Apparently, I was wrong. Chief Justice John Roberts does give the tiniest fuck about the legitimacy of the Supreme Court as an institution. Good for him? In the meantime, Anthony Kennedy, I'm so fucking sick of you. I mean, sure, Tony Scalia is a ranting old man, and Clarence Thomas is a joke, but I know those things about the SCOTUS going in. But I keep holding out some hope for you, Anthony, I guess because of Lawrence v. Texas, even though I knew clear back when you were fretting about how grown-ass women couldn't be trusted to live with the consequences of their own choices in Gonzalez v. Carhart at that you were an asshole. ("Whether to have an abortion requires a difficult and painful moral decision, Casey, 505 U.S., at 852–853, which some women come to regret. In a decision so fraught with emotional consequence ..." You know what, Anthony, you don't need to worry your pretty little head about us ladies not knowing the potential emotional consequences of abortion. We're adult citizens of this country, who are entitled to make decisions without your paternalistic trolling -- there's no such thing as taking away someone's rights for their own good.) Anthony, if you fuck up gay marriage next year, I don't even know.
But you know, living in the world is strange. I used to be much more political than I am now. I was the president of the Pitt College Democrats when I was in college, and a committeewoman for the Pennsylvania Young Democrats; I volunteered for many political campaigns, mostly as a grassroots organizer, and I wasn't bad at it. But at some point I was standing in a hotel room in Harrisburg, drinking cheap beer with a lot of 40 year old men in bad suits who had basically no principles whatsoever, and I realized that to pursue a career in politics was more or less tantamount to voluntarily giving up your soul. I stopped that shit.
But that's not what I'm thinking about. What I'm thinking about is the levels of the world.
So today, everyone's very worked up about the Supreme Court upholding Obamacare. I'm glad they did for several reasons, the first of which being, simply, that the law is constitutional. So, really, we could just come full-stop there. But beyond that fact, I also want to see health care reform in America. I support single-payer, government care; I am, in fact, extremely dubious about the government forcing me to buy anything from a private corporation. I know and am fine with the fact that the government can take my money; I am not fine with private companies being able to take my money. I also think that any system in which private health insurance coverage is anything except a niche luxury for the very rich who want "Cadillac Care" is not really any kind of solution for our nation's health care problems. Like I said: government-provided, single-payer, universal care. Nothing else will ultimately suffice.
But anyway, everyone on my Twitter feed and a lot of people on my Facebook page, and Americans in general on teh interwebz are all thinking and talking about this big national issue.
At the same time, I found out last night that a friend of mine tried to kill themselves yesterday. They're in the hospital, and OK for the moment, thankfully.
How does one navigate the world? Where should our focus lie? What is the connection between big national problems and those of our day-to-day lives? I'm not suggesting that my friend's situation implies anything about Obamacare -- they're getting care in a hospital, so they're apparently OK. I'm just saying that there are so many concentric circles around us, from the very intimate and personal to the international, that today I'm wondering how we decide how to parcel out our concern. I know that personally, the older I get, the more my concern shrinks. I cared enough about today's Supreme Court decision to have an opinion about it, but not enough to like, volunteer for a health reform group. But that's not necessarily the choice everyone makes -- many people stay active in large issues their entire lives. I don't know why I choose to keep my focus on myself and those immediately around me -- it's probably some laziness. And probably also an affect of what I've described previously, the need -- in order to protect my mental health -- to have a small life, lived day-to-day.
I wonder, though, if engagement at a society-wide level is important to living a good life, or a satisfactory life. Am I losing something by restricting my chief care to my family and friends? Is it a responsibility to care about people I don't know and things I can't directly control, but only marginally influence? (Though one could say that I can only actually marginally influence even those relationships that I think of myself as having the most power over.) I don't actually think I have such a responsibility (to whom?), but am I missing out on an important aspect of life in the world by withdrawing from engagement with large concerns in favor of small ones? Between one person in a hospital bed and 300 million people fighting over how those hospital beds get paid for, where do we draw the circumference of the ultimate extension of our effort, if not our gaze?
I don't know. I'm just asking.
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