The Faith to Persevere

A few days ago, my fellow Daily Nexus political blogger Audrey wrote a piece detailing the “disinformation” that she believed Obama was spreading about health care reform. After reading her post, and feeling entirely unmoved vaguely interested, I knew that my terrible impulse control would, per usual, betray me and before I realized it, my fingers were already flying. While I will not deny that I left a somewhat snarky comment, her response to my comment bewildered me. She wrote, sarcastically of course, that next time she wrote a post she would not, and I quote, “back up [her] statements with so many facts; it might send the left into a tailspin.” While I would not exactly call my five sentence, one paragraph response a “tailspin,” it was her sheer confidence in her beliefs and unquestioning loyalty to her party’s line that really blew me away, not her attempt to hurt my feelings by referring me to the dictionary.

I won’t lie about it, I am an admitted leftist, perhaps a bit of a socialist at that (or, as Glenn Beck would put it, a “radical Marxist” like Van Jones), but although they hold some beliefs that I do not share, by and large I support the Democratic party and the legislation they put forth. While I happen to be a proponent of the single-payer system, I also understand that in America some compromise must always be made in order to ensure that the majority of the wide range of business interests that wield such great political influence must be left with feathers unruffled, and I can support the Democrats’ current health care push because not only does it guarantee that the unfortunate and detrimental American belief in the free market will be left mostly unharmed, but it will also inject a powerful enough dose of government intervention that those who need help the most are sure to get it. Yet the one thing that never ceases to amaze me is that both the Democrats and the Republicans are so fond of touting their “facts” about a health care reform plan that has not even solidified into a single votable bill. The fact of the matter is that nobody can be truly certain of what is going to happen when Obama’s health care plan is enacted, but while the Administration has been reasonable in its projections, not denied the potential costs and long implementation period, and even announced that the health care package might increase the deficit by two trillion dollars (which just a few short years ago, if I remember, was considered nothing when Reagan, Bush, and then Bush again used the Treasury as their personal checking accounts), the opposition and their new favorite consituency, the anti-government radicals, are already dead sure that this bill is going to raise taxes to new highs and send the costs of healthcare skyrocketing, invite the sick from the world over to cross our borders for free medicine, then shoot grandma over a bunk hip and send the IRS out to collect for the bullet.

However, the difference between the arguments provided by the left and by those on the right lies not in who is right about the fine points of the letter of the law, but in the unstated agendas of the two major players in the health care debate. Sure, you can write a long-winded article (and it looks like your thesaurus could probably use a rest after the amount of abuse you gave it!) about your perception of Obama’s speech, and rant and rave about how his bill will destroy American values and all that nonsense, but the only “fact” in your argument is that you and the Republicans, as well as many other confused folks on the right, are so concerned about yourselves and your relationships with your doctors (I’m sure you spend so much time with them, it would just crush you if you couldn’t make your bi-annual appointment with the same receptionist), that you forget the fact that no matter how many times you bitch and moan about socialism, “Obama-care,” or your desire to get on Representative Wilson, by retarding progress on health care reform, you are perpetuating both our system’s exorbitantly high costs to the nation and the outrageous crimes being committed regularly by thirty million citizens of the United States: the crime of not having enough money to see a doctor, the crime of being unemployed and unable to provide your family with health insurance, the crime of being so sick that your life is no longer worth wasting money to extend.

So sure, there might be some problems with the bills currently circulating in Congress. Those will be ironed out in committee, that’s why it exists. After it breezes through the votes in the House and the Senate, the President will sign it. And at the moment that the words on that page become law, your pitiful cries will no longer have ears to fall on, because the long and arduous process of freeing even one aspect of American society from the disgusting profiteering of big business in this country will have begun, and while country club membership might start to decline a bit in the years to come, when all is said and done the only “fact” that will remain will be the fact that for once in this great country, someone finally had the gall to just say “NO!” to the interests of those with everything, to yell “NO!” to those who hide their greed and corruption behind Christianity and family values, and to stand up and shout “YES!” to the disenfranchised and marginalized of this country who for too long have been talked over and pushed around and disrespected. This battle may seem only another petty skirmish in a war along a front line that never moves much, but it is more than just an argument about how to fix health care, it is an argument about how best to take this country out of a glorious past in which it has languished for so long and push it towards an even more promising future. For some sad yet elusive reason, so many Americans are so terrified of what they can’t imagine, that they will do almost anything to cling desperately to what they hold so dear. The President may have found his hopes for this nation audacious at the beginning of his campaign, but he said he was running for the job in order to change this country, and in our collective panic at the thought of drastic change, we have forgotten the very things that held us together when we were threatened with four more years of stagnation.

Barack Obama had the audacity to hope, and when he transferred his hope to an American populace long tired of unchanging party rhetoric he lit a fire that can never be put out, not as long as there remain those dedicated not to the deepening of pockets, but to the lengthening of lives, those who believe we should turn down the chatter of machine guns so that we can hear the laughter of children, and those who refuse to sit down and take it when they can still stand up and fight. Barack Obama showed us that he could be audacious enough to hope, now lets show him that we can be faithful enough to persevere.