The third is freedom from want--which, translated into universal terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants--everywhere in the world.
FDR spoke those words on January 6, 1941. It was part of his aspirations for all peoples, all over the world.
Until we can make those words true here, at home, in the United States of America, we as a society and the governments we have elected have failed to provide the true security of this nation and its people.
a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants
HEALTHY
Physical health. Mental Health.
Healthy food, water and air.
Economic security.
This is the moral issue I wish to explore.
I have described my experiences of this past weekend, spent mainly at the Wise County (VA) Fairgrounds, as having transformed my life. I have already written three diaries flowing from that experience.
On Friday night, after my first day of volunteering, I offered A different perspective on the health care debate, in which I wrote above the fold
I thought I had some concept of the healthcare crisis. Having written about this annual event, in a diary titled This may break your heart - and it should, I thought I was prepared for my volunteering.
I was not. Today I spent from 7 AM to 5:30 PM - with only about 3 minutes off - working in dental triage with outstanding dentists trying to process as manhy patients as possible. My heart was broken time and again, and my spirits were lifted by the dedication of all who volunteered.
And I was angered and ashamed at what I saw, which is the only reason I am attempting to explain in this diary.
Sunday, after I returned home, having reflected on the long drive back, I offered Now that the Wise health fair is over . . .. Near the end of the piece I wrote
I will carry this weekend with me for the rest of my life. If I do not, if it has not meaningfully changed me, then I have neither conscience nor soul.
As I continued to reflect upon the experience, I asked readers to Please bear with me in which I tried to explain, first with
And, at least for me, it is a matter of urgency, because it is an issue of basic morality, and of common humanity.
and then expressed perhaps partially my understanding:
My politics must be the politics of love and respect. It must seek to uplift, not to crush.
I am shy. I do not do this well. Which is precisely why I must go beyond my limitations, not hide behind the excuse of my shyness.
To open oneself up is to risk being hurt. It is also the only way one can truly find love and affirmation.
To close oneself off, to seek to control so that one does not "hurt" is to be in hell. At least for me, that is surely hell without end.
I do not seek to impose my understanding upon others. I cannot. You are not me. I can only express haltingly and in an incomplete and perhaps confusing fashion what I grasp "through a glass darkly" as Paul put it. I can only point in a direction I know I must follow.
And I can only find that direction as I seek to explain it to others, so that I am not trapped in my own mind, in the limitations of my own thoughts.
I hope that the words with which I began this diary may be of value. It is how I have come to understand the experience, including the three diaries already posted, and reading and rereading the comments appended thereto. It is also a product of a number of conversations, both while I was at Wise, and since I returned. It includes electronic interchanges directly via email.
Originally our government had a Department of War. We kept that nomenclature until after the Second World War, when we unified the military into the Department of Defense. It was our understanding that we had grown sufficiently as a nation, in wisdom and understanding as well as economic and military power, to in theory commit ourselves not to military dominance of other nations but to keeping ourselves and those with whom we allied secure, safe, at peace. We would defend, not be aggressive.
We have not been perfect in folllowing that path, but it did coincide with a continuation of the pattern that had blossomed in the New Deal, of an understanding that our nation could not be healthy while so many were suffering. In his second inaugural, January 20, 1937, FDR told us
I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.
We often remember those words, yet forget those that follow immediately:
But it is not in despair that I paint you that picture. I paint it for you in hope—because the nation, seeing and understanding the injustice in it, proposes to paint it out. We are determined to make every American citizen the subject of his country’s interest and concern; and we will never regard any faithful law-abiding group within our borders as superfluous. The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.
Let me repeat the end of that: The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little. These words are the background upon which Hubert Humphrey offered on November 4, 1977, at the dedication of the building now housing the Department of Health and Human Services, named in his honor - the first time a Federal building had been named in honor of someone living. Humphrey said
It was once said that the moral test of Government is how that Government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.
Humphrey's words came at the end of a period when we had lived through expanding the American dream through the Civil Rights Movement, where the programs of the Great Society, many implement while Humphrey served as Vice President under Lyndon Johnson attempted to address many of the remaining inequities and insecurities of American life.
I reflect on the more than three decades since Humphrey spoke those words. I see an abandonment of the commitment to ALL here. Some have sought politically to pit one group of Americans against another. Some have justified the increasing economic and social inequity of American society as a form of progress, obscenely glorifying great wealth for its own sake. Often the voices that dominate discussion are those of great wealth, who while they may be well-meaning, seem to lack an understanding of the reality of life for many at whom their programs are directed.
We have seen words spoken in one context misapplied to a different time, place, and set of circumstances. The words Jack Kennedy spoke at his inaugural,
Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.
have been perverted into "they hate us for our freedoms" as we fight a war of choice that has come close to bankrupting this nation. The aspirations of Martin Luther King, Jr.,
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character
have been used to justify abandoning a commitment to overcoming the disparate treatment that still exists in too many places.
We see some who argue that we should continue to spend obscenely on unnecessary purchases of military weapons not wanted by the Department of Defense while they simultaneously argue we do not have enough money for health care for all, or to properly address education by cutting class sizes, refurbishing decrepit buildings . . . having forgotten the words of the President who had overseen the succesful invasion of occupied Europe and the establishment of NATO, Dwight Eisenhower, who told us
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed - to this I would, after this past weekend, add from those who have not dental and medical care.
NATIONAL SECURITY - it is far more than preventing invasion by another nation or terrorists attacks by those without or even more likely those among us such as the Eric Rudolphs, the Timothy McVeighs . . .
We are not secure when we have those who hunger while others gorge themselves
We are not secure when too many lack meaningful employment while others make huge profits from laying off still more people
We are not secure when some can spend thousands on cosmetic surgery not occasioned by disease, disaster or deformity while they refuse to pay the fair share necessary for others to have access to basic medical and dental care
When I was younger I lived in a nation where we saw more and more people being raised up. Education, food, medical care, assistance for seniors, inclusion of more in the fullness of the American dream - this was the nation that shaped my understanding of what we could be. It was one reason that America was a beacon drawing people here for the possibilities.
We have allowed our nation to regress, to accept increasing inequity, to accept divisions between "our kind" however we might define ourselves and those "others" who are different - perhaps by race, or by ethnic background, or religion, or national origin, or immigration status, or sexual orientation
Lincoln warned us years ago that a house divided against itself cannot stand. He spoke those words in the context of nation wrestling with the continuation and expansion of chattel slavery. We should now be wrestling with the continuation and expansion of economic disparity that is cruel, oppressive, destructive of liberty.
Unless and until we see that the wellbeing of ALL of our people is of greater importance than the profits of any corporation or the protection and transmission of great wealth by individuals and families we are not secure as a nation, as a people.
I read words of politicians who say we have to control the costs of medical care as they wrangle over expanding health care, yet refuse to recognize how much of the excessive costs comes from profits, inflated salaries and benefits in for profit insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies, and the administrative costs imposed therefrom. They do not seem to understand that if my obligation as someone who runs a for profit entity is to maximize the return to my shareholders, then denying coverage either because of pre-existing conditions or terminating coverage because of newly developed medical situations is not only logical, it may be my legal responsibility. Which is why the for-profit insurance companies are very scared of competing against non-profit entities, because they would inevitably be more expensive and thus less desirable.
But which is more important, the economic well-being of their shareholders, or the medical health of the American people?
How do we justify making distinctions between "medical" and "dental" when issues in one domain inevitably affect the other, because both involve a human body which does not magically isolated issues of dentition from the rest of the body?
When we see so many now suffering from the psychic wounds of Iraq, why do we still continue to maintain a dichotomy between "physical" health and "mental" health?
If all of our people do not have meaningful access to basic and sufficient nutrition, then all we do after the fact to treat them is insufficient, besides being far more expensive and less effective in keeping them as productive members of society.
If we expect people to work, we should recognize that many would like to, but are denied the opportunity because some see ways of making greater profits by manufacturing or servicing from overseas, or by imposing a race to the bottom on wages and benefits.
Why do our leaders, business and governmental, not recognize the wisdom of Henry Ford in paying his workers enough that they could purchase the products they produced? Have we not learned that unless the American people have the capacity to purchase, our economy cannot fully thrive?
All of these issues - and others - are interconnected. Jobs, health, nutrition, economic equity, social justice, shared commitment via paying our fair share of taxes for the many benefits we receive.
Shared, as is the natural beauty and wealth with which this nation is blessed, which should mean that mineral rights should not outweigh all others; that no man has absolute control of "his property" to the point that his use of it endangers the life, safety, health, and well-being of others.
Radical - from the Latin, radix - root.
Perhaps I now appear and sound as a radical.
Because we insist on compartmentalizing, I believe we also unnecessarily complicate. And in the process we lose sight, we lack understanding, of how interconnected so many things are.
Perhaps if we step back, and begin to recognize certain core principles, we may begin to understand.
National security is far more than a strong military.
The nation will not be secure when the lives of so many remain insecure, one illness away from permanent financial disaster, that is, if one is able to obtain the necessary medical care.
In the poem I quote most often, "Little Gidding" by T. S. Eliot, there are two lines that speak very directly to my current thinking:
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
Absent full commitment, to all of us in common, we will not be secure, as a nation, as a people, as a society.
The next two lines of the poem are taken from the words of Julian of Norwich, a medieval English anchorite:
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
They bespeak a hope that is not bound, a hope and a faith I saw in the faces and determination of those who waited for several days to be treated at the Wise County Fairgrounds.
They also are what drove many in the most recent national election, a hope and a belief that we could heal our nation and our society.
Eliot concludes with these words:
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
Perhaps these may seem not applicable to the rest of this meditation. I assure you they are.
Think of fire as passion,and the rose as some kind of joy, of achievement.
Or perhaps this may help? Our politics must be about far more than process, it must also confirm to our goals. And those goals must be more than achieving power, or implementing policy. That is, they should be of service, of empowering, or better, enriching, all of our people.
Those riches are far more than the size of one's house or one's stock portfolio or the kind of car one drives or the clothes one wears or the food one eats.
The greatest riches are the interconnectedness with others that enriches us all. Insofar as we separate ourselves from others, we justify disparate treatment that benefits us and ours, we are not secure, we will not be secure, we cannot ultimately be secure.
I am a teacher. I am constantly learning, most of all from the students entrusted to my care.
But we all are both teachers and students. Every human connection has the potentiality of expanding our understanding.
We are also all physicians - responsible for the care of ourselves - Physician, heal thyself! - and others. That is, we are bound to "first, do no harm" in our actions and interactions.
I am out of words, out of thoughts, this essay/meditation still incomplete, as my life is incomplete, as my learning is incomplete.
Perhaps you will see merit in what I have offered, perhaps not. After I thank you for having indulged me by reading this far, I ask only one thing -
is it possible that each of us can be willing to push a little beyond our own comfort zones, to continue to grow, to try to leave the world as we know it perhaps a little better than we found it?
Peace.