generalspeaking

Democracy, American-Style

Of all the flawed types of government available to human nature, the most just seems to be democracy. Styles of governance relying on fairness and justness become flawed because human nature is flawed. The best of all possible intentions may reside in enlightened governing concepts; on the face of it socialism too promised far more than it was able to deliver because its administration was through human agency.

And human motivations are not necessarily always, or even sometimes, fair and just.

Nature equipped humans primally with the overarching sublimated but original instinct of survival. That which benefits us adds to our success in survival. That instinct is given free reign and is interpreted by individuals through efforts to enhance their personal status; we call it greed. We have the potential to overcome the instinct, override it for the greater good, whenever it surfaces in a manner that promises to benefit some and punish or deprive others, but we don't, necessarily.

The instinct for survival is basically a selfish gene. Our genetic means to achieve survival is nature's original equipment handed out to all her animals. Who use it to take possession of finite resources. Denying it to others, embracing it for themselves. What could be more basic? In Canada, as in many other advanced societies of the world fortunate enough to have advanced their mode of collective action to benefit an aggregate, we have what is called socialized medicine.

That, as much as any single item on the human scale of goodness and justice, defines human nature managing to go beyond the elemental instinct for survival; reaching beyond the individual to the group; an egalitarian good. In the wealthiest, most powerful country yet seen on Earth there is no universal medicine in the sense that the state of American democracy is punctuated and its equality is punctured by the capitalist system to interfere with a social good.

Which has resulted in the reality that access to medical care and hospitalization is not equal by any means within the United States of America. An unexpected illness, the contracting of a disease, advance into the elder years, an accident, can all be catastrophic in their outcome. Suddenly, a first-world experience is plunged into a third-world reality. Medical-hospital expenses can have the effect of beggaring a family, reducing its income to nothing.

A succession of presidents, late in the day as it were, has attempted to introduced a version of socialized medicine into the institutionalized political-social fabric of the country, never successfully. One administration, the latest, has assumed the responsibility of adamantly, belligerently, bulling it through the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government, to make it law, however inefficient and expensive it may now be, having waited so long to build it into the system.

The Obama administration's Affordable Care Act is deplored by Republicans, defended by Democrats and welcomed by the working poor in America. Americans themselves are divided; those who take their seats in the comfortable pews are outraged that this travesty is being foisted needlessly upon them, while those struggling to make ends meet while searching out 'affordable' health insurance and hoping for best-scenario outcomes are conflicted, uncertain, but willing to give the plan a chance.

The wide, wider and widening social-political distance between the haves and the have-nots in America, has created a dissonant society. One where the two governing political parties have become estranged from civility and mutual engagement for the greater good. And where a relatively small number of righteous belligerents, proud of being part of a democratic nation, have defied and denied the very democratic nature of the country they insist they care about.

A social good that has been brought into law is being defied and denied. The result of which is a stalemate whose cost is prohibitive in moral terms while they insist they are intent on preventing a prohibitive cost in dollar terms, forgoing the cost in terms of the quality of human lives.

Labels: Controversy, Democracy, Health, Human Relations, United States

posted by Pieface @ Saturday, October 05, 2013