Are We There Yet?

Yesterday, President Obama threw down the gauntlet. Without using the exact words, he nevertheless encouraged the Congress to use all means necessary to pass his health care legislation, and to do so quickly. As of now, the Senate appears more or less divided along party lines. In the House, the Republicans remain unified in opposition, and while there are some defections among the Democrats, they hold such a substantial majority it is reasonable to think they can overcome the objections of a few apostates. It is presently unclear whether the Democrats will stand firm on this issue and emerge victorious. Equally obscure, at this point anyway, are the long-term electoral consequences of this action, whether they win the immediate legislative battle or not.

Is it just me, or does this feel like a crisis? I don't mean a crisis in the overused sense it now carries, but rather in its root meaning of a decision, a judgment, a separation. Moreover, and is it just me again, or does this crisis feel like none we've faced in a long while, warranting, as a result, the definite article "the" in front of it?

Or am I over-reacting? Am I a victim of 24/7 cable TV news, sonorous talk radio, and Internet saturation? Bombarded with too much information, often contradictory, and shell-shocked by too much noise, have I become unable anymore to sensibly separate wheat from chaff? Maybe. But I don't think so.

Typically, politicians avoid these moments if at all possible. That they avoid them we often attribute to a self-serving gutlessness on their part, and we are usually correct to do so. But, to be fair, sometimes a crisis is to be avoided because to face it, i.e., to decide, to judge, is to risk as well, separation. Skilled, nimble, and farseeing politicians know this and know also when it is not so much their own survival that is at stake, as it is the survival of the political unit itself. Or at least its survival as it is currently constituted.

But as wise as doing so sometimes is, you can only kick the can down the road for so long. So I ask, are we there yet? Who would have thought that plugging the few holes in what is still undeniably the best health care system in the world would have brought us to this point? I would have predicted a different issue, for example, one in which peace or war hangs in the balance, or a cultural hot button issue like abortion or gay marriage.

Nevertheless, and despite its surprising provenance, the question we are currently facing seems to me bigger, much bigger, than simply whether or not we take another (yes, another) step towards socialized medicine. To me, it feels more like we are deciding, yet again, who and what we are are as a people. And for that reason, the stakes couldn't be higher. A crisis? The crisis? Maybe. But are we there yet?