Liberal Virtue

When I was 10 years old, my greatest hero wasn't Superman or Spiderman or the Lone Ranger.  When I was 10 years old, my greatest hero was my best friend, Jasper, who was far and away better than every other hero combined.

Jasper was smart, and fast, and funny.  He could play basketball like one of the big kids.  He could jump his BMX bike over anything in the neighborhood.  He always beat me on our after-lunch math tests.  He was like a great shining institution in our neighborhood.  Small but respected by everyone, he was the ultimate arbiter of playground disagreements, not to mention the best video game player in history.

It's been more than 20 years since those great and wonderful days.  I live thousands of miles away, and where I became a professional person, Jasper became a workman.  He's spent the last decade up in trees, climing, cutting, trimming, hauling.  It's good work and the pay is good, but he never had benefits.

He never really worried about not having benefits until last week, when a tree fell and nearly crushed him to death.
The tree crushed his ribs, fractured his scull, and injured his spine.  After 7 hours of surgery, he is stable, but his life will never be the same.  

Not only will he never fully recover physically, but it looks, at this point, like he will never recover financially either.  Colorado's medicaid program helped a great deal, but as a blue collar guy, his income was never that high.  He was already only just barely making ends meet.  Now he'll likely be disabled and unable to work the colorado treetops ever again.

I bring this up, because we often hear about 48 Million uninsured Americans, and it doesn't really connect.  It's like there's some other America.  It's like there's some other nation of people who work, and raise families, and live, and struggle and die here.  It's like it's not our brothers and sisters and friends and fathers and mothers and heroes who's lives are ruined by the way things are.

Conservatives believe this is fine.  They believe that it's not just ok for us to suffer and die, but they truly believe that it's ok for us not to care.

Abraham Lincoln said that government should do for people what they can't do for themselves.  I would that I could take care of all those who suffer in the world, since I can't, I count on government to do it for me.  

Conservatives don't want us to see the connection between soaring pharmaceutical and medical prices, soaring HMO profits, and soaring levels of poverty.  If we see the economic truth of our situation, our whole nation might, as Liberals always have, work to correct our economic diseases and work to care for our best citizens, our least protected heroes.

My oldest friend, my greatest hero will never be the same.  The weakness of the Conservative movement is that they will never even acknoweldge that such a thing matters in America.  The virtue of the Liberal movement is that we will fight forever for equality and for change.