FROM MY CORNER

As the Rightist health care battle continues, it might prove valuable to consider the subject in an abstract context.

It fascinates me how the American Left and Right see each other as such dangerous enemies. Both are rather like elegantly-dressed alley cats, always fighting over some piece of raw hamburger.

The utter inability of the Right, for one example, to see any part of Obama Care as valuable is barely short of paranoia. Obama Care is only the first successful, long-fought-for law-based foothold in a tool the majority of the world’s civilized countries have possessed for decades.

A national healthcare program assuring all citizens of a country comprehensive medicine is from any humane aspect a no brainer. Requiring people to be wealthy to have full health care is barbaric.

A medical profession demanding excessive profits, instead of providing the best possible health care to all regardless of their financial condition, violates basic natural rights of civilized people.

Medical professionals deserve decent incomes and sound retirement programs. But reaping excess profits, while any citizens remain unable to afford top care, denies the basic purpose of the profession: to help preserve the human race.

The Left, from its perspective, fears the Right’s insistence that individuals should always be able to fend for themselves without society helping them achieve that ability.

The Rightist fallacy is: if you were not born with money in our greedy society, you discover massive obstacles to your succeeding. Particularly if your skin is not pinkly whitish or beige, and if your family and you are uneducated.

A society denying its responsibility for assuring all people actually having equal health care is not a society. It is a con game. It only promotes the deception that because you are rich you are entitled to health while others are not.

I have no fear of rich people who feel no obligation to helping others not possessing their educational and financial advantages. They don’t fill me with paranoia. They fill me with disgust.

This being a human being is a unique gift. That we exist in this vast universe at all is an awesome phenomenon. If all we are capable of doing with it is competing to see who gets to live and who must die – that’s a pitiful viewpoint.

If one wants fat profits, there are far more honorable ways to get rich than playing dice with people’s lives. Our true philosophical leaders throughout time have always agreed that assuming responsibility for one another just makes sense.

We all would like to be treated with maximum respect and care by our fellow creatures. After we each establish that fundamental, time enough always exists to profit from each other by providing only the best we know how to create of anything.

If, instead, you choose to do second best, then second best is the best you will ever be. You lose all of your paranoia when you try to do the best for humanity. And, although the commodity won is not always money, you profit thereby.