Pearlstein is generally not prone to angry outbursts. He is a good columnist for the Washington Post. However, he has had enough of what has gone on. And he uses his column as a vehicle.
This month, health care reform is the issue talked about in town halls. However, these discussions are interrupted by astro-turf (fake grass roots) activists. They have disrupted these events and even, supposedly, threatened Members of Congress.
Pearlstein essentially decides to use his column as an attack. He opens by saying:
As a columnist who regularly dishes out sharp criticism, I try not to question the motives of people with whom I don't agree. Today, I'm going to step over that line.
The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers on the effort to reform the health-care system have been so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage. By poisoning the political well, they've given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition. They've become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems.
The column then goes through the facts and attempts to dispel them. The idea that there is no choice? Wrong. The hypocrisy of complaining about costs, but refusing any of the normal ideas of either decreasing utilization and/or unit price? Exposed.
But, I would argue that the most important paragraphs are Pearlstein's last ones. The words are particularly damning:
Health reform is a test of whether this country can function once again as a civil society -- whether we can trust ourselves to embrace the big, important changes that require everyone to give up something in order to make everyone better off. Republican leaders are eager to see us fail that test. We need to show them that no matter how many lies they tell or how many scare tactics they concoct, Americans will come together and get this done.
If health reform is to be anyone's Waterloo, let it be theirs.
The rhetoric and the development of this debate, and so much of our public policy is troubling. As I have stated before, the way has turned into a screaming match. Reasonable people have become unreasonable. Everyone is in it for himself. It is me and greed.
However, such narrow-minded individualism cannot work. It must be tempered by community and shared sacrifice. No society ever functioned in that manner. A democracy functions best when ideas are discussed with passion but rational bases, sort of a modification of the old marketplace of ideas. We talk; we compromise; we reach consensus. We do not scream. We recognize the opposing views and take it into consideration and seek to still occupy the same space. We do not drown each other out.
Should this debate end because of these disruptions, it says a lot about American Society. I fear too that we will also be unable to address other disasterous problems looming on the horizon or that we have not even conceived of yet.
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