In this writers home state 21,000 people could lose medicaid services thanks to the new federal legislation. It can’t be that different in other states. Forget red state and blue state and lets just think in terms of dead or alive. Forget whatever bread crumb of a tax break that new federal budget might give your household and think about the jump in your state taxes if you want to live in a society that cares for its neighbors. 

I have heard that these impacted people, especially those poor people and undocumented immigrants, are not our neighbors, but that can only true in the legal abstract of a political world. No teacher of any of our spiritual traditions has discounted love and caring from the duties of being a human being. The front line of this pocket picking debacle of an oligarchy is going to be the medical system where life saving care must be provided. Why, you might ask, must care be given? Because those deeply trained and oriented doctors and nurses swore an oath to care in their professions. The vow of care is not conditional on wealth, skin color or address. Most of those people took that oath seriously and uttered the words from their deepest sense of good. Who among them can or wants to take on the duties of God and assign the privilege of life and death. Who among your circle could themselves survive the moral distress of this ungodly, unnecessary triage? Which of your local hospitals and clinics could stay open if your state refuses human succor to the individual human beings who will inevitably appear at your hospital or clinic doors? 

An immodest proposal for good.

Loving your neighbor as yourself is not this project’s proposal. I believe it is the instruction of the Christian tradition and other traditions as well. I believe for the Christian tradition it is part of the “Greatest Commandment”. Religions, at their core, do not eschew the responsibility to love. Yes our leaders presently seem to eschew that requirement to love one’s neighbor effortlessly, but most of us in this nation are not spiritually free to be complicit with such greed and selfishness. Our religions are not modest. They are what they are. The more modest proposal for this Project is to start now doing what must be done to save the lives at risk, for even if you don’t care for the ‘illegal immigrant’ your medical practitioners will care and some of them are now in line for such moral distress, it could be fatal for your hospital, clinic or urgent care, if not the practitioners themselves.