Montpelier
When I was just a feckless youth, and beginning to think of doing things I knew I shouldn’t, I was often jerked back from planned indiscretions by the saying, “Our family doesn’t do things like that.” In subsequent years I managed to disprove that notion pretty thoroughly, as well as the biblical advice about bending the twig and influencing the growth of the tree. I’m still surprised at the lack of anxiety with which I switched, during my freshman year in college, from the Genesis versions of the Earth’s creation to the notion of billions of years of phylogeny that had led thus far to the physical results evident all around us.
There was also in this transformation in world view another lesson: the often crippling effects of ideology in decision-making and the importance of evidence-based decisions.
A perfect example is the incidence of unplanned teen pregnancies in areas of the nation in which abstinence-only sex education is the rule, as opposed to the results reported in districts where it’s assumed that teens will have sex and are thus taught birth-control techniques. I’ll be among the first to admit a faint nostalgia for the good old days when a bride who wore white did so as a symbol of “purity,” but also among the first to recognize that it was often a fantasy born of ideology and unreality, a frame imposed by a romantic image of the world upon the actual.
I suspect that the greatest problems the United States has had and continues to suffer from are the direct result of misguided ideology that flies in the face of facts — and relies, in many cases, upon inaccurate interpretations of the very authority it cites. A very good example is the self-reliant neanderthal neighbor (“like an old-stone savage armed”) of Robert Frost who mends his walls each spring because his father taught him once that “good fences make good neighbors.” Frost, the reality-based partner in this effort, wonders why — “There where it is we do not need the wall: He is all pine and I am apple orchard. My apple trees will never get across and eat the cones under his pines” — but bows before the resolute principle of his neighbor.
The legislative branch of our national, and many state, governments are currently in the grip of middle-aged white men who seem to have drunk deeply of the ideology of Ayn Rand, John Wayne and Franklin Graham — as well of the financial resources of wealthy corporations and individuals. Having spent the last eight years barking at the heels of the Affordable Care Act, they’ve finally caught it, and have crafted some alternatives to it that are stunning in their unresponsiveness to the citizens they purport to assist.
This is where the ideology comes in and skews the result. In the proposed American Health Care Act, as it is called, citizens will be released from the yoke of government oppression and in the best American tradition free to choose their own health care plans — in much the same way that any of us is free to stroll into a Ferrari dealership and pick out the one he or she wants. It’s a triumph of the fantasy that any American can, if willing, raise himself or herself into a state of solvency and competency. But it’s not fact-based.
We learned in church this past Sunday that in at least two of the major mainline denominations the 21st of each month will be recognized with fasting. The reason is that the 21st is the date at which many welfare and food stamp recipients’ monthly benefits run dry. It’s not because poor people are wasting their money on cellphones and prepared foods, like the rest of us, but because what they get isn’t enough to sustain health. Those last nine days must be interminable.
Yet, according to the Daily Telegraph, the budget that our president will propose this week will cut Medicaid benefits by $800 billion over the next 10 years and reduce food stamp benefits by over 25 percent. It’s clear that no one with any experience of the facts of poverty, joblessness, hunger or homelessness had anything to do with these changes; since this nation can easily afford not to impose them, they’re based purely on ideology.
If anyone were to do a fact-based analysis of the benefits of Planned Parenthood, rather than a mount a faux-biblical attack on the program based on its inclusion of abortion among its many services, he or she might be less inclined to climb on the bandwagon dedicated to its extinction. There is literally nowhere else that many thousands of poor women (and men) can go for help in diagnosis and treatment of some diseases, family planning and contraception. Without the resources of Planned Parenthood — well, the result is as unthinkable as it is indescribable.
It’s all too easy for an upwardly mobile American lawmaker, elected by enthusiastic constituents, to be awed by the majestic polished granite grandeur of an office building and much-improved social status. Dealing with the needs of the poor, while living on a six-figure salary with benefits, may seem demeaning. The lawmaker needs a little Shakespeare on the office wall facing the desk: Th’ abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power. … But ’tis a common proof that lowliness is young ambition’s ladder, whereto the climber upward turns his face. But when he once attains the upmost round, he then unto the ladder turns his back, looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees by which he did ascend.
Great nations, after their deaths, are usually judged by their once-great power. Perhaps they might still be with us if their ideology had first attended to the care of the least of their citizens.
Willem Lange can be reached at willem.lange@comcast.net.
