So, my brother wrote an interesting post today which, if you haven't read it - and if you're a friend of his - you should go and check out. It's well written because, duh, my brother is a professional writer, and puts a human face on something I've thought a lot about, which is how involved to be politically. My brother, as he will be the first to tell you, is a very non-political person. His general - and quite rational - feeling is that politics generally isn't helpful and usually, especially in the short term, just makes people upset. Which is something that resonates with me. It's true - politics comes up and everyone loses their minds. I'm a bit more political than my brother, political enough to post random memes on Facebook. I've even turned up to a rally or two. But, especially as I get older, I've come round to his way of thinking. Getting involved with politics is a sure way to get pushed off my balance. And so, the temptation is to just avoid politics. To avoid getting involved.
But the universe has a funny way of not letting you taking the easy way out, and in this case, what got pushed in my face - pushed in my whole family's face - is my brother's cancer and, specifically, its relationship to the Affordable Care Act. For the back story you should just read my brother's post, but the gist of it is that at 37 years old and otherwise healthy, my brother suddenly found himself without healthcare and with cancer.
So the first thing to understand about the United States, for anybody that doesn't live here, is that we have some of the best care in the world, and also the most expensive. You can't afford to pay for the fight against cancer on your own unless you are very, very wealthy, and possibly not even then. It is an exaggeration to say that my brother would not have been able to afford his healthcare without some kind of insurance, but it's not a big exaggeration. He certainly wouldn't have been able to afford it on his own; my parents would have had to step in.
It's also important to understand that there are lots of reasons why a person might not have healthcare that are not "being irresponsible" or "not being able to afford it". Certainly those are two big and valid reasons, but as somebody who has gone through periods of not having healthcare myself, I can attest that the healthcare system in this country lets a lot of people through the cracks. I worked a crazy schedule of different startups and other companies with varying sets of HR policies, various approaches to healthcare, and also various approaches to whether I could continue working for them (that's a joke by the way). A patchwork of crazy quilt healthcare services from the city of San Francisco and even the state - not to mention COBRA - theoretically covered me during most of that time, but in practice, at any given time I'm not sure I could have even told you if I had insurance, much less which kind I had or what the terms were.
So here, then, we have my brother, who is 37, white, rich (by most standards), healthy, and generally lucky. And yet - at least before Obamacare - screwed. And through no fault of his own, I might add. He didn't get cancer from smoking, or living on a radioactive Simpsons-esque sewer pipe. He just got it because that's life. Rays from space.
So while it is not completely true to say that "liberal politics" saved my brother's life, it is also not that much of an exaggeration.
Now, faced with that reality, there is a choice to make. One choice is to just sit, hands in prayer mudra, and namaste with the Universe, in the hopes that whatever great power is guiding our existence has our best interests at heart, or at least a good sense of humor. Another choice is to get involved, but for all the wrong reasons - out of anger that the other side is killing sick people, or just a fetishistic desire to tell people what to do or control things. But a third choice is to take the path of maximum compassion, and if and when that path intersects with the path of politics, to get involved to the level needed and commensurate with the calling to do so.
I am grateful that people - myself and others - got involved enough with politics to eventually cause President Obama to be elected and, eventually, the Affordable Care Act to be passed. That work, and that involvement, may have quite literally saved my brother's life, and that's something that's too important to me to just brush off as inconsequential. That is real, and that has meaning. So at the very least, it's time to pay that forward, and do the work today so that future brothers and sisters and sons and daughters and fathers and mothers get to cure *their* cancers, and the world can be a more compassionate place.