Emily's Worldview

In the New York Times today, there is an article about the overburdened emergency rooms, in New Orleans. It describes patients waiting for six hours to be seen, inadequate equipment, overburdened staff, and people being forced to travel to health facilities far away for non-life threatening emergencies like broken limbs.

It struck a chord with me because just this week I have been working on an essay about what it was like for my neighbor in Tanzania when he needed surgery. In short, it was exactly like that, and he was in an area of the country with relatively better health facilities than elsewhere, including one of the best hospitals in the country. Sometimes, here, we take health care for granted and marvel when it is not there for us. But for most people in most places it's never there to begin with.

This is an amazing graph showing how the Congress spends its discretionary funds. More than half of those go to the military. Click to enlarge, scroll around. Check out the tiny circles representing famine relief and assistance to poor families, the big ones for space programs. Here are Congress' priorities.

I don't even remember what it was, but I recently was accused of doing something solely to assuage my liberal guilt. Which got me thinking, is feeling guilty really a bad thing? I guess the whole idea of liberal guilt is that some people know that there are all kinds of injustices and outrages in the world, and they feel so powerless to change the whole constellation of iniquity that they may take a few piecemeal actions but won't do anything to alter their whole lifestyle. And they feel guilty about it, and that's a pointless thing to feel.

But what is the alternative? Not feeling guilty? I guess some people think they deserve to buy cheaply made goods from sweatshops, and burn limitless oil that pollutes the air, and benefit from trade barriers that protect the local way of life while keeping poor people around the world on their knees. But do those people take substantive action more than guilty-feeling people do?

Obviously, feeling guilty and doing nothing is a worthless exercise. It's self-indulgent. But if feeling guilty means you recycle, and give to charity, and take the subway to work, and read about Darfur when it shows up on the Op-Ed page, and maybe write a letter to Congress, isn't that something? Even if a personal decision to walk to the mailbox instead of driving doesn't change the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere a single iota, it is still ethically a good decision. We are all guilty, and we have to act like we know it.

It's not enough, but it's something.

So I know I'm weeks behind the rest of the world on this one, but I recently saw Bill O'Reilly on Letterman, and was really struck by how contradictory the idea of the War on Christmas is with conservatism. I mean, basically, O'Reilly and crew have a handful of examples of local governments and institutions that have decided to make their holiday observations more tolerant--not allowing a public nativity scene in Texas, changing the words to Silent Night in Kansas. But local communities have the freedom to observe holidays how they want, and it's conservatives who traditionally support their autonomy.

Moreover, if conservatives want to find a conspiracy that is undermining our (supposedly universal, supposedly stable) "culture of Christmas", they could look to the major corporations which have changed the season, the decorations, the meaning of Christmas from a religious holiday to a consumerist one. But major retailers are not targets for conservative ire; local school boards are. Sigh.