a big week for "I"

A Supreme Court decision eviscerating Congress's now-failed attempt to limit the effect of corporate money on elections; an electoral rejection of a Massachusetts Democrat on grounds that health care for all will cause an incremental increase in taxes : it's been a tough week for those of us who persist in the belief that our society moves over time towards an ever more rational, ever more ethically-minded sensibility about how best to configure ourselves relative to each other as a society. Maybe the U.S. is too far down the path of the glory of self-interest to realize that there is no virtue in equating the interests of corporations - groups of people organized for the sole purpose of earning profit - with our society's best interests. True, the creation of wealth is a 'good' and necessary aspect of life. But accepting that wealth creation is the solution to all societal problems is just wish fulfillment, and an easy convenient answer for us, a way to avoid facing real problems. Allowing an insurance industry whose sole purpose is to extract profits from health care transactions between providers and consumers to regulate and increasingly define those transactions in ways best configured to produce profit is to do one thing only - produce insurance industry profits. Providing health care for poor people is simply not profitable, so it is not provided. We are now coming to see that providing health care to really sick people is not profitable, either, so slowly the industry is finding ways to avoid providing it (preexisting conditions, etc.). But under the mantra of freedom (the freedom to produce wealth), we seem to be reluctant to do anything to redirect the system to more efficiently define the provider-consumer transaction. And the same political system which is in the process of refusing reform is also telling us that we cannot do anything about it : we cannot even, thorough Congress, regulate the control corporations have over the political process. So, it appears that we are headed irreturnably down the rabbit hole of self-interest with nothing more than the unfounded belief that producing wealth is more than enough of a societal benefit to offset the consequences of ignoring the inefficiencies of a profit-driven system rather than a needs-driven system. And nobody, it seems, cares. Everybody is too busy either making money or spending it. Everybody, that is, except the people who have needs left unaddressed by profit-makers. Is this really what we want for ourselves, as a society ? Do we really want, "Every man for themselves" ? I don't think we do. I still trust that people in this country are going to wake up one day and realize how far removed we've allowed ourselves to get from the notion that we are our best when we see life as "we", not as "I".