Health care and past evils

As an American Buddhist I am appalled at the current health care debate.  The health care crisis in the United States is, more accurately, a reflection of the darker side of the American character.  Minus all the glowing ideological rhetoric, so that the raw historical facts are allowed to speak for themselves, there is a lot in American history to provoke moral outrage with regard to how America has treated its unemployed, its poor, its elderly, and the general population who are often underpaid and lack adequate health care.

While human nature exhibits—at least from a Buddhist perspective—a drive towards compassion some in the news media, the government, and corporate America have found a way to silence the conscience of a nation when it comes to health care.  In addition, they have found an effective way to deceive the critical reasoning skills of a nation by putting in its stead specious arguments and ideology.

By another name, we may call such specious arguments and ideology an evil spell by which the weakest and most ignorant minds succumb first and eventually the majority with only the strongest and most compassionate minds able to resist.  What else might we call it when we see cruelty appear before our eyes and feel helpless to stop it except with great courage?  But I will say that we have been under an evil spell for a long time and thanks to our compassionate revolutionaries, we are gradually waking up from the trance—but many of us are still in a spell.  And just to illustrate that we have been waking up from an evil spell cast by the ideologues, I cite this example from the book, The Town Labourer, 1760-1832 (1917) by J. L. Hammond, Barbara Hammond; Longmans, Green.

The system began with serf labour from the workhouses, and it was not until the weavers had been reduced to want that they took their children to the hated mill. In many parishes the overseers refused relief unless the children went out to work. A family could not live on an income of five or six shillings a week. Cobbett described how women took their children to the mill through the snow; the child was crying, but the mother too was crying. It is true, again, that a great deal of the beating in the factories was done by the workpeople without orders, or even against orders, but that only emphasised the brutality of the system. Fathers beat their own children to save them from a worse beating by some one else; overseers and spinners beat children, sometimes no doubt from sheer brutality, but often because they had to get so much work out of them or go.

Would we tolerate this today?  Of course not!  This is utter cruelty, yet it passed in England because the conscience of a people was so bewitched by its ideologues that they saw this as necessary.  And who provided such evil rationalizations was none other than England’s paragons of morality.  And yes, they deceived everyone including themselves with their specious arguments and dangerous dreams.

Today, we are still in the process of waking up from evil.  There are the weaker minds among us who would believe that health care for all citizens is not a good thing.  Such minds are under the spell of evil but they call it liberty and self-reliance.  Citing from the book previously mentioned, they are not unlike, in nature, a father working in a mill who boasted, as a witness before the Lords Committee, that “he had broken his child’s arm for disobedience in the mill.”

All the worlds advanced countries, except the United States, have universal health care who, long ago, broke the bewitching rationalization that it is okay to deprive your citizens of health care by making it so unaffordable that only those with good jobs can afford it.  After all, private health care organizations have the moral right to make a profit at the expense of others—right? 

In another hundred or so years, Americans will look back at this time and see a cruel society the way, today, we look back at England’s cruel and despicable treatment of labor.

Comments

[V]

I lived in SOCIALIST Russia for 4 years.

You want "health care for all" ????

You got it there, it SUCKS, its BAD, there is no profit motive for good care and good Doctors.

US Has the best health care on earth, and invents 80% of the new drugs on earth.

The zennist author is a crypto commie Kalifornia douchebag (waits for this comment to be striken).

[V]

the lot of you are moronic socialist scum

[Bodhiratna]

Great article!

Not only these greedy Capitalists practice cruelty in America, they promote suffering and instability around the world through war, exploitation of labor, and stealing other country's natural resources.

The real irony is while these capitalists doing all these evil deeds they preach 'freedom and democracy' :(

Some say the Capitalist's new 'Waffen SS' troops are these dumb right wing nuts here in America who try to stand in the way of progress. These wingnuts should be working in the mills in England back during the turn of the century! :)

Bodhiratna

[WuWeiTV (youtube)]

Is it not the case that similiar labour conditions still go on in many parts of the world to provide us with our products?The sleight of hand is that because it is out of sight we think we have left these conditions behind through history when we have actually merely displaced them through geography.