In a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives, Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA), attacked a public option in health care, saying among other things that it would "kill people". He specifically called out Canada and Great Britain, saying that our former mother country and our cousin to the north “don’t have the appreciation of life as we do in our society.”
Every time our country, or western Europe, or European civilization, or Christian culture, runs up against opposition, the odd idea that we who are inheritors of western, mainly Christian, culture and ideas have a respect for human life and dignity that is absent in other places. I grew up hearing how the Japanese in WWII demonstrated their lack of appreciation for human life in a variety of ways. The Soviets were very often portrayed as little more than uncivilized barbarian hordes, ready to overwhelm western Europe and destroy it culturally. In the years since the al Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington, we have heard far too often that Muslims have no respect for life, like we in the west do.
The idea that western Europe has demonstrated in its history, its culture, its religious and political ideas, an underlying respect for the dignity and sanctity of all human life is not only false, it is almost laughably ridiculous. To claim that the United States, alone among western English-speaking nations, has an appreciation for life not shared by Great Britain or Canada, is an insult to those two great nations, a lie so easily proved one wonders how Rep. Broun could say such a thing with a straight face.
There may be good arguments against a public option in health care reform, although to this point all I continue to hear is "socialism!" and "rationing!", repeated like some weird Zen koan that clears the mind of thought and is supposed to trump all practical arguments to the contrary. To claim the United States - land of slavery and Jim Crow; land of the genocide against our native peoples (beginning with Increase Mather in colonial Massachusetts urging the authorities to give smallpox-infected blankets to the Indians as a way of clearing space for colonial growth); land of hate crimes against Jews and Catholics, gays and Chinese, the internment of Japanese-Americans and the vilification of non-Protestant Christians as heretics - has a respect and appreciation for human life that is not only unique, but superior to that of other nations would make me laugh if the various trails of tears and blood that mark our history did not cry out from the ground for us to acknowledge.
