Healthy Skepticism

By Stephen Lautens

July 30, 2009


For a long time I have believed that government has only three main things it should do – keep its citizens healthy, safe and educated. Everything else is extra.

Of course a lot of things flow from those three main jobs. Keeping people safe means having effective police and efficient courts. It also means having an army that can defend the country and our interests from threats. It means secure borders and safe streets.

Keeping people educated means having a well-funded school system and support for students and parents. It should broaden the mind and open children’s eyes to the many possibilities out there, and help them achieve whatever goals they are capable of reaching. It means keeping higher education affordable and accessible. Educated people are generally good citizens and good taxpayers, so everyone wins when people have the ability to contribute back to society at their own personal best level.

And keeping people healthy? We made a decision as a country some time ago that it was our moral and humanitarian duty to look after our sick and hurt as best we can, and that comes with a hefty price tag, but it is the right thing to do. It’s also our biggest expense, since health care is not cheap by its very nature and made more expensive by people living longer.

But if Canada believes government has a duty to keep its citizens healthy, safe and educated, there are those in the United States who believe that government’s job is only to provide people with the opportunity to make enough money to afford to be healthy, safe and educated.

The private health care companies that get rich in America are now fighting an all out war in the U.S. against a new proposal for universal health care. They have gone so far to recruit several Canadians for TV ads to tell their own private horror stories about problems with our “socialist” health care system.

Shona Holmes, a Canadian unhappy about waiting for health care in Canada, is featured on a commercial by the “Patients United Now” a front organization for the U.S. health care industry and a “Project of Americans for Prosperity Foundation”, which supports limited government and free markets. Tellingly, they also advocate pro-tobacco industry positions.

Of course it’s unfair to feature the few people who have had serious problems accessing health care in Canada and ignore the millions it helps, but this isn’t about fairness – it’s about cutting into HMO, drug and insurance company profits, which by any standard are enormous. The profits are huge because the cornerstones of American health care are “for-profit” businesses that provide medical care or drugs not on the basis of need, but on a cost-benefit analysis, denying coverage to people who need it most.

Many Americans - both rich and poor - support the idea that they should be taxed less and be left to make their own decisions about how to spend their money, whether it is on gated communities, private schools or private health care. In other words, the chance to strike it rich in America provides some people with the opportunity to be healthy, safe and educated. It also means that 46 million Americans can’t afford health care at all.

On the other hand, in Canada we believe that making people healthy, safe and educated is what provides opportunities in the first place. We may not always do it well, but at least we are committed to doing it.

© Stephen Lautens, 2009

Man Trouble

By Stephen Lautens

July 24, 2009


What is it with men? Why are we always doing stupid things even when we are given an out?

We may never know what happened in Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr’s house. There are competing versions of how he came to be arrested, but one thing seems to be pretty clear - either man could have just walked away with nothing more than temporarily raised blood pressures.

According to a press report, veteran police Sgt. James Crowley – who is white - confronted Henry Gates – who is black - in his home after a woman passing by called police about a possible burglary. The sergeant said he only arrested Gates after the professor “repeatedly accused him of racism and made derogatory remarks about his mother”.

I am certain that inside the prof’s house, many stupid and offensive things were said, likely on both sides. I'm sure race had a role to play in both sides making initial assumptions about the other, long after everyone had realized that no crime was being committed. I'm sure professor Gates has personally experienced racism, and was offended about being challenged in his own home.

Being a white, middle class male myself, I can’t imagine the scars that are left by being on the pointy end of discrimination. Go back far enough and my family’s heritage is Austrian, and the movie Brüno aside, the world doesn’t take too much notice of us. For a while my brother and I tried to come up with an offensive name for Austrians, and finally settled on “Schnitzel”, but as you can see, it lacks that visceral impact that other racial slurs have. Besides, I like schnitzel.

But as the facts come out, it starts to look less like the product of racism and more a product of testosterone. For one, the arresting officer, Sergeant Crowley, was chosen by a black police commissioner to teach recruits about avoiding racial profiling. I would also venture to guess that as an 11-year veteran of the Cambridge police force he would have a certain hesitation about arresting any Harvard professor in his own home.

Still, men do stupid things, and you don’t need racism to explain it. Men start and fight wars, scuffle in bars, race strangers at stop lights, and trade insults and fists rather than walk away from trouble.

I wasn’t there, but you wonder if all the fuss in Cambridge could have been avoided if either one of them had stopped and said: “This is stupid. Let’s just forget it.”

Professor Gates – after getting over his initial anger – could have said, “Sorry I was upset when you came in. I understand you were just doing your job when someone reported a break in. Now good night.”

Sergeant Crowley could have said: “Sorry I came in like gangbusters. Confronting a robber can be a dangerous thing, so you’ll understand I had to yell a lot, point a gun and secure the situation before sorting out who you are. Otherwise I could be killed. Now that I know who you are, I bid you a good night.”

But you know one or both couldn’t leave it along. Testosterone kicked in and it became a “yo mama” match.

When are we men – black and white and any other colour you care to mention – going to learn to solve our problems in a less manly way?

© Stephen Lautens

Space – The Boring Frontier

By Stephen Lautens

July 17, 2009


Monday will be the 40th anniversary of the first man setting foot on the moon. I know – it surprised me too. You’d think such an important human achievement would be more memorable, but the truth is that a generation and a half later we have forgotten our space pioneers.

It seems that the public is not alone.

NASA threw out the plans to the Saturn V rocket that took Apollo 11 into space. That’s right – they tossed the whole thing in the trash and didn’t even keep a copy as part of their regular “housekeeping”.

Last week I also read that NASA also destroyed the original film of the first moon landing beamed back to Earth. The reported truth is sometime in the 1970s or 1980s they were running short of videotape and just decided to tape over it with something else – probably a Magnum P.I. episode. I guess it was easier to tape over historic video than running down to Radio Shack for some new ones.

I’ve kept my space mementoes longer than NASA it seems. My grandfather worked for a newspaper back when all press photos were sent in by a primitive fax machine. I saved all those pictures after the paper used them and pasted them in my “Space Album”, which I’ve kept all these years. I still get a thrill looking at them, maybe because they are so raw. In a world of megapixel cell phone movie cameras, it’s hard for today’s generation to imagine history being made in grainy and black and white, even if it was pioneering.

Edwin “Buzz”Aldrin, who became the second man on the moon after Neil Armstrong on July 20, 1969, has recently made it his mission to remind people of what an enormous achievement this was. A few weeks ago he told a British newspaper that “young people have lost any interest in space that isn’t in a video game or a movie house.”

True - at the time of the moon landing, Star Trek had already been cancelled and ran its last episode the month before. Hollywood’s space was a lot more interesting, with green alien slave girls, evil empires and blaster battles. Not only that, it was in colour at a time when all the images sent back from the moon were in scratchy black and white, with nary a green slave girl to be found.

In reality, space is quiet and mostly empty, and has a hard time competing with our crowded and noisy world. Even the current space shuttle mission with Julie Payette, who is joining fellow Canadian astronaut Robert Thirsk at the International Space Station, has trouble getting attention as we’ve come to look at the shuttle as more or less a space bus. It is after all the 127th space shuttle mission, and there is only one crew member on board under the age of forty.

Buzz Aldrin wants to make space travel sexy again and bring back the spirit of adventure. Not only has he teamed up with Snoop Dogg to make “Rocket Experience”, his own hip-hop single and video, he’s trying to promote our next logical step outside our world with a manned mission to Mars.

I hope he succeeds. Not just because I remember how exciting it was to watch forty years ago as a new frontier was being conquered by true pioneers, but because we need to be reminded humanity should have greater dreams than Twittering about the latest celebrity adoption, divorce or diet.

We can and should be better than that.

© Stephen Lautens, 2009