A Price Too High to Pay

I went to the gym to work out today, and as I got on the treadmill, I got quite a shock. I started out at a slow speed and glanced at the TV monitor which was playing a commercial with a woman lying in what appeared to be a hospital bed. She was not saying anything, but had this deep, sad expression that words just could not describe. The camera then went to a man sitting next to her bed (both of them looked to be in their 40's). He also did not say anything, but had this grieved look of helplessness on his face. The camera then faded to black, with these words:

"Losing everything because you don't have healthcare is a price too high to pay."

That hit me like a brick wall and I just about lost it right there. I immediately looked away with a tight grimace and forced myself to think of something else before I broke down.

Meanwhile, just out of earshot, I'm sure one trainer leaned to the other and said something like, "Wow – that guy must really be out of shape. He's just warming up and he's already about to puke."

Avoiding the Weak

"Research released this week in the American Journal of Public Health estimates that 45,000 deaths per year in the United States are associated with the lack of health insurance."

Be strong. Be brave. Don't let that number, 45000, get to you, because it does not apply to you. You have insurance, you are covered, so you have nothing to worry about. Your mother is insured, your children are insured, and those 45,000 people are...well, OTHER people. Not US. We have to be strong, to remain unmoved by such numbers. Focus on what is important: your out of pocket expenses, and how they would SURELY go up if we brought the millions of uninsured under the safe umbrella of coverage. Think about yourself having to wait in lines. You hate waiting, right? Remember that. And be strong. Throughout history, it was the strong who survived, those with assets, who knew how to hang onto them. When the Titanic went down, most of the lifeboats were only half occupied. Those inside were too cold, scared, and traumatized to risk their safety to pull any others into their boats. More people would have meant more risk to the survivors, so they braced themselves and were strong. They ignored the cries of those left in the frigid waters until those cries faded away. And they survived until the morning, when the Carpathia arrived. They survived because they were strong, and they focused on themselves, instead of those weak people in the water. Now is your chance to also be strong, and just focus on yourself. 1,517 people died that night (much less than the 45,000 that die each year due to being uninsured), but the strong survived. And you will survive too, because you are a survivor.

Right?

Matthew 25:36

Our Milgram Experiment

We like to think we are good people. Relatively speaking, we certainly are. There's always someone we can point to who is worse than us.

But then someone like Stanley Milgram comes along, and says things that upset us. You probably heard about this in your freshman psychology class: Stanley Milgram was the Yale psychologist who did a famous/infamous experiment in the early '60s, showing that we're not quite as good as we like to think we are. In the experiment, a student was instructed to push buttons delivering various levels of pain to another student, out of sight in another room, based on how they answered questions. It was supposed to be a "learning" experiment, but the truth was that it was testing whether a student was willing to torture another person. In reality, no-one was actually getting hurt, that was really an actor in another room. But the student did not know that. He just knew that he was told to push button #3, he did so, and a cry of pain came through the intercom.

Invariably, the student would proceed to push those buttons when instructed to do so. The whole test was to see how easily the human conscience could be "turned off", when we hand over the responsibility for our actions, whether they be right and wrong, to someone in authority over us.

Don't be so shocked - we're all susceptible to gradual compromise of our morals. It becomes easy when someone in authority over us is pushing us to compromise. And the bottom falls out when our community around us is pressuring us to do so.

I think of the church in Germany between 1935-1942. Where were they? What were they doing? What about the church in the American south during the slavery years? Where were they? What were they thinking?

It's all about gradual compromise. You've heard the analogy: if you drop a frog into a pot of boiling water, he will immediately jump out. But if you drop him into a pot of lukewarm water, then gradually turn up the heat, degree by degree, he will end up boiling to death, because he never realizes a drastic difference. He slowly adjusts to the warmer and warmer temperature, until he dies.

Could that happen to us?

What if you found out the government had been spying on you for the past 6 months, not because of anything you've done, but because of the church you go to. What if they had been recording your phone calls, with no search warrant. What if they snatched you out of your car one night, and flew you off to another country, where you were tortured. Yes, tortured. With no arrest warrant, no proof of evidence, not trial by peers, no conviction, and no release? Shocking? It has all happened under American authority.

That's what we've come to. The frog is floating belly-up in the pot of boiling water, victim of a gradual errosion of rights, all in the name of the "war on terror".

But you say that would never happen to us! That is only done to terror suspects. The really bad guys who deserve it. Right?

And it's all OK, because...it's...them...not us...them. You know, "them". As in, the muslims. Or the poles. Or the jews. In fact, why don't we just make this simpler and put stars on them, so they are easier to identify.

I speak as a "conservative Christian", a member of the evangelistic church movement. There were, of course, many who did recognize the warning signs, and protested loudly (my sister being one). But many of us in the church sat back, trusting in the president as a wise man of faith and convictions, saying we should let him do his work with our full trust. That was me. I was there.

And you know what the scary thing is? Not just that it happened, but that we let it happen. We didn't question it. We aquiesced, accepted the reasons. Since when is there a just reason for suspending constitutional rights? Since when can we justify dropping constitutional protection from people? Since when are there people who don't qualify for those protections? Isn't that how the germans justified their treatment of the jews? "They're not part of us. It doesn't matter what happens to them."

We let this happen. Even though many of us disagreed with it, what did we do to stop it? I even found myself at times afraid to open my mouth, stir up argument, for fear of being labeled or ridiculed. We're afraid to think for ourselves, recognize when the government has gone too far, and to speak out.

And as my children study history, seeing the shameful mistakes of our past, I'm not so sure we can say it is all behind us. If we so casually accepted the notion of torture being done by Americans, what else are we capable of? As President Obama rolls back many of the compromises made over the past several years, we realize just how far we've come. For a moment, we find ourselves as that college student in the experiment...who just pushed the button. Now we have a taste of what we are capable of, so what will we do?

Living Out the True Meaning of Our Creed

I'll admit, I didn't vote for Obama, as I don't see him standing on the right side of the abortion issue. But there is one thing that does bring joy to my heart this week. Having grown up in the south, much of that time in racially divided towns, I grew up with my own minor demons to deal with. To this day, I have to work hard to not see people through the lens of race.
But as I look at this milestone in our nations history, I feel a joyful contentment. Our children will grow up in a land where truly anyone (any man at least) can become president. Amazing. I grew up knowing that THAT top rung of the ladder was always there; not that I ever expected to climb that high myself, but I always knew there was no ceiling imposed on my ambitions. And yet all my childhood, I also knew that the other half of the population, those who didn't have my skin color, did not have such an opportunity. Sure, technically, legally, anyone could become president, but the facts on the ground spoke something different. And now, for the first time, the playing field has become level.
That makes such a huge difference for young men growing up - to know that anything is truly possible. Although Obama is a flawed man, like the rest of us, this milestone brings a change for everyone. Our nation will not be the same, and I believe we will be a better people for this.