Pages

Monday, January 11, 2010

The Luxury of Non-Consideration

A couple of posts from other bloggers over the last week reminded me about the luxury of non-consideration that "normal" people have. One post revolved around the health care debate, and another post referred to Breast Cancer Awareness as being p0rnified.

Both bloggers were in good health and male....not that being male, in and of itself, will put someone on one side of a particular issue...though I think it had bearing on the second blogger's view of Breast Cancer Awareness.

I always find it ironic to read people who are in generally good health, with little experience dealing with doctors, hospitals, and insurance companies, skewer any concept of universal or government-sponsored health care. Their declarations that the US form of health care is better than any other country's health care, their invocation of the "mess" of Canadian health care, and their general belief that everything in the US is peachy-keen seem born out of the good fortune of not having had to actually use the health care system as it is.

My point is not really about health care, but about how easy it is to form opinions and spout arguments.

The older I get and the more I learn....the less I "know".

Perhaps that's just the way life works. We're full of advice for parents and ideas about how to raise children until we actually have them and find ourselves swimming in the uncertainty and doubt that we ever had any clue about what we were getting into. We create political Utopias in our minds that could exist if "people just...a, b, c", ignoring the fact that "people" never "just...a, b, c,".

Maybe credulity and trust in our own views, formed without experiences, is a youthful hangover form childhood. Without first-hand knowledge to help us understand what we're talking about, we're left to imagine our imaginings as normative for everybody. We indulge in the unnoticed luxury of non-consideration...non-consideration of opposing viewpoints....non-consideration of how our views actually work out in the real world....non-consideration of what people who are not "normal", like us, are going through...and non-consideration of our blithe and empty comments.

It's impossible to consider everything and everyone. There is only so much empathy of which we can be capable.

But the over-used art of rhetoric and flippancy has got me down. Liberal, Conservative...I don't really care anymore.

The labels have lost their meaning in my mind.

Oh for reasonable, thoughtful people to rule the world!

If people would only just think about the issues with a little more thought!

1 comment:

Assistant Village Idiot said...

I dunno, I make my living in the field and it would make my life a lot easier - finding meds for indigent people ain't easy - but universal care doesn't add up for me. We have a better survival rate for all cancers, even among the uninsured, than the European Universals do.

I admit, I am much in the minority among people who do my job with that sentiment. But the majority of people who do my job can't do simple math, either.