Letter: Unite American by meeting our needs
(Krystal Ramirez | Las Vegas Sun via AP)
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., reacts during a town hall meeting at the Culinary Workers Union Local 226 hosted by UNITE HERE, Tuesday, Dec. 10, 2019, in Las Vegas. Sanders, appearing before several hundred union workers in Las Vegas, explained his Medicare for All plan, which would switch the country to a government-run system and eliminate private health insurance.
By Joshua Cameron | The Public Forum
| Dec. 24, 2020, 1:00 p.m.
If our sense of reason is a slave to emotion — and we know from the get-go that it is — what happens when we start to hijack our emotions in order to guide our reason in the direction we wish?
What happens when we understand the ways in which we are manipulated by our own hormones as well as the outside environment? What happens when we start to ask all of the unspoken, unarticulated and presupposed ideas that we have about ourselves and about life, often based on what other people tell us without a second of personal processing and this intellectual and frankly spiritual sojourn begins to make you into a different kind of person?
What happens when we realize that people don’t know “right and left” when it comes to straight policy? People know when they hear good policy, as illustrated by
a Fox News poll showing 70% of respondents desire government-run health care. But wait, isn’t that Medicare for All? Yeah. It is.
This is what people meant by Bernie Sanders attracting Republican voters. These voters understand that medical bankruptcy is a very real threat to their and their family’s material conditions and future outlook. Especially now during a global pandemic. Even with a disease that only has a 1% mortality rate, what happens when we land in the ICU, recover, and check out with a $20,000-plus medical bill when the average American was a $400 emergency away from bankruptcy pre-pandemic?
Do you wish to unite the country? You don’t do it by holding up stimulus checks to help your political friends and hurt political enemies. You unite the country by crafting meaningful legislation that addresses the material conditions of the working class, as detailed by
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
Joshua Cameron, West Valley City
