Please Use Good Health Practices
YMCA Good Health Advisory
Above every water fountain at the YMCA there is a sign affixed to the wall, which reads: “Please Use Good Health Practices.” The sign, of course, should read: “Don’t put your mouth on the spigot.”
Herein we have a ready symbol for the current health care debate. As the government wrestles over a bill to overhaul the healthcare system we fear that instead of a clear remedy we will end up with an ill-crafted obfuscation.
The issue of healthcare reform seems to raise an interesting paradox. To a large degree a culture of individualism defines American society. The enterprising, disenchanted Europeans who traveled thousands of miles to endure the rigors and dangers of the pioneering life for the sake of freedom put their stamp on the country’s DNA. That spirit of individual freedom coupled with entrepreneurial grit has evolved into an expectation of choice and self-determination in all things.
We believe we have a right to buy something at free market value and we don’t like to be told that an item isn’t available or can’t be had, or is priced artificially high.
The current healthcare system does just that. We can’t go out and purchase the healthcare package that’s right for us. Most of the time we have to buy the one our employer offers. The current healthcare system is unAmerican, surely.
Here is the paradox; people who object to the process of healthcare reform generally do so out of a fear that it means socialized medicine… Whereas what we have now is totalitarianized or monopolized medicine.
But I didn’t intend this to be a post about healthcare (even though I have a cold). I was more concerned with the problem of the wording of that sign over the water fountain. “Please Use Good Health Practices.” Haven’t we learned anything in the last few thousand years? Wasn’t Socrates chiding us for such imprecise and literally meaningless thinking-turned-language all those eons ago at the ancient Greek equivalent of the YMCA?
Every child should learn good thinking habits. It’s more important than brushing one’s teeth.
Another case in point: Senator Joseph Lieberman — a man somehow innoculated against lucid thought — has described the Fort Hood shootings as a “homegrown terrorist attack.” What does that mean? How does that concatenation of labels get absorbed by the American people and by people in other countries? “Homegrown,” “terrorist,” “attack.” Each word carries heavy freight under mildewed tarpaulin.
I fear that Lieberman, like the sign-crafters at the YMCA, really intended to convey something much more directly but shrank from it, or chose to obscure it. “Don’t put your mouth on the spigot!” was the real message, or, in Lieberman’s case “Let’s keep a closer watch on the arabs in our midst.”