entire leadership in Washington, know that if health care reform is allowed to die because of the events of this week, they’re going to be drowned by a wave of populist rage that will make the one that supposedly erupted on Tuesday look like a tsunami in a soup bowl. It’s going to come from people our age, and if I know anything at all, it’s that for those of us who grew up to believe that this country could rise collectively to its moral responsibilities, letting this dream die now would be as bitter as death—and about as satisfying.
DON’T LET IT HAPPEN! It’s that simple. Let them know that if this thing doesn’t go through, there will be a day of reckoning the likes of which they have probably never imagined. And please, pass this on. And on, and on, until all of us who care about this have had a chance to speak our justifiably outraged minds.