Alberto Cairo s orthopedic clinic in Kabul

Alberto Cairo s orthopedic clinic in Kabul, posted with vodpod

Detroit-area man is cancer patients’ coffee angel

If you’ve lost a bit of faith on humanity.  If you’ve gotten a bit discouraged at the cruelties we can dish out to one anoter, or if you just want to read a good story, do yourself a good deed.

Read this.

 

Detroit-area man is cancer patients’ coffee angel.

 

Richard Wilkinson: How economic inequality harms societies | Video on TED.com

This talk captured my attention because I spent several hours last night with a group of people talking about the value of educating children in a diverse economic environment.   We were talking about creating and sustaining a private school with a public school population and how powerful and valuable that would be.  We talked about the vast delta between the very rich and the very poor in our country and how,  as we focus on the outcomes of our societal investments, we fear one outcome is less educated, less capable, less empowered kids for every social level, not just the poor kids.    During this conversation I had no data to back up my instinct that our staggering, widening social gap has terrible consequences for the country.   We can all point to our out-of-work friend or a kid who needs help but to think systemically about the cost; I had no way to do it.

I don’t want to steal from the rich to give to the poor.  I don’t advocate death to rich people.  I advocate a level playing field and a sensible approach to community accountability and responsibility.  That’s all.   So let’s talk turkey.  A report released today by the Congressional Budget Office tells a pretty clear story:  The top 1% of households saw their after-tax incomes grow by 275% from 1979 to 2007.  275%.  The rest of us?  40%.

2010 IRS Returns show a group of 1.6 million people earning 50% more income than a group of 69.9 million people.

SUMMARY OF FEDERAL INDIVIDUAL INCOME TAX DATA, 2010

The top 50% make 7x what the bottom 50% make.

If the bottom 50% had health care, food, access to education and stable housing, maybe it wouldn’t be such a big deal.  But they don’t.  If the tax codes (and I don’t just mean federal income tax as is listed above) were less regressive (think gas tax as a % of your income), maybe it wouldn’t be such a big deal.  I don’t know.

But it is a big deal.  Especially when the richest people, or some of them, appear at least to have gotten their wealth at the expense of those that don’t have any money.    It’s a big deal because the outcomes tell us it’s a big deal, not because you or I have a big feeling about it.

Richard Wilkinson’s talk is sobering.   The outcomes of social inequality are inexplicably clear:  the greater the inequality, the greater the cost to society.

ObamaCare is not a 4-letter word

Finally a video that isn’t about death panels and rationed care and communism. In a complex world with complex problems solutions aren’t easy and they don’t come packaged up in a bow. Very few people – left, right or center of the political spectrum-  actually like ObamaCare. It’s either goes too far or not far enough.

But it’s something. It’s a start.

ObamaCare is a bold effort to do something to change to ROI on our health-care dollars as well as improve the real-world human outcomes for Americans.

I am alive today because I happened to work for a company that had (and has) a good health care policy. My $500,000+ surgery and after-care treatment was not going to happen if I had been laid off. Or if the plan didn’t let me chose my hospital. I would have been one of the 5.6 people who die every hour in our country because they don’t have health care or the dozens more because they have inadequate health care.

And of those 45 people who died while I worked today, 2 were mothers who died in childbirth. During those hours I worked 721 children were born without health insurance and 64 children died before they reached their first birthdays*

In 2007 a 12 year old boy died from a tooth abscess because the mother couldn’t find a dentist who would take Medicaid coupons.  Two emergency brain surgeries later, the boy died from brain infection.  Wouldn’t we be better off if we, as a society, had footed the bill for the $80 tooth extraction?**

So like ObamaCare don’t like ObamaCare it doesn’t really matter.  We have a crisis in our country and real people are really dying.  Since the Affordable HealthCare act has passed, 95% of all children in America are eligible for health care.  That’s 38 million kids just like yours.    And young adults struggling to find their first jobs after college are now insured on their parent’s insurance.   And up to 17 million kids are safe from having their insurance cancelled due to asthma, diabetes, cancer or other health conditions.

Perfect?  Not by a long shot.  But it’s something.  It’s a start.  And we have to start somewhere.

*Children’s Defense Fund

** Wall Street Journal

The full measure of our devotion…

.. was not something I expected to hear in Hebrew, or to hear chanted at a Bar Mitzvah.  But I did.  I always thought this quote came from some American President (Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address) or British Prime Minister.  It’s from a Jewish devotion sung for hundreds of years:

When justice burns as a flaming fire within us, when love evokes willing sacrifice from us, when, to the last full measure of selfless devotion, we proclaim our belief in the ultimate triumph of truth and righteousness, do we not bow before the vision of Thy goodness?

Maybe it has a different history, I don’t know.

I have been listening to audio books on the Revolutionary and Civil Wars.  The idea of the last-full-measure is haunting.  Bodies of once-healthy boys left broken on wheat-fields and rolling hills, the ground soaked in their blood.  NPR interviewed Tony Horwitz today, author of Midnight Rising about John Brown and Harper’s Ferry.  Talk about the giving the last measure of devotion; Brown wanted to spark the country into ending slavery and he and his men gave their lives to do it.

And I wonder, is our ability to give to the last full measure of devotion limited to war?  Does it need to end in death?  I know that’s what the sentiment suggests:  what else can it mean?  What if we turned the same passion and conviction that leads one to give that last full measure to solving the problems of the living without the expectation that it will kill us?  Is that cheating?  Is that holding back?

Marian Wright Edelman spoke at a lunch in Seattle this week.  She pushed the audience to stand up against the tide of poverty and illiteracy the children of America (and the world) are swimming against.

She stood with Dr. King during the Civil Rights movement.  It wasn’t war as we know it, but it was war and the Rosa Parks and the Septima Clarks and the Dr. George Lees and other martyrs of the fight for racial equality in American were willing to give their lives; they were willing to die rather than allow the injustice to continue.

There are any number of injustices to fight today.  For me, education is the battlefield I want to fight on.

Today 67% of all 4th graders are reading below level.  67%.   U.S. students rank 25th in math out of 30 industrial countries.  25th.   7,000 kids drop out of high-school every day.    We spend 4x as much a year to house and feed a prisoner than we do to educate a child.   1.2 million kids leave high school every year without a diploma.   2000 schools in the US have a higher than 40% drop out rate.

This is a national crisis.

And if you think this isn’t about you, or is just a liberal agenda, think about this:  by 2020 there will be 123 million high-paying high-skill jobs in America.  Only 50 million Americans will be qualified for those jobs.  How will you run your business?  How will you compete in the international marketplace?  Where will you find workers?  Leaders?  Health care providers?  Nuclear power plant managers?  This is not just about the children in poverty (although it should be).  It’s about the very foundation of our economy.  You think it’s bad now?  Just wait until we have the next generation of kids who can’t read or write or compute with even the barest functional literacy.

What would happen if we were willing to give our last full measure of devotion to ensure every child had an education?  What would happen if every child could read and write at grade level?  If every child had a way out of poverty and hunger and sickness, and a perpetual reliance on welfare.

What would happen if every child had hope?