We Are In A Moral Crisis And It Doesn't Have To Be This Way

This evil system is not natural.

I am writing this in the waiting area of the emergency room of the City of Hope cancer hospital in Duarte, California. It’s pretty busy in here for the day before Christmas Eve, and the parking lot was full; cancer doesn’t take the holidays off. I’m here because my girlfriend, who is a cancer patient, is undergoing a new chemo, and her response has been pretty dramatic - a high fever and vomiting, and so they asked her to come in to get checked out.

As I sit here I feel very grateful. Maybe it’s a weird thing to feel in this situation, but it’s coming naturally to me right now. I’m grateful to be with her at this time, to be able to support her. I can do this because I am sober, and because the last six years of my personal journey has given me tools and strength to show up in difficult situations. I’m grateful that she has good doctors, who really are doing everything they can, even as her cancer continues to be incredibly wily and hard on her.

And I’m thankful that we don’t have to worry about paying for all of this. That we didn’t have to wonder whether coming to the emergency room would bankrupt us, if we could handle the thousands of dollars in fees and costs that come from even routine visits to the hospital, let alone the cancer hospital. I’m thankful that her insurance is going to cover this and has been covering her treatment all along, and that the team at City of Hope is very good at working with the insurance when it doesn’t want to cover something.

I can’t imagine sitting here with the added weight of financial ruin hanging over us. I can’t imagine having that stress added to what is already a pretty fucking stressful situation. Yet thousands and thousands of people in this country experience exactly that - the question of whether it will be the illness or the debt that kills them first.

Now, I might end up in just that situation soon enough - as my girlfriend’s next phase of treatment begins I am going to have to leave my day job to take care of her, and my day job is where I get my insurance. That’ll disappear overnight; COBRA is available but so expensive as to be a joke. I’m 49, not in great shape, with high blood pressure and what one might call a stressful daily life. I’m afraid to go to the doctor before my insurance ends because I am afraid of getting diagnosed with something and then not being able to afford to take care of it, to be able to get the medication (I’m going to have to figure out how to keep getting the medication Incurrently am already on when my insurance goes away). I’ll look at the insurance exchanges, hope that Obamacare has something for me, but it won’t be as good as what I am currently getting through work

How did we end up here? Looking at the American health care system objectively you must be horrified - to see that people cannot get care because they cannot afford it… this is how we treat human beings? Sorry, you can’t have the thing that will save your life because you don’t have money for it. That’s how we’re running our society?

It’s not wrong. It’s not a mistake. It’s evil. It’s an evil system, one that allows people to become enriched on the misery of others. The cost of medication in this country is mind-boggling - life-saving insulin costs at least $100 a vial in the United States (as of 2021) and 12 bucks in Canada. Same insulin, just not being prescribed in a system that is fundamentally evil.

I do not use that word lightly. Generally I don’t like that word; it’s loaded with theological meaning, and I tend to believe that all people are born good and become tarnished but that we can return to a state of goodness with the right amount of work. But this system is evil; it is not tarnished, it is built on cruelty and greed. I do not understand how someone can work at an insurance company and put their own profits ahead of the lives and suffering of real human beings. How much money convinces you to throw away your conscience, to decide that a nice house or a new car is worth the death of someone’s mother? How do these people operate fully aware of the cataclysmic evil they are perpetrating?

Of course it isn’t just insurance and health care. I’m thinking about that because I’m sitting in a hospital, listening to people on the phone with insurance providers and the hospital’s financing office. It’s everywhere in our society, this greed and disregard for others. As a severe winter storm batters the United States people are being actively evicted - can you imagine telling someone they have to live on the streets when the temperature is below zero? How does your heart get so black that you can put someone in that situation over a couple of thousand dollars?

And I am not above it. I live in a big city, and I walk and drive past people homeless on the streets all the time. Think about that - I’m walking past someone suffering terribly, someone having an experience I cannot even imagine, and I’m just going about my business. Maybe I’m listening to a podcast or maybe I’m just looking straight ahead. How did we get to this place where we all ignore the suffering of others?

We could solve all of these problems pretty easily. I hate to be one of these guys, but a fraction of the military budget would effect incredible change on a number of these problems. People have tried to make a difference, but they get pushback - they get other people actively fighting to keep folks on the street, to keep health care out of reach of the poor (and increasingly the middle class, such as it is). People are actually against helping other people.

This is the result of an intense and advanced moral rot in the very heart of American culture. It is fitting that I am writing this in a cancer hospital, as this is a cancer that is killing this nation and, at this rate, this species. The thing is, it’s nothing new. The Buddha, thousands of years ago, talked about this very cancer - the three poisons of greed, delusion and hatred. Two thousand years ago Jesus Christ told us the same thing; in a remarkable feat of perversity our Western culture has managed to take his message and twist it to support the very greed, delusion and hatred he was against. Isn’t that incredible! The people who are fighting hardest against getting the homeless homes are often the people who are loudest about their commitment to Jesus Christ. What would Jesus have to say to these people? He would repeat what he said in the Gospel According to Matthew, that he would put these people on his left and say:

‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

“They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’

“He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

We do not have an economic crisis. We do not have a health care crisis. We do not have a homeless crisis, or a crime crisis or a drug crisis. We have a moral crisis. We have a terminal moral crisis. It is a crisis of greed, where our desires - not even our needs! Just our desires! - are seen as being more important than the health and wellbeing of others. It is a crisis of delusion, where we believe that those who are suffering and dying in some way deserve it because they’re lazy or they’re poor or they’re drug addicts or they have done something bad in their lives. We convince ourselves of this but we know it isn’t true - no one deserves to die frozen on the streets, as too many will be doing this week. No one deserves to be denied life saving care because they don’t have enough money in their pockets.

This is not a moral crisis of sexuality or gender. There is no moral crisis surrounding trans people or gay people except for the moral crisis of hatred; that we use hatred as an excuse to treat others poorly, to deny them humanity and their basic needs. The moral crisis is not about people using pronouns or being sexually promiscuous or whatever hateful bullshit the cruel and mean among us pull out of their delusional, hateful asses.

It’s about not loving each other. And when I say that I don’t mean some hippy dippy stuff - some people suck, or they have personalities you don’t like or they irritate you or whatever. That’s natural. When we talk about loving each other we mean treating each other like human beings, respecting each other’s needs and providing for each other. This is why we are where we are today, by the way - because when we were small mammals we figured out that we should get together and look out for one another. One on one we couldn’t take on the big predators, or survive the hard droughts and freezes, but as a community we could do it. As a community we could not be stopped, and we thrived and we grew and somewhere along the way we forgot that original insight. Now we look out for ourselves, or for the smallest possible family unit, and we don’t realize that we are all part of a great whole, that not only our society but our very ecosystem is a connected thing and that while you might be able to prosper from damaging one part of it for a while, eventually all of it will collapse. All of it will come tumbling down, and for no reason other than we forgot the simple, basic fucking lessons that got us out of the jungles. The simple, basic lessons that wise and holy men have been reminding us of for millennia, the simple, basic lessons that somehow we mutilated into the evil moral crisis in which we now all suffer.

If this all comes across as angry, well, I’m mad. I’m mad that we as a species can do so much and yet cannot figure out how to just give a shit for one another on a mass scale. We do it so beautifully one on one - there are a zillion stories of small kindnesses and charities that have made huge differences in the lives of others. But we have such a hard time taking that and doing it at scale, at understanding that when a person is without a home it’s because we failed them. That when a person cannot afford a treatment it’s because we failed them. When a person lives in poverty, when a person turns to crime, when a person hurts others because they believe they need to in order to protect themselves in some way, we failed them.

It’s Christmas, and when people write stuff like this at this time of year they usually try to do it with a sentimental cheeriness, but I am not feeling that this year. I am feeling distraught and exhausted by what I see around me - the pain and the hatred and the suffering - and knowing that it is not supposed to be this way. It’s not the natural state of things. It’s not human nature. It doesn’t have to be like this.