Want Government Health Care? Canada Shows us the Way

So you want national health care, do you? And you want to use the Canadian system as an example? Well, then, here's a fine example of what that means: the Province of Ontario has said that a thirteen month old baby with a terminal condition must be allowed to die rather than receive a tracheotomy. Basically, the doctors at the hospital in London, Ontario where the child is have decided that it was pointless. Ontario's Consent and Capacity board agrees.

Granted, the case is apparently headed for further review, as the parents of the baby disagree with the recommendation. It is now headed to the Ontario Public Guardian, whoever or whatever that is; but do you not notice how Big Brother the very titles of those government bodies read?

A tracheotomy does not appear to be all that difficult or costly of a procedure, and all the parents want to do (all they want to do sounds downright eerie in context, don't you think?) is have something done so that they may take their child home for the remainder of his life. They were, ahem, allowed the procedure for a daughter a few years back. Why not now?

Unless we are talking about the public's money being wasted. And what else can we be talking about?

To be sure, we here in the bad old U S of A hear all about the evil insurance companies who won't pay for certain medical procedures. Why are not we hearing so much about the evil Provincial Government in Ontario? Who do you fight when the leaders are against you? Who watches the watchers? Because any attempt to assure us that this won't happen here, that 'safeguards' will be put in place, can only be turning a blind eye to the events within the borders of our nearest neighbor. Any reasoning that we can stop such human rights abuses must now ring hollow.

How this will play is yet to be seen. But the simple fact that it is happening should be a wake up call to those who want the government telling us who can get health care, when, and how. That will happen here, my friends, once we're on the road to government health care of any type. And we will have no recourse when it does.

Zeal Must Be Tempered Within the Pro-life Movement.

A proposed Georgia law, if it is being understood correctly, would call a woman to task if she suffered a miscarriage. Unless, that is, she could prove that the incident had occurred beyond the scope of human action. In short, and again, we must say that if we understand things properly, a woman who had a miscarriage would have to prove she did no wrong.

Right off the reel, it seems that such laws would violate the innocent until proven guilty assumption which is supposedly at the heart of our system of justice. Yet that is surely an easily altered section of the bill. When the big picture is considered, when we hear ideas of this nature, our first thoughts quickly move towards how these proposals might affect the pro-life movement. That effect cannot be good.

That a willful miscarriage would qualify as an abortion cannot be denied. But to put a woman in the position of defending a miscarriage simply because it was a miscarriage must be seen a nothing more than a witch hunt. The trauma which such an awful event would have on a woman expecting to have a baby must be understood in order to fully appreciate it. That trauma cannot be good, of course. To then add the threat of prosecution to the horror she would have already went through is nothing short of vulgar.

That does not mean that government actions supporting contraceptive use is any less vulgar. That does not mean that real and true abortions are not on their very face willful murder and ought to be stopped. But it does mean that, in their zeal to end abortion on demand, the actions of pro-life activists and legislators must be tempered by reason.

This type of legislation is exactly the kind of initiative which will not help the pro-life movement. It does indeed paint the anti-abortion crowd as lecherous souls leering into every bedroom. Indeed, it threatens the movement in ways and manners of which we should hope that a rational soul would have taken notice: if it embeds the practice of abortion all the more within our society through any substantive counter-reaction, then the blood of those children aborted in the future would in truth be on their hands.

It Will Always Be the Same.

"For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land."

Today baseball begins. Today at 1:05 in Dunedin, Florida, the Detroit Tigers begin their Grapefruit League play against the Toronto Blue Jays. And before the broadcast, I have to believe that we will hear the Voice of the Tigers, Ernie Harwell, recite the above quote from the Song of Solomon. It will be from a recording, of course, as we lost Ernie last May.

It would be so easy to say that baseball will never be the same. Yet we know he wouldn't tell us that. We know he would not want us to feel that way. The game goes on, life goes on, the Earth still spins. And baseball will still be played.

Ernie would want that. So we should want that.

It is my first season without him, and it will be bittersweet. But the game goes on, and he goes on. Things are as they should be.

God bless you, Ernie.

What are Moderates Really?

New polling suggests pretty heavily that the Democrats and President Barack Obama need the so-called moderate vote in order to win elections, while the GOP can rely on the conservative vote quite readily. This can be interpreted in several ways, but perhaps the most insightful is this: moderates aren't really moderates, as a group, but, rather, lean towards more traditional and familiar thoughts whenever in doubt.

That makes sense, in the end. For when there is a crisis, don't most people act based on what they know? When President Reagan was elected back in 1980 to stem the tide of Democratic and hence more liberal leadership, what was his appeal? To make America great again, based on the traditional American values of individualism and hard work. When the GOP ran the tide last November, what was the big question: nothing less than obtrusive, interfering government trampling the rights of the people.

The moderates responded as they knew how, by throwing out those who did not support real American values. That's why conservatives don't have to appeal too overtly to the presumed middle: they aren't actually in the center after all. They are in fact more moderate to conservative rather than being between the left and the right as they are generally portrayed.

Given the fact that so few people, about 20 percent or one in five, call themselves liberal, and it seems that what we truly have in our nation today is an overall aversion to liberalism. Even the presumed center appears to harbor similar doubts about the left, seeing as the Democrats need to get about 60% of the middle of the road vote to win major elections. It is a telling statistic, and does not bode well for any long term success for the party of Jefferson and Jackson.

Of course, the Democratic Party left the beliefs of those American stalwarts behind eons ago. But that is a tale for another time.

Wal-Mart pictures: an Invasion of Privacy?

An Ypsilanti woman is upset that a picture of her mother shopping at a local store has appeared on a website dedicated to taking and posting photographs of shoppers at Wal-Mart. Needless to say, the most potentially embarrassing pictures are the ones most likely to appear on the site.

Melanie Wheeler doesn't like it, and who can blame her? It goes beyond the fact that the picture in question is her mother and into questions of privacy even in public areas. Why does anybody feel they have the right to take semi-random photos of those around them, to then post them on the Internet?

To be sure, many people wear clothes designed to draw attention to themselves. It is probably fair to say that those folks don't mind the practice. But that reason hardly excuses the process of actively seeking people who may be dressed, well, in less than complementary fashion and making them public on a worldwide stage. Especially if all they are doing is shopping.

That some people are easy targets for the gawkers of our land rather misses the point. We could debate forever about what type of clothing suits whom, and there's no doubt that fashion sense is lacking among many citizens (we are not intending to besmirch the woman in question here, as we have not and will not look up her picture). We also readily concede that many folks simply need to dress with greater care for themselves and with better regard for the fact that they will be in a public setting. Still, taking and publishing pictures of the unknowing and unwilling simply as an attempt at humor is, to say the least, merely childish and sophomoric. A decent respect for others, even if they do not appear to merit it, ought by itself to discourage the practice.

At the risk of sounding like your mother, would you want your mother treated that way? Then perhaps we as a society need to stop encouraging such behavior.

General and Special Interests

The Detroit Symphony Orchestra is on strike. That is not news to metro Detroiters, and likely not a big story nationwide. Still, it affords a chance to examine an issue which is rarely discussed. That is, what are general interests, what are special interests, and how each ought to be supported.

It has been accepted since the beginning of the Republic that the government should only be involved with general interests. What that traditionally entailed were things such as military protection and police powers, uniform weights and measures as well as currency, and so forth. It was a rather short to do list. That list has nonetheless been expanded upon over time, and not necessarily wrongly. The need for clean air and water, for example, particularly as industrialism developed, became the province of government, and quite properly. But the main point is that government ought to only get involved in the things of the interest to society writ large: the general interest.

That began to change as government on many levels became interested in things such as parks, museums, indeed the arts in, uh, general, as well as many other areas at first not within its realm. We can of course debate what and where exactly government obligations may lie, and at what level, but it is surely a reasonable argument that governments ought to be slow to have parks and arts in their spheres. Why? Those who want to camp ought to bear the full cost of camping; likewise those concerned with the arts ought to be the ones supporting them. Why? Because they are the ones who want them, and the general public ought not be supporting what are essentially private activities and interests.

If we are truly concerned about and want to reduce government expenditures (and taxes) we must first become more involved in what is of the general and the special interest and see that governments act only on the former. For the record, I do not this minute know whether the DSO for example gets any government funding, but that does not matter to the issue at hand. If it does, it should not, and if it doesn't, then all is as it should be. The bottom line though is simple enough: governments should only spend money on things which benefit everyone at least roughly equally. Anything more is simply the strong (by that it must be understood those who hold political power) forcing the weak to support what they may not care to and should not be expected to when left to their devices. If we began spending only to the general interest, we may be shocked at how much spending can be cut, and how many dollars could be left in the wallets of all.

Presidents Day

Toady is, of course, Presidents Day. We are expected to celebrate our Presidents, even the ones who weren't that good or memorable. And we do that at the expense of the ones who truly do merit a certain reverence. Washington, Lincoln: you guys are as good as Millard Fillmore of James Buchanan.

That attitude is simply wrong. It does not aid our history and it does not honor the honorable. Indeed, it rather belittles the ones who deserve mention. It is a holiday which we ought to rethink.