RALPH’S WORLD WITHOUT RALPH EQUALS HOPE FOR HEALTH CARE?

A HEALTHY AND SENSIBLE HEALTHCARE SYSTEM STANDS ON A FOUNDATION OF TWO ESSENTIAL HUMAN QUALITIES: EMPATHY AND RESPONSIBILITY.

The first foundation , EMPATHY, is the basis of all civilization, society and community. Empathy is simply our name for allowing ourselves to feel, in imagination if not in reality, at least something of what another person is experiencing.

Persons without the decency to be moved by the joys and sorrows of fellow mortals become less than human. All humans have some capacity for empathy and some of those with a genuine ability to empathize with others enter the helping professions.

RESPONSIBILITY, follows from empathy. It is the behavior seen every day among the people in our societies who care, not only about themselves and their needs, but who also work to share burdens and ease the pains of others.

It is at least arguably true that no other health care system (our Canadain system) in the world came into being more directly founded on empathy for those who suffer from economic depression and an acceptance of responsibility by all of society to provide care for each other.

The stream of conservatism now sweeping through North American society and being fed into Canada by political leaders pretends to be human and socially concerned but conservative behavior is that of cold calculating commercialism.

Ralph's World boasts of money and power exercised with heartless disregard for the experience of any segment of society except those already healthy, getting rich and adding to government coffers.

In so many ways those who care about real democracy are asking the biblical question, “What does it profit a man (province) to gain the whole world and lose his (its) own soul?”

Empathy and responsibility have been notably absent from Ralph’s World and the Ralph who was sold on the pretext of listening and caring, still clings to power as if his world weren’t exploding like the hospitals he destroyed.

The “SAVE HEALTHCARE” drive is our greatest hope of holding off more conservatism at this time and in the immediate future. It's the best hope of preventing an extension of Ralph's World into a society more and more under the control of morally bereft corporations rather than governed by socially responsible servants of the people.

Work toward instilling a greater sense of empathy and responsibility into government will still have to go on after Ralph's World is a memory. But nothing in democracy is more worth working for.

Blair McPherson