COMMON GOODNESS

Dear Spike:

Your mother and I were back in the emergency room this week, although this time it was for me, not you.

I was playing soccer Tuesday night, dribbling along the sidelines and looking for a teammate to pass to when suddenly — bam! — I was on the ground. I’m still not sure what happened. One moment I was dribbling and the next moment I was on the turf, dizzy and confused.

My teammates tell me an opposing player came from behind me and slammed me — and my head — hockey style against the wall. It was late in the game and so, after peeling myself from the ground, I stumbled to the bench and sat down. After the game, I kept asking my teammates what happened. And they kept laughing.

All of that should have been a sign that I shouldn’t have gotten into my car, but I wasn’t exactly thinking straight.

About halfway home, my lips began to tingle and I began to feel nauseous — signs, I correctly identified, of a concussion. I called your grandmother so I would have someone to talk to as I drove home.

Your mom and I got to the hospital about a half hour later. The doctor only spent about three minutes checking me over before sending me home.

My concussion was a mild one, he said. He told me to go home to get some sleep and told your mother to wake me up every few hours, just to make sure I wasn’t dead.

Given how unconcerned he seemed, I felt a little foolish for having even gone into the emergency room. And I felt even more foolish when, as we were leaving, the medical assistant hit us up for a $100 co-pay.

A hundred bucks.

For three minutes with a doctor.

And that was just the co-pay. God only knows what the hospital charged our insurance company.

Still, believe it or not, I recognize that I am one of the fortunate ones — and not just because my concussion was only a mild one.

Today on the radio I heard John Edwards, a senator from North Carolina who is running for president, make a pitch for national health care. That’s something our Democratic politicians have been promising for a long, long time, but even when they’ve taken power they haven’t been able to make it happen.

Our country has the best medical system in the world, but it’s shared unequally among its citizens.

Those who have jobs with socially responsible companies — and I grudgingly include my employer in that group — have access to fairly comprehensive medical care. And though it can still be costly to go to the hospital, we’re fairly well taken care of when we do.

Others — who work just as hard but do so for companies which have decided they cannot afford to provide their employees with health insurance — must purchase their own insurance on the open market. That can be extremely expensive. And so often those people simply do without.

When you are older, your mother and I will tell you about the idea of a common good. We’ll point to our roads, parks and police officers as examples of how, collectively, we can enrich and provide for everyone better than we could possibly expect to do as individuals.

It would seem that universal health care would be a perfect example of this — indeed, it seems to me to be a moral imperative for a society as rich as ours.

Perhaps by the time we’re able to talk about these sorts of things, politicians like Mr. Edwards will have gotten past the talking and onto the doing. Perhaps then we’ll have moved on to the next moral imperatives: Ending poverty and hunger in our nation and around our globe.

But I doubt it. The truth is, we’re very likely to still be working on these problems when you’re my age — and perhaps when your children are my age.

It’s easy to say no to something we know to be right because it seems impossible — or impossibly far away. And being of a privileged class of “haves” makes it even easier to ignore the plights of “have nots.”

I expect you to care, nonetheless.

The power of the common good is immense, but it takes faith, good will and work on the part of decent people.

We’ll get there, I know, because I believe in our common goodness.

And I hope you will believe this, too.

Love,
dad