Differing points of view

On the flight home I had an interesting conversation. Well actually it started out interesting and turned into something a bit more disturbing.

I started up a conversation with a friendly guy in the next seat, and we started off talking about books and then TV shows (which he was passionate about...shows like 24 and Prison Break, which I haven't watched or heard of). He didn't really seem to read much, so there wasn't much there. Then we drifted into talking about new media and the disappearance of newspapers. He claimed that they were going extinct because of their left-wing bias. I had to point out that Tucson just lost its conservative newspaper to leave the "left-wing" one standing on its own, in a state that is very conservative. Not exactly proving his point, but he didn't seem very interested in such a detail.

Then he started talking about how people in the US are moving far away from our Constitution and have a ridiculous sense of entitlement....for things like...health care. He said that we have great access to health care in the USA, but we do have to pay for it. That in Europe and Canada health care is rationed and terrible. I told him that I thought that health care was a human right, not something for those lucky enough to have sufficient resources to pay to see a doctor. He went on to say that he was opposed to Obama, who was moving the country toward socialism, and that we'd have to resist this movement. He kept going on about the incredible sense of entitlement people have nowadays, that the market should and could right itself.

I then asked him...."what about the TARP and the concept that some businesses were too big to fail?" He then went on to spew a lot of Fox Network rhetoric about the bad unions and bad management of the Big Three auto companies, completely obsessing with the union's sense of entitlement for things like...gasp...health care. He went on and on, and never got to the banking sector and Wall Street, where the really breathtaking thieving and sense of entitlement is going down.

When he came up for air, I asked him...."ok, so what do you think about the Bush years and running up trillions of dollars of deficits? How does that fit?" He then told me that Bush was not a conservative, but a liberal....i.e. somehow that he doesn't really count. Again, a brushing off of minor and inconvient truths.

The questions that remained somewhat unanswered (because he couldn't stop talking):

1. Has he ever listened to someone who has no health care or insufficient health care living through a health crisis? He talked about how it was all a question of cutting off cable to pay for a doctor's visit.

2. Has he ever talked to an average Canadian or European about their health care? What do they think of it?

When people create their mental maps only from the blogs or networks they listen to/read, and move in circles so rarefied that they don't encounter people who are different than them...it leaves them really limited in their perspective. It was painfully clear that he was not able to listen others, only talk and talk. Drunk on the sound of his own voice.

I could have shared my story...growing up amid the Big Three and seeing Detroit die (far more complicated than blaming the unions, I'm afraid), of having limited health care for a sick parent, of watching how my faith community organizes to get better health care access...because it is the human thing to do. Crazy sense of entitlement....for we believe that all humans should to be able to see a doctor whenever they need to. They could be a penniless soul or a migrant worker or a waitress. Whoever. Your bank account should not determine whether you live or die, whether you get treatment or not.

I decided not to share theses stories because he was clearly not interested or able to listen. A loss for him and me.