Years ago, a Chinese-American friend mentioned that an African family had moved into our New Jersey neighborhood. “There go our property values,” he concluded. Hardly original thinking, but at the time I was amused at how quickly a recent immigrant was ready to pick and choose which Americans should be permitted to live next door to him.
I was reminded of this exchange last week, when my outraged dad sent me the latest anti-Obama email that had landed in his inbox. The arguments are invariably weak and inaccurate: the latest insisted (incorrectly) that Senator Obama’s first job was as a "civil rights activist," dismissing it as hardly "a productive job." Others seek to “expose” the senator’s Kenyan and Muslim heritage, usually by attaching pictures of his paternal relatives without comment. And to a particular audience, the images of dark-skinned men and women in native garb certainly speak for themselves.
But it’s not this clunky racism that troubles me. It’s that these emails are being circulated by fellow Indian-Americans. Why would these Indians choose to distribute (and thus implicitly endorse) xenophobic sentiments which could easily be turned against them? Don’t they realize that to many Americans, names like “Amol” or “Rahul” sound just as alien as “Osama”? That Governor Bobby Jindal’s relatives back in Punjab look just as foreign as Senator Obama’s Luo brethren? Perhaps they need to be reminded that if it wasn't for the "civil rights activists," we'd still be drinking from separate water fountains and attending separate-but-equal schools. Make no mistake which would be assigned to us.
After eight years of ineptitude and arrogance from a man who knew little about the world and lacked the curiosity to learn about it, President Bush’s successor will assume office with America’s global relationships and image in tatters. If elected, Obama’s childhood in Indonesia will help him put a human face to people that American foreign policy too often treats as “collateral damage.” To most politicians, “liberty” and “freedom” are just words in a teleprompter, but Obama’s extended stays in Kenya would’ve ingrained their value through exposure to a society that lacks both. Consider how much harder it would be for cave-dwelling fanatics to cast America as Satan if it chooses a man from African and Muslim stock as its leader. It certainly wouldn’t hurt to try a new kind of leader, especially after a President—the son of an ambassador, CIA director, Vice President and President— who only visited four countries before his inauguration. I’d been to four countries by the time I was four, and my dad didn’t even have access to Air Force One.
Rather than take issue with Obama on substance, these Indians are unintentionally revealing their own closely-held biases. “We might be a minority, but we’re better than those other minorities,” they say to themselves. In doing so, they turn their back on the inclusive ethos that welcomed them to America and enabled them to so quickly achieve success in a foreign country. I’d suggest that we avoid judging our neighbors by the color of their skin, and instead by the content of their character—lest others begin to do the same to us.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Neither Left Nor Right
The political talk shows have it down to a science. Find one person who calls himself a “Republican strategist,” another that smiles when introduced as a “Democratic strategist,” and pit them against each other, each competing to cram as many meaningless (but focus-group tested) buzzwords as possible into the three minute segment. But who’s not “pro-family?” Why do only some people that work qualify as “working class?” And how can a President turn a $13 trillion economy on a dime by implementing his “economic plan?” Never mind. The host is only too happy to enable the silliness, devoting endless hours to issues like gay marriage and abortion that are easy for the public to understand. Ratings go up, everyone gets a paycheck, and no harm done.
Well, not quite. Consider these two inconvenient truths:
1) If we tally all the benefits due to everyone that will be eligible for federal entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, and subtract all the taxes that will be collected to fund these programs, the government will still need to find $57 trillion to make up the difference. That’s about $200,000 for each American alive today. That figure leapt by $2.5 trillion last year alone, dwarfing 2007’s “official” $162 billion operating deficit. To pay out all of these benefits, the government has but two choices: it can either slash benefits or raise taxes through the roof.
2) Universal health care is already here. Anyone—it doesn’t matter whether they lack health insurance or entered the country illegally—must be given care when they walk into a hospital’s emergency room. Providing healthcare this way is unconscionably expensive: we spend 15% of our GDP ($2.3 trillion in 2007, or $7,400 per person) caring for ourselves, and the percentage is growing (we only spent about 5% of GDP on healthcare in the mid-1960s). We can keep doing this until our entire GDP is consumed by healthcare, or we can make the tough choices required to control costs by providing preventative and catastrophic health services to everyone through the most cost-effective channel. And to control costs, we must come to grips with the fact that the supply of care is not unlimited: the funds for a 90 year-old’s quadruple bypass surgery may be deemed better spent on providing pre-natal care to hundreds of moms, for example. But the patient would always be free to pay for it on his own. And if you’re still convinced that we’re getting our money’s worth from the current “system,” why do Americans’ life expectancies rate 29th (Source: CIA) and 38th (Source: UN) in the world? And perhaps you’re wondering how much Japan, the UK, Germany and Switzerland are spending to live longer than us?
So are “conservatives” ready to turn away sick people from hospitals? And are “liberals” willing to call for limitless taxation to maintain entitlements at current levels? Debating terrorism might be sexier, but these are the real issues that fundamentally threaten our way of life. Yet a serious discussion of how to address them are deftly ignored by the politicians and their enablers in the press.
We report, you decide? Not exactly.
Editor's Note: Hat tip to loyal reader N(2) for the PBS link.
Well, not quite. Consider these two inconvenient truths:
1) If we tally all the benefits due to everyone that will be eligible for federal entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, and subtract all the taxes that will be collected to fund these programs, the government will still need to find $57 trillion to make up the difference. That’s about $200,000 for each American alive today. That figure leapt by $2.5 trillion last year alone, dwarfing 2007’s “official” $162 billion operating deficit. To pay out all of these benefits, the government has but two choices: it can either slash benefits or raise taxes through the roof.
2) Universal health care is already here. Anyone—it doesn’t matter whether they lack health insurance or entered the country illegally—must be given care when they walk into a hospital’s emergency room. Providing healthcare this way is unconscionably expensive: we spend 15% of our GDP ($2.3 trillion in 2007, or $7,400 per person) caring for ourselves, and the percentage is growing (we only spent about 5% of GDP on healthcare in the mid-1960s). We can keep doing this until our entire GDP is consumed by healthcare, or we can make the tough choices required to control costs by providing preventative and catastrophic health services to everyone through the most cost-effective channel. And to control costs, we must come to grips with the fact that the supply of care is not unlimited: the funds for a 90 year-old’s quadruple bypass surgery may be deemed better spent on providing pre-natal care to hundreds of moms, for example. But the patient would always be free to pay for it on his own. And if you’re still convinced that we’re getting our money’s worth from the current “system,” why do Americans’ life expectancies rate 29th (Source: CIA) and 38th (Source: UN) in the world? And perhaps you’re wondering how much Japan, the UK, Germany and Switzerland are spending to live longer than us?
So are “conservatives” ready to turn away sick people from hospitals? And are “liberals” willing to call for limitless taxation to maintain entitlements at current levels? Debating terrorism might be sexier, but these are the real issues that fundamentally threaten our way of life. Yet a serious discussion of how to address them are deftly ignored by the politicians and their enablers in the press.
We report, you decide? Not exactly.
Editor's Note: Hat tip to loyal reader N(2) for the PBS link.
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