{"id":2967,"date":"2002-10-23T11:49:40","date_gmt":"2002-10-23T11:49:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/staging.armedliberal.com\/?p=366"},"modified":"2002-10-23T11:49:40","modified_gmt":"2002-10-23T11:49:40","slug":"political-first-aid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=2967","title":{"rendered":"POLITICAL FIRST-AID"},"content":{"rendered":"

Riffing on Teresa Neilsen Hayden\u0092s great comment, I want to try and explain (again<\/u>) why I keep harping on this issue (she defined it incisively:I believe there’s a largely unacknowledged divide between politicians who still believe we’re all members of the same polity, all citizens together; and those for whom I’m just a member of the voting audience, watching but not otherwise a participant in our regularly scheduled pantomime of democracy.<\/I>).
\nIt relates closely to why I refuse to support Gray Davis, and why I harsh writers like Hesiod and Tom.
\nLet me make a metaphor first.
\nI\u0092ve done a fair amount of first-aid training; I\u0092ve participated in risky sports \u0096 climbing, sailing, racing cars, bicycles, and motorcycles \u0096 most of my life, and a long time ago, someone died as a part of one of my sports activities when I was a freshman in college, driving home the point of risk and of shared responsibility.
\nPart of the responsibility is taking proper precautions (why I\u0092m sometimes called \u0091the Safety Nazi\u0092), and part of it is taking responsibility for consequences \u0096 hence the first aid.
\nOne of the things they train you to do (and here the more advanced medical bloggers are free to comment and clarify) is to evaluate someone\u0092s condition, and deal with the most critical issues first.
\nA compound fracture is and looks bad, but a blocked airway is worse.
\nYou have to look beyond the superficial symptoms and try and determine what underlying conditions are serious and how best to deal with them.
\nThis was brought home to me last week when someone I know on an internet list died. He was in what appeared to be a relatively minor accident, received superficial care from the attending EMT\u0092s, who transported him to the hospital, where it was discovered that he had severe bleeding in a lung, which couldn\u0092t be controlled, and he bled out and died. I don\u0092t know all the facts, and certainly don\u0092t know from my limited information if better diagnosis would have made a difference to him (and his grieving family). But I do know that that is the practitioner\u0092s nightmare\u0085to fix the scraped knee and miss the bubbling lung.
\nOur country \u0096 our world \u0096 is definitely not short of scraped knees, and people with band-aids ready to fix them, if only we\u0092ll vote for them.
\nBut some of us\u0085including me\u0085hear a frightening bubbling coming from the lungs.
\nWe face huge systemic challenges, coming from rising population, misallocation and shortages of key resources, a huge gap between the First and Third World, compounded by closer economic, informational, and transportation ties that will make these challenges abroad into ours.
\nWe have challenges at home, in poverty and alienation, as well as education, health care, and the environment.
\nTo deal with these wisely will require that we restate our commitment to some common goals, and to some processes \u0096 some governmental, some political, some private \u0096 that will tie us to these common goals. And we must do it while maintaining and improving both freedoms \u0096 the freedom to, and the freedom from<\/u>. And it is exactly that shared commitment to some set of goals, and that shared sense of common citizenship that is eroded by the kind of politics and kind of commentary that I criticize.
\nIf we don\u0092t deal with these, our country and our world will look far different and far worse than if we do. The worlds of Blade Runner and Snow Crash aren\u0092t impossible dystopias. They are very possible<\/u> dystopias, and I don\u0092t want my children to live in them.
\nI\u0092ve talked about this a lot. Here\u0092s<\/a> one quote:<\/p>\n

We\u0092re at a point in our history when we need to find the threads that bind us into a nation and a polity. Sadly, \u0091win at any cost\u0092 politicians (c.f. Gray \u0091SkyBox\u0092 Davis), and culture warriors of one stripe or another are happy to drive wedges, if they believe the fractures serve their short-term political interests.
\nAnd we\u0092re at a point in our political history that\u0092s been made by single-issue warriors\u0085for and against development, for and against abortion, for and against parks for dogs…and damn those on the other side of the issue.
\nI had the unique opportunity to have dinner once with then-State Senator John Schmitz. He was a genuine John Birch society member, elected from Orange County, who lost his office when it was discovered that his mistress had sexually abused their sons. (His daughter is also Mary Kay Le Tourneau, so I\u0092ll take as a given that the family had\u0085issues\u0085). He was still in the Senate, and made a comment that I\u0092ve always remembered:

When Moscone ran the Senate, he and I used to fight hammer and tongs all day, then go out and have drinks over dinner and laugh about it. We differed on where we wanted the boat to go, but we recognized that we were in the same boat. These new guys would gladly sink the boat rather then compromise.<\/BLOCKQUOTE>And that\u0092s why I think the [pledge]<\/u>decision was stupid, and why the forces behind it\u0085the Church of My Wounded Feelings\u0085and their soldiers, the Warrior Cult of the Single Issue\u0085are incredibly destructive. And right now, we don\u0092t have the time for it.<\/I><\/BLOCKQUOTE>Yes, Gray Davis has put some good band-aids on the scabs I think are important. Yes, a Republican Congress would probably put band-aids on scabs I think are totally unimportant, and worse, damaging. I\u0092ll clearly continue to argue for the things that matter to me, no matter how small.
\nBut I\u0092m just done participating in a game of \u0091kiss the boo-boo\u0092 and believing that I\u0092m really doing anything to help the patient. I want to get the heart and lungs examined, and I want to find and support people who support making sure the patient doesn\u0092t die before they worry about the cuts and bruises.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Riffing on Teresa Neilsen Hayden\u0092s great comment, I want to try and explain (again) why I keep harping on this issue (she defined it incisively:I believe there’s a largely unacknowledged divide between politicians who still believe we’re all members of the same polity, all citizens together; and those for whom I’m just a member of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2967"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2967"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2967\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}