Jesus Navarro needs a kidney transplant.
Five days ago, almost nobody knew that. Five days ago, this diary about Jesus was published, and at tht time only a thousand or so people had signed the Change.org petition. At that time I wrote
Please sign the petition and help it go viral.
Now more than 135,000 people have signed
the petition demanding that Jesus be given a chance to live.
It surely wasn't that pitiful little diary that caused 130,000 people to act in support of Mr. Navarro. I really have no idea how it of a sudden went viral on Tuesday morning. But who knows? Maybe someone who got forwarded a link by someone who got forwarded a link to the petition by someone who read about Jesus' plight here on Daily Kos was able to blast it out to a million people, asking them to sign. Or not. However it happened, it is pretty damned amazing.
Now, of course, the real work begins. Actually convincing UCSF administrators to change their minds. Perhaps raising enough money so that Mr. Navarro and his family (and UCSF's administrators) can be assured that he will be able to pay for his anti-rejection drugs far into the future.
However this turns out, it has been incredible to watch. But it is also horrible that we have to watch it unfold at all. Jesus Navarro is a symbol of everyone in the United States who has been denied insurance, or been denied treatment on some basis other than medical best practices. Every one of us knows someone like Jesus -- not in the sense of his immigration status -- but in the sense of having been screwed by our health care system monstrosity.
Despite this, even in California, the votes are not there to pass a sane remedy: single-payer health care. (The bill, SB 810, failed to clear the California Senate last week, and is quite dead, at least until next year). It could still be decades until America has a health care system that takes care of everyone, while most industrialized countries have had such a system for decades.
That 135,000 people care enough about the fate of an undocumented worker to raise their voices makes me think America is better than that.
But our failure as a nation of 310,000,000 speaks otherwise.