Save America

[Cees Binkhorst]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frank-schaeffer/how-the-right-and-the-lef_b_262085.html

How the Right and the Left Destroyed the Public Option

What's the common denominator linking crummy public transport, military
contractors and the public option being taken off the table in the health
care reform fight? Why is a single-payer health care provider
"unthinkable"? The common denominator is that the United States is in the
thralls of a demented cult that combines the idea of privacy and the
profit motive into what is, in fact, our civil religion. It's a crap
religion.

The Cult

If the "public option" for health-care reform is off the table who's to
blame? We all are -- left, right, moderate, progressive, we have glorified
the notion of privacy, profit and individual space for so long that we
wouldn't know a public option if one bit us in the ass.

A weird convergence of factors has resulted in United States of America
being one of the only places on earth where all sense of a public space,
let alone public duty, is off the table as a matter of faith. Privacy,
ownership and profit are what we are about.

Examples: Roe v. Wade (whatever your view of abortion) was argued on the
basis of privacy. The right to own weapons has been carried such a
ludicrous point, in terms of private ownership, that we have little
mercenary armies marching around in the woods calling themselves militia
groups and armed to the teeth with semiautomatic high-powered
military-style weapons. Our trains are 50 years behind the rest of the
world's because some genius addicted to the cult of profit decided that
they aren't infrastructure but just another business.

"Privacy," "choice," "profit" -- these words are the only American
religious creed. Hatred and fear of the government has been both a right
wing and left wing preoccupation when government seems to be in a position
to curb this cult.

What went wrong?

My son commutes every day to Boston from Newburyport, Massachusetts; a
train ride that in Switzerland, France, Germany or even England would take
15 to 20 minutes but here drags on for an hour and 10 minutes. Here our
trains must be "profitable" to exist so there is no money to update the
system. In other places they work, are updated -- and lose money. The gain
is an infrastructure that allows for massive wealth creation in other
sectors.

Our train system is stuck in the 19th century. Our health-care providers
have been taken over by today's equivalent of the robber barons. Even our
prisons are being run by private corporations. When my Marine son fought
in Afghanistan and Iraq he and the other soldiers and Marines were
outnumbered by the private contractors earning 10 times what our soldiers
were earning for doing the same jobs and while making hundreds of millions
of dollars for a privatized defense establishment.

"Christian" Heretics

What is so curious is that in this religious country of ours the same
evangelicals, conservative Roman Catholics and others who are running
around saying that we had a "Christian foundation" have forgotten that one
of the great contributions of Christianity (going back to the fourth
century) was public nonprofit hospitals and hospices. Since when are
Christians against vocation? Since when does Christianity teach that
profit must trump all other considerations? -- "I'm my brother's keeper,
if I get paid"?

Somehow right wing evangelical Christians now seem to believe that Jesus
commanded that all hospitals be run by mega corporations for profit.
Somehow the right also thinks that it's normal for the state to hand over
its duties to private companies for military operations, prisons, health
care, public transport and all the rest. The word "infrastructure" seems
to have lost its meaning along with the word "community'"as something for
the common good. The common space never needs to "turn a profit" because
it is the lifeblood that allows private profit. (Every small business
owner about to go under because of health care costs knows this, as does
my son, who wastes hours each day on a slow train!)

In fact Christianity was the modern root of the whole idea of public
spaces for health care, the rule of law, even public transport and safety
that started with the idea of the "king's highway." Public space is what
made Western civilization possible. A common law, that applied to all, a
common sense of sacred duty to others, a common road system protected by
the crown and so forth.

Christianity teaches altruism and altruism is not profit-based. Check out
New England's Puritan-established villages. What do you think all those
"quaint" post card village greens are? Why do you think they were called
the "commons"? The greens are the shared grazing land. Public space was
the essential ingredient of Puritan life: church, town meeting house and
common grazing land, civic work and hospital building, defense and law.
And as for privacy, the community was involved in everything we now hold
private.

On the secular side, public space to was also paramount. The dynamism of
Western civilization, beginning with the Renaissance in Florence and other
European cities, was based on an understanding of the value of public
works, public space and public projects combined with private initiative.
Walk the great piazzas of Italy and you will be enjoying the public spaces
created by civic-minded people who were the forefathers of the Europeans
who would build high-speed rail systems that work. Private fortunes were
made in the context of a public sector that worked. This is no new thing
or "socialism." This is what made the West the wealthy West. (The Medici
bankers were no socialists and they understood the need for public
spaces!)

If it's Not For-Profit it's Evil. Since When?

Now in the USA we have the worst of all possible worlds: a
leftist/libertarian addiction to personal private space, in which no one
is allowed to tell anyone else what they should do, combined with this
weird anti-Christian "Christian" right wing notion that everything -- even
trains, the post office, our infrastructure and medicine, and now even a
big chunk of the military (via "contractors") -- must be run for a
for-profit motive.

The left, the right, the secular community and the religious community
have denied the best of their own heritage when it comes to America. The
problem of not getting a public option for health-care reform relates to a
philosophical shift in our culture wherein everything has to be justified
on the basis of profit and/or privacy. Result: there is no concept of
public space at all. Result: idiots shout "socialism" about common sense
solutions to our problems that -- very ironically -- the Medici princes of
Florence and the Puritans would have all agreed needed to be matters of
common public space.

Until Americans -- left and right, atheist and believing -- begin to take
another look at where this road of absolutist privacy combined with
absolutist profit leads we'll be stuck with the health care that's a mess,
trains that don't work and for-profit lunacy: deified individualism.

The Solution

The only real solution is to attack the idea that profit and privacy is
sacrosanct. Privacy and profit must be once again balanced by common
obligation, public space and civic mindedness trumping individual choice.

We need to get back to the idea of civic space, and public works, not just
in health-care but in all sectors of our economy. It's not a question of
being anti-capitalist; rather, it's a question of rediscovering a more
narrowly defined capitalism that thrives because of a thriving public
space. For instance, we need a single-payer health care system and we need
it now.

Frank Schaeffer is the author of Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of
the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or
Almost All) of It Back and the forthcoming Patience With God: Faith For
People Who Don't Like Religion (Or Atheism).

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