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| My First Daughter-Leah Elaine Winner of...Life |
Mucho frustrato...
So, I'm going to try it again here. In his article he distinguished between 3 types of Catholics:
My comments here are not to detract from Brandon's wonderful insights. Instead, I want to bring to bear what I think is germane in this discussion.
- The 'Spiritualist' Catholics - Those with little to no concern for justice, compassion, and peace. According to this group, religion shouldn't mettle with politics, charity, or 'good works.'
- The 'Peace and Justice' Catholics - Those typically concerned with poverty, war, torture, care for creation, and systemic injustice.
- The 'Pro-Life' Catholics - Those typically concerned with abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem-cell research, and other 'life' issues. (Note: I use the 'Pro-Life' label for this group not because the other two groups are anti-life but because this term is most commonly used to describe this set of Catholics.)
The fundamental issue in this debate is life. If one does not value life at its book ends (conception and natural end), then what does is it matter how you treat the in-between? Who cares about health care if life isn't valuable. Life as such is like a book without a cover--the pages are bound to fly around everywhere. To put it more forcefully, if one does not value life at it's conception, he or she has no principled ground to value it at any other time, or at best that decision is ad hoc and therefore grounded not in the mystery of life itself, but in the subjective conscience. It turns the human being into a Warhol. It is precisely this movement that leads to the subjectification of the value of life and necessarily devolves into "camps" of social justice--one group chooses to disregard foreign life, another unborn life and another geriatric life. Yet, all of these groups will choose to fight for a particular kind of life under the auspices of patriotism, humanism or something of the sort. The good news is that we all get it, at least tacitly, that life is valuable. However, what stalls the health care debate or any debate concerning our care for life isn't that we don't know it's important, but that we all don't know why its important.
I recently watched the documentary, Waiting for Superman, and there was a forward-thinking teacher who started an amazing school in Harlem who made the profound observation that our children today recognize that they are getting the short-end of the stick. His observation, of course, came within the context of education, but I think it applies more broadly. The movie climaxes with a telling example of a group of children who *lose* a drawing to get into charter schools and are thereby relegated to attend their poor performing schools.
[spoiler end]
The sad reality is that children today have the cards stacked against them from inception. To lose anything in this life is to win simply because you had the chance to lose at all. We should take stock in the experiences of wanting to do more, to get it right, to help each other. In those moments, we are all closer than we were before in realizing what is fundamental to each of us--existence.
But to deprive another person of that most fundmental value--life--is to make enemies of everyone. If I can't develop empathy for the weakest and most defenseless among us, how can I develop proper empathy for anyone at all? Who cares that you can't get the heart-transplant you need, my TiVo isn't working. As bastardly as that sounds, everyday children are slaughtered at the altar of a better, more entertained, fun and exciting life. The movie gets it almost right. Just look at the decline in down syndrome in our society. We haven't developed in utero gene therapy, we've just learned how to give kids no stick at all.
So who cares about health care?
We all do.
Why?
We all don't know, and that is the problem. Until we can agree why life is important, justice tribalism will prevail and you can expect that prescription drug to continue to cost a little bit more every year.
