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Solidarity

I keep seeing the first ten minutes of a documentary about the 1995 Chicago heat wave that killed 739 vulnerable and poor people in 5 days. In light of the current moment, I'm having some thoughts. Let me get the caveats out of the way first. I know that politics is often a choosing between two or more less than ideal scenarios. I know that people of goodwill can legitimately disagree about the best way to reach an agreed upon end.

The thing is, I'm hearing a voice again, and it sounds an awful lot like Dr. Bryan Cross, my friend and a professor of philosophy at Mount Mercy University. The voice is a little more direct than Dr. Cross tends to be in most arguments, but it's saying, "Who would you have to tax, and how much, to provide every poor person in Chicago with at least a window unit for air-conditioning at no cost to them?" You could say that death comes for us all, and that some people in Chicago would not have been able to escape heat related death that summer. On the other hand, Mayor Daley wasn't going without air-conditioning. The Chicago Bulls didn't go without air-conditioning. And if you're asking me if I favor some sort of social democracy to prevent some of these things from happening the way they have, the answer to that is an emphatic "yes!"

Now don't hear what I'm not saying. I'm not saying that people aren't responsible for willing choices that they make. I'm not saying that we all owe $100 to every drunkard we meet on the sidewalk. I'm definitely not saying that we should look the other way as the closest thing we have to a social democratic party in the United States promotes abortion, euthanasia, divorce, broken families, and whatever else. I am saying that in the abstract at the level of principle, I believe that any one of us can stand to be slightly less rich, if we can make our poor less desperately poor.

At bottom, I reject individualism, especially as it pertains to wealth. I believe that we have moral obligations which transcend and supersede an absolute claim of "my rights". I recognize as a matter of course the inefficiencies of government, and that any attempt to assist the vulnerable will become an occasion for graft and corruption. Too many times, however, a philosophy of anti-politics and anti-government has raised the specter of inefficiency and corruption to maintain the status quo of radical individualism, and bluntly, radical selfishness. The American people pay taxes to support things that we need and share as citizens. Quite frankly, it is time to ask if we are getting anything close to what we pay for.

Given the difficulty of convincing so great a number of people to stay home for the protection of others while a deadly virus attacks the vulnerable, I would say that we are infected with a stubborn individualism. No ghost of statist socialism erases that moral problem, and we should say that there must be a middle ground. It's time to stand up and claim that middle ground.

Someone could argue that I'm just a sentimental fool, but my retort is that we have chosen to be governed for decades by heartless fools. I will take the sentimental fools over the heartless fools every day, and twice on Sunday.

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