During a routine physical exam a man walks into his doctor’s office and says, “I am 50 years old and I’m getting eight hours of rest every night. My blood pressure is 120/80. I am trim
How does a healthy society look?
and energetic and I have a generally good outlook on life.” Horrified the doctor responds, “Start burning the candle at both ends, increase your sodium intake, decrease your level of exercise, and start watching the daily news.” “What?! But that kind of lifestyle does not sound like it will keep me healthy,” responds the perplexed patient. “Healthy? Who are you to define what health is?” demands the physician.
Ridiculous scenario, right? But this is exactly the kind of insanity that has been playing out in American society over the last several decades and now coming to a head with the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) as well as the recent presidential election cycle.
Happily all doctors and patients can agree what physical health looks like and what sickness means for an individual. But we are divided on how a healthy society behaves and cannot agree about how a sick society looks. Interestingly the debates around repealing the PPACA are all nibbling at the edges of this important question of where the good of society meets the good of the individual.
As you know the U.S. Federal government has usurped control of the medical sector through the PPACA, swamping society with thousands of pages of legislation filled with vagary most legislators never bothered to read. Fear not, we will all continue to hear many more words about the PPACA as this election cycle winds up. But will they be the ‘right words,’ born from the right ideas? The passage of the PPACA occurred because legislators thought something was terribly wrong with, at least, the medical portion of society. In passing the law they mistakenly presumed that everyone understood and agreed on a common view of how a good society should look, without ever clarifying their vision.
There was a time when most Americans had the same idea of how a good society should look and what a good man was within that society. And politics was simple, a matter of serving the shared sense of the greater good. Now to serve the greater good means appeasing the richest, most powerful constituency able to get you reelected. If that means redefining marriage to include homosexuals, so be it. If it means ignoring the infanticide that is abortion, then that’s just fine. What’s worse about this state of affairs is that, for example, the debate about abortion can never be resolved because the reasons people have for being either pro-life or pro-abortion are usually based on emotional choices without a clear and compelling rationale, drawn from a shared conception of the purpose of a human and the common good of society. All we have are appeals to emotion like, “It’s a woman’s body,” or “Thank God your mother was pro-life,” ad nauseam. So we have unresolvable concerns expressed only in protest and counter-protest constantly trying to reveal the obvious evil ploys of the opponent. We have conventions complete with the unceasing emotional banter cloaked in logical terms spoken by the elitist ruling bureaucrats in suits with the compulsory, yet somehow patriotic, red or blue tie. And the bemused and bewitched watch from their recliners as the flickering box sparkles in their wide eyes and exclaim, “Oh, how exciting! We’ve had enough! Yes, we can!” Yet for many, a harvest moon is beginning to dawn revealing the haunting reality that government does not have the power to restore society to health.
America, like government and now medicine, is close to losing her soul. We must return and remember what a good society is. We must resurrect a common understanding that the ultimate purpose of a human is to glorify God by living a life consistent with His character. Society must be reborn into an ancient way of thinking, finding meaning in the context of belief through the authority of the Judeo-Christian God.
CompassCare resists the advancement of this modern pluralistic insanity by holding to the truth that women and their pre-born children have a purpose in the Divine Will. Our place is to facilitate the vision of that purpose. Together we renew hope and desire for men and women to learn and embrace healthy ways of viewing children and parenthood amidst the materialistic fog and social darkness that isolates the individual, knowing that good community is only born out of the common everyday lives of godly people.
If you would like be involved through: 1) prayer contact CompassCare’s administrative office at 585-232-3894, 2) volunteer activities email daniel.tomlinson@compasscare.info, or 3) investment opportunities donate online.