Differences
Differences
by Ken Melvin
… He said I have no opinion about this
And I have no opinion about that
Asked an Honors History Class what they thought was the most important issue facing America. In an earlier period, Patrick, a kid from Africa, responded, “our differences.” In a later period, a black female, in a plaintive voice, responded, “we are different.”
Indeed. We are a world of people with many differences: different politics, different religions, … different cultures. Not just here; worldwide, humans are wrestling with this question: How to live with our differences? Can we humans, after all our centuries, change enough? Change enough to accept our differences?
The importance of these questions came to the fore with the recent onslaught of immigration into Europe and has since played out in referenda/elections throughout Europe and the United States. The pending further, and of greater scale, dislocations caused by global warming/climate change and globalization, makes their answering imperative. Plus: What will resulting cultures look like? At what point does an existing culture become more like that of the immigrant? What is the tipping point? Can the center hold?
Over the past 20 years, really quite late, much of our nation has come to believe that someone else’s sexuality is really none of our business. We, as a nation, now accept lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender, LGBT, people as they are. Not ignore them, not tolerate them, not demand that they change; but accept them as they are. Yet, there are still regions of America, sectors of the population, where a majority of the people think that they know how people should act, should think, … that they have the right to demand that others change.
Really? Does anyone really have the right to tell anyone else that they must change? Be like the rest of ‘us’. That they must assimilate?
Time was, when most would have said that assimilation was the time-proven solution; that a minority should adopt the culture of the majority — with the culture of majority minimally affected. The mechanism for this change went along the lines we have often seen narrated in literature where: the immigrant parents clustered, were suspicious of others, and were subject suspicion. They may have squabbled with those within the cluster of different ethnicity, culture; even called each other names. But, their children played together, went to school together, and along the way took on many of the ways of the majority. Their children might marry someone of their own cultural group, or maybe someone from another; and some married someone from the established majority. Voila, in a couple generations, the immigrant families had assimilated; and the dominant culture had gained a few new dishes to enjoy, added a few new words and phrases to their vocabulary. An immigrant minority assimilated.
What if a cultural minority doesn’t want to assimilate? Feels that assimilation would mean the loss of their culture? What if aspects of a minority’s cultural beliefs are in direct conflict with those of the majority? For example: Does a minority cultural group that believes in female genital mutilation, FGM, have an inherent right to practice FGM in a society where the majority strongly oppose the practice?
Even in an accepting society, there will be norms, limits, bounds. All well-functioning societies have norms, limits, bounds, …; have common cultural norms that are the ‘laws of the land’; that supersede any and all other cultural customs. No cultural belief can ever supersede the law of the land. Though both laws and beliefs are subjective, and both are derivative of culture; they are not equal. Laws have precedence over beliefs. Everyone of a cultural minority chooses whether to believe or not to believe; they do not get to choose which laws to obey. In a multicultural society, some, maybe all, cultures will have to forego certain of their practices. The cultural majority will have to accept certain practices and behaviors of the cultural minority that are different from their own. Minorities cultures can maintain most of their cultural identity and still fit into a larger multicultural society. The cultural majority accepts most of a minority’s behavior. In exchange for this acceptance, the minority cultural group must agree to, at all times abide by, accept, the ‘laws of the land’.
If any minority cultural group were to be granted immunity to the laws of the land, others will petition for the same; society would soon descend into chaos and failure.
Doesn’t the first amendment give us the right to not have religious beliefs imposed on us? It does. But when homegrown religious groups try to impose their religious beliefs upon us, they often try to base their legal arguments on that they disdain most, science.
Not sure I understand the point. No, female genital mutilation is not Ok because of “freedom of religion”. Neither is throwing virgin into the volcano or cutting out the heart of a sacrificial victim.
Change.
The need being to understand what is our underlying unifying philosophy.
Another fine, fine essay.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/29/opinion/obamacare-coronavirus-republicans.html
June 29, 2020
Obamacare Versus the G.O.P. Zombies
Ten years of failed promises to come up with something better.
By Paul Krugman
Covid-19 cases are surging in states that took Donald Trump’s advice and reopened for business too soon. This new surge — is it OK now to call it a second wave? — is, on average, hitting people younger than the initial surge in the Northeast did. Perhaps as a result, rising infections haven’t been reflected in a comparable rise in deaths, although that may be only a matter of time.
There is, however, growing evidence that even those who survive Covid-19 can suffer long-term adverse effects: scarred lungs, damaged hearts and perhaps neurological disorders.
And if the Trump administration gets its way, there may be another source of long-term damage: permanent inability to get health insurance.
Remarkably, last week the administration reaffirmed its support for a lawsuit seeking to overturn the Affordable Care Act, which would, among other things, eliminate protection for Americans with pre-existing medical conditions. If the suit were to succeed, having had Covid-19 would surely be one of the pre-existing conditions making health insurance hard, perhaps impossible, to get.
Now, the legal argument behind the case is beyond flimsy: The lawsuit claims that the 2017 tax cut effectively invalidated the act, even though that was no part of Congress’s intention. But with a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, nobody knows what will happen. And Trump’s support for the suit makes it clear that if re-elected he will do all he can to destroy Obamacare.
Not to worry, says the president. In tweets over the weekend he insisted that he would come up with an alternative to Obamacare that would be “FAR BETTER AND MUCH LESS EXPENSIVE” while protecting Americans with pre-existing conditions.
But he’s been claiming to have a much better alternative to Obamacare since he took office. Republicans in Congress, who voted to repeal Obamacare 70 times during the Obama years, have been making the same claim for more than a decade.
Yet somehow the great alternative to the Affordable Care Act has never materialized. In 2017, when the G.O.P. finally came close to repealing the act — failing thanks only to a last-minute change of heart on the part of Senator John McCain — the plan on offer would have stripped away protection for pre-existing conditions and added 23 million Americans to the ranks of the uninsured.
In other words, Republicans’ insistence that they have a superior alternative to Obamacare is a zombie lie — a claim that should be dead after having been proved false again and again, but it is still shambling along, eating people’s brains.
But why can’t Republicans come up with a better alternative to Obamacare? Are they just incompetent? Possibly — but even if they did know what they were doing, they couldn’t produce a superior plan, because no such plan is possible. In particular, unless you’re willing to move left instead of right, by going for single payer, the only way to guarantee coverage for Americans with pre-existing conditions is a system that looks a lot like Obamacare.
The logic here has been clear from the beginning. To ensure coverage of people with pre-existing conditions, you have to prohibit insurers from discriminating based on medical history. But that’s not enough: To provide a decent risk pool, you also have to induce healthy people to sign up, preferably with both subsidies and a penalty for being uninsured. In other words, you need a system that is basically Obamacare.
The 2017 tax cut, which did away with the individual mandate — the penalty for noninsurance — weakened the system; you can see this by the fact that states, like New Jersey, that imposed their own mandates saw a drop in insurance premiums. But the design of the subsidies, which insulated most people from rising premiums, contained the damage: The percentage of Americans without health insurance, which fell sharply as a result of Obamacare, remains near record lows.
So is there any alternative to Obamacare? Of course there is. We could go back to being a country in which people with pre-existing conditions and/or low incomes can’t get health insurance, where for a large fraction of the population illness either goes untreated or leads to bankruptcy. That would, in part, mean becoming a country in which Americans who caught Covid-19 during the pandemic would be uninsurable for the rest of their lives.
Indeed, turning us back into that kind of country is the G.O.P.’s true goal, and is what will happen if the party gets its way either as a result of the current lawsuit or through legislation during a second Trump term.
But Republicans can’t admit that this is their goal. The public overwhelmingly supports protection for Americans with pre-existing conditions, so right-wing politicians have to pretend they can provide that while dismantling the regulations and subsidies such protection requires. And they have to hope that voters won’t remember that they have been promising a plan, but never delivering, for more than a decade.
Let’s hope voters are smarter than that. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me 70 times and counting, shame on me.
anne:
Pull up the Sacremento Bee and Erwin Chemerinsky (dean of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law) column of the judge’s decision over turning the ACA. I have known Erwin for almost 20 years and have found him to be one of the most knowledgeable law experts i have talked with from time to time. He was also kind enough to ignore my frothing at the mouth while battling with the courts. Texas judge is wrong on Affordable Care Act ruling.
There is more on this topic which is a worthwhile read as it lays the legal foundation for overturning the judge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Chemerinsky
Erwin Chemerinsky (May, 1953) is an American legal scholar known for his studies of United States constitutional law and federal civil procedure. He served as the founding dean of the University of California, Irvine School of Law from 2008 to 2017, and is currently the dean of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law.
A study of legal publications between 2009 and 2013 found Chemerinsky to be the second-most frequently cited American legal scholar…
[ Excellent. ]