Arthur Salm: Health care - It’s in the Constitution

“I think health care is a privilege. I wouldn’t call it a right.” - Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.)

Slavery used to be cool, and that was even before cool was cool. In fact, slavery was beyond cool — it was something people didn’t think about one way or the other, because there was no “other.”

Just a few hundred years ago, just about everywhere, slavery was an accepted part of life, like families and work and the sun coming up in the morning and the Padres trading away franchise players. Not even slaves were anti-slavery: Any of them fortunate enough to be freed, and then to become prosperous, would just naturally get himself a slave or two or ten. That was the way people were. That was the way people thought.

Two hundred years ago, nearly half a century after this country’s founding, education was for the relatively few children whose families could afford to send them to private schools — which were the only schools. It certainly wasn’t the government’s business to educate its citizens. That was the way we were. That was the way Americans thought.

Today, the acceptance of slavery is all but unimaginable. Literally: unimaginable. So radically have our values shifted that it’s all but impossible to empathize with a slaveholder, to put one’s self into his mindframe and say, “All right, I see that. I may not agree with it, but I can kind of understand where he’s coming from.” It’s beyond our ken.

Likewise the notion that we bear no responsibility, as a society, to educate our children. Self interest plays a part, of course — a modern technological civilization requires an educated citizenry — but it goes further and deeper than that. We now agree that spending public treasure on sending kids to school is a moral imperative. Every child, we are convinced — we know — deserves an education... Read more