During the Sedar, every year, as I read from the Haggadah, I always relate the story of Passover to our present day life. This editorial by Simon Greer was very meaningful to me so I wanted to share.
In 1775, Marine troops preparing to intercept British warships carried yellow drums painted with what would become an iconic image of the American Revolutionary period: a rattlesnake, coiled and ready to strike; underneath, the motto “Don’t tread on me.” Capturing the anti-government political sentiment of the moment, this image was soon immortalized on what became known as the Gadsden flag.
A year later, as America declared independence from Britain, a second image took its place in our national history. The Great Seal, bearing the motto “E pluribus unum” (out of many, one) — bore witness to a second political vision for this nascent country, that of collective identity and mutual obligation.
America, the great political experiment, has attempted since her birth to balance these two founding ideals of individualism and collectivism. Today, the rhetoric of the tea party movement tugs us dangerously out of balance, reimagining this country’s creation as rooted solely in the values of individual rights and freedoms.
One small indication of the movement’s allegiance to this strand of our founding narrative, to the exclusion of the other: Sales of the Gadsden flag increased 400% over a two-month period this past fall. We should all care about this perversion of the founding narrative of this country; it misrepresents what America stands. For Jewish Americans, it marks a rampant individualism that runs contrary to the mutual obligation that Judaism holds out as a political and social ideal.
With Passover on the horizon, Americans can look to the Jewish founding narrative — the Exodus story — for perspectives on freedom and nation building. Interestingly, the Exodus from Egypt is framed not in terms of the individual’s right to freedom from oppression (though that is certainly implicit) but rather in terms of the freedom to work together to build a society of equity, of justice, and of collective social responsibility.The story itself opens with an image of collective identification. Moses, born to Israelite parents but raised by Pharaoh’s daughter, forgoes the privileges and luxuries of the royal palace to identify with his Israelite brethren. His first action as an adult reveals his sense of fealty and responsibility to the larger Israelite collective: he risks his life to come to the aid of an Israelite slave being beaten by an Egyptian, whom Moses ultimately kills in the struggle.
The climax of the story similarly emphasizes identification with the communal entity. In the moments before redemption, as the Israelites prepare to leave Egypt, they are instructed to mark their doorposts with blood in order to be spared the final plague and to be freed. Only by identifying as members of the larger community can any individual household take the steps out of Egypt. National freedom, the story tells us, is a collective, not an individual, enterprise.
Passover focuses on the Exodus from Egypt, the beginning — not the end — of the Jewish national formation. Exodus is followed by Sinai. The Sinaitic covenant is the blueprint for building a society in the promised land. The Jewish model of redemption and freedom is not simply the freedom from oppression to do as one wants, but is also a freedom to actively participate in a covenantal community. This is a highly communal articulation of what freedom is and what it is meant to be.The founders of this country knew the Exodus story well. Many wrote of America as the new Israel, Britain as the new Egypt. The freedom they sought was modeled after the Exodus; yet, departing from the Hebrew Bible — which strikingly does not use the language of individual rights — our founders created explicit space for the individual in this country’s laws and cultural narrative. In this way, America was indeed a great political experiment, striving to negotiate the tension between individualism and a greater collective good. The Declaration of Independence itself articulates this tension, with its opening call for the “inalienable rights” of the individual juxtaposed against its authors’ closing commitment to “mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”
The rising popularity of the tea party movement signals a dangerous and unfortunate departure from the balance sought by the founding ideals of this country. More concerning than any one policy position is the movement’s rhetorical power, drawing us further away from the society envisioned by our founders, and creating a culture of individualism. Using the lens of Exodus to analyze the tea party phenomenon steers us toward reframing the debate and re-infusing the discourse with the narrative of mutual responsibility and the common good. This Passover, I hope Americans of all religious stripes will draw from these values and ideals to envision a new future for this country, one of justice, equality, and collective destiny.
Happy Passover, y’all!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WF6irnzAiI
This was a very nice editorial. While I disagree completely with his emphasis on collectivism and, especially, with his misinterpretation of the Tea Party and the Founders, its an interesting take.
Thanks cargosquid, I appreciate your honesty on the editorial.
I have heard that term ‘collectivism’ a lot lately. I am not sure what people mean when they say it. I am not much for socio-political philosophical talk to start with.
“The story itself opens with an image of collective identification. Moses, born to Israelite parents but raised by Pharaoh’s daughter, forgoes the privileges and luxuries of the royal palace to identify with his Israelite brethren. His first action as an adult reveals his sense of fealty and responsibility to the larger Israelite collective: he risks his life to come to the aid of an Israelite slave being beaten by an Egyptian, whom Moses ultimately kills in the struggle.”
He is interpreting this an identification with a collective identification and that is the perceived reason that Moses stops the beating, while my interpretation would be that Moses, as an individual, saw an individual being beaten and found it to be wrong.
It was not because the slave was Jewish, but because the beating was wrong.
Collectivism is the idea that the individual is subservient to a group and has value only because of inclusion in said group.
1 : a political or economic theory advocating collective control especially over production and distribution; also : a system marked by such control
2 : emphasis on collective rather than individual action or identity
Some quotes: From Ayn Rand, the easiest to find:
“Collectivism means the subjugation of the individual to a group — whether to a race, class or state does not matter. Collectivism holds that man must be chained to collective action and collective thought for the sake of what is called ‘the common good’.
Collectivism holds that the individual has no rights, that his life and work belong to the group . . . and that the group may sacrifice him at its own whim to its own interests. The only way to implement a doctrine of that kind is by means of brute force—and statism has always been the political corollary of collectivism.
Current examples would be the HCR mandates to buy health care insurance.
Of course, no society cannot be successful without a mixture of individualism and collectivism. However, history has shown clearly that those societies that emphasize collectivism become tyrannical. Those that are strictly individualist are, well, not societies. There must be a balance. This tension and pendulum of emphasis is what makes America vibrant. Unfortunately, the collective side always seeks to grow, by its very nature, and must be fought, while the individualist side must be reinforced by collective unification behind basic principles as found in the Bill of Rights.
The irony is that the most communistic collective in the US is the military. The mission is everything and they own everything that you use.
GREAT analysis Cargosquid, I enjoyed your perspective.
I would add, that as far as HCR is both to me, collective and individual. For every person that waits to get healthcare if they are sick and then goes to the ER, it raises the cost for me and my family (the individual) so if the entire populace(collective) is required to have healthcare, I believe, the end result IS in for the benefit of the individual. The individual is forever intertwineed with the collective, sort of the conjoined twins. Seperate but the same.
However, the sticky part is where does the individual get protected? Especially since the rules by which we govern do not mention nor authorize forcing individuals to buy services or goods from a third party. If the government is worried about medical care, nothing (that I know of) prevents state or federal governments from building clinics and hospitals or providing medicine.
@Elena
Ahhh, but fear the decision of the “collective” over your health care decisions, for as in examples as diverse as the Soviet Union to Canada, the quality of care and the willingness to expend those resources has less to do with you and your health care the problem as it does where you sit in the collective society’s risk/cost/benefit line. Even the priemier (President) of Canada feared that system’s ability to meet his immediate needs and he came here for his heart surgery. As long as you think you are getting something now that you would not have gotten otherwise – you should be for ObamaCare. If you think you are going to get equal access to any and all required care – you should be for it. If you beleive it will reduce costs or encourage more people to practice medicine – without tort reform, you should be for Obamacare. if you beleive that Medicare is being saved by those budget cuts, you shoudl be for it. And if you really do not believe that those companies are serious about their calculations regarding their health care costs – you should be for it. And, if you do, I have property in Florida I would like to talk to you about – perfect for retirement.
I think that Elena is right in defining Americans as a “collective” with an obligation to seek the common good. But, then, so was the Soviet Union a “collective” — a “collective” whose constitution claiming freedom for all has often been cited as one of the most beautiful national guidance documents ever written. We know, of course, that in real terms it was not worth the paper on which it was written. I think you will find copycat examples of the Soviets in many places in the world. So, how are we different? It seems to me that we somehow found a way to operate as a “collective’ but still managed to maintain a sense of personal freedom within every individual making up that “collective.”
In contrast to that Soviet document, we were given a written covenant which really meant something because, in response to Ben Franklin’s express warning, we worked at making that document mean something. And that was not an easy task. One of the very first problems we faced was the Whiskey Rebellion, which caused George Washington to launch military troops against a portion of our own people who seemed to take the meaning of personal freedom to a far extreme outside the basic concept of the “collective.” Not many years later we had to fight off the contrary idea of the Alien and Sedition Acts. We have had to try to figure out a delicate balancing act in that regard for 223 years.
In my opinion, the obligation of government in our “collective” is to make sure that the people retain that personal sense of freedom by respecting the Constitution and refraining from actions which can be construed by the people as a violation of its precepts. If the people lose that sense of freedom within our almost unique operating “collective’, then the “collective” itself is weakened. As an unabashed conservative, I have to say that, over the past half-century and regardless of the party in power, my own sense of personal freedom has been eroded to some extent. I sometimes feel that our national fabric of personal freedom is being unraveled thread by thread and that, despite my right to vote and even to participate in politics, I, as an individual, have become increasingly powerless to intervene in a truly effective way. And I must say that the way in which the recent health care reform issue was handled at the leadership level made that feeling within me even stronger. And this does not necessarily pertain to political party rivalry and conflict. It just seems that I have somehow lost my access to and influence over those elected representatives whose task it is to ensure that government does not erode the personal freedom supposedly guaranteed by the Constitution. I feel like an outsider watching someone else play the whole game. I am not someone who at my age is inclined to get out in the street and shout out my frustrations but I certainly have an urge to do so.
It follows that the complexities and oppositional issues of our modern time leave me often in a quandry. Can I justify failing to defend the rights of others in the same way I want to defend myself? I personally had somewhat of a “Road to Damascus” during and after the Viet Nam War. I was myself among the targets of protest during that period. I hated those anti-war demonstrators with a passion because they insulted me and seemed to be insulting my definition of patriotism and my obligation to respond to my country’s call. But, over time, I began to re-examine my attitude with regard to the bulk of that protest, with a very wide exception for the likes of Bill Ayers and Bernadine Doorn and the Weathermen. I had to come to the conclusion that most of these people were experiencing a sense of a loss of freedom in their own way and that, as long as they did not engage in violence or unlawful protest, they had every right in our constitutionally-defined world to be out there and raise their voices in anger. I could disagree with their opinions but I had absolutely not right to criticize their presence on the streets. And I had no right to wage a campaign of denigration against them, looking for every little misstep of protest, seizing upon the actions of a few to try to undermine the whole, or labelling them all in a specific way without actually knowing them and knowing what was in their minds and hearts. This did happen often in that era. But I personally tried to get beyond it.
Now the shoe is on the other foot. I am among those who are angry and who feel deeply a lost sense of personal freedom. I want to raise my own voice in lawful protest. But, when I do, I find myself generically under attack. An untoward and unjustifiable individual act here, a blanket accusation there, and I become suddenly part of an unruly “mob” engaged in seeking “mob control.” I am a racist, a spitter, a window breaker, even a lethal threat to the members of government. No, I am none of those. I am an American engaged in using my constitutional rights to voice my opinion to elected representatives who seem to me to be increasingly deaf to the voices of a considerable segment of the population. All I am asking is to be heard and for those representatives to sit down with me and find ways to make our “collective” work without leaving a large swath of its human componet parts seething in anger at having the door shut in their faces. I am not some inhuman brute. I feel the pain of those who are in true need of help. I am willing to find a way to help them for the good of our “collective.” I just ask that you leave me at the end of all this with the same good feeling about the country that those being helped may acquire. If I could do a personal about face with regard to the huge protests of my youth, especially since I was one of the targets of those protests, certainly you can do the same for me now.
Americans are a pack, not a herd.
I like that Cargo, a “pack” as opposed to a herd 😉
I can empathize with how you are feeling Wolverine, I felt like that for 8 years with Bush in power along with a republican congress. Did you feel that way when Clinton was in power? I wonder if, when there is only one party “ruling”, the outcome is that that many people feel like they are not being represented. I am not sure what the “best” answer is for healthcare reform, but the trajectory we were on was not sustainable, not from a fiscal perspective.
“(Reuters) – The United States spends more on healthcare than any other country in the world but has higher rates of infant mortality, diabetes and other ills than many other developed countries.” http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE5504Z320090601
Like I said, my belief in insuring people is not just from a moral and ethical perspective of the “collective” view, it is also from and “individual” selfish criteria. I have seen our our healthcare coverage costs increase each year, this year our copay for ER visits doubled.
Everytime I use my insurance for an emergency issue for one of my children, I invest an inordinate amount of time appealing their decision not to pay because my child went to an in network hosptial but the ER physician was out of network. How stupid, what a scam, in an emergency situation you don’t HAVE a choice. I have the time to put into getting our fair share paid by the insurance company, but I guarantee you, plenty of other families do not.
I think it is common sense for me that I not be required to share the burden of increasing health care costs because so many millions of other people hike up the cost of care because they either wait to get treated or use the ER as their family practitioner. Do I believe in torte reform, absolutely. I also believe that every person has a responsibility to take an active role in their own health. I had a home birth with two incredibly qualifed midwives, instead of spending what would have cost 10 thousand dollars for a hosptial birth, it was 2,300.00 I didn’t make the decision lightly, I did my due dilligence and a ton of research. Don’t get me started on the out of control costs for maternity care with one of the worst infant mortality rates and maternal mortality rates considering we are one of the wealthiest nations in the world!
I am not sure what the “best” answer is for healthcare reform, but the trajectory we were on was not sustainable, not from a fiscal perspective.
“(Reuters) – The United States spends more on healthcare than any other country in the world but has higher rates of infant mortality, diabetes and other ills than many other developed countries.”
Elena,
How is the new program any more sustainable? You know that the numbers presented by Congress are BS (new abreviations!). Also, what other developed country has an influx of poor people that have never had health care or an inner city culture of poor people. I understand where you are coming from, but, comparing Europe to the US is apples to Oranges. Our diet and culture is the reason for diabetes. Get rid of the high fructose corn syrup out of most of the food and you would watch diabetes drop. Our cities were are developed for the use of cars. Most other cities in the “developed” world are built for walking. Our medical system allows access to all. One can get tests and treatments at short notice. Usually. One has to pay for them, but, they are there. England, France, Canada, all have waiting times or worse. We need reform. But its not about an unsustainable fiscal perspective. The market was not active in pricing. Government was, and more government is not the answer. Health care costs are increasing under the current plan. In the years to come, if this is not changed or repealed, your taxes will go up. And the system will still collapse. The NHS in England is a disaster. Government health care is a budget breaker. Our deficits, including medicare and medicaid are $45 TRILLION dollars. And you call PRIVATE insurance, expensive? Using “out of the box” ideas like the midwives is excellent. Now, what do you do if the the government says you can’t do that? Pick a reason. Unions, cost, “safety”, global warming…..the gov’t doesn’t need a reason. And you can’t fight city hall while you can fight a company.
You keep repeating that we are one of the wealthiest nations in the world. We are TRILLIONS in debt. We have no money. Its ALL borrowed. We cannot afford it.
Just noticed. Yet again, we are discussing health care. AAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGHHHHH! Its the zombie thread that will not die! Health care in a PASSOVER thread. Even if we did start talking about collective vs individualist.
Man, you folks can type! Correction, were one of the wealthiest nations in the world. Soon we will be referred to as just another debtor nation. The majority of all those receiving free child birth services from our hospitals are to people not born in this country. Draw your own conclusions, and they still won’t have to pay for services. That’s why it would have cost you 10 thousand so you help defray the cost of those who receive it for free. Nothing is free, someone always pays. Unfortunately those who receive the services and those who pay aren’t always one in the same!
Elena — about that Clinton thing. I worked for every president from JFK through Clinton. I did not matter to me in my particular profession what the political labels were. I was sworn to do the best possible job I could do at all times. If political or ideological things ever bothered me, I had the out of saying that I worked for you and Moon and Pinko and Cargo and everyone else out there. You were my clients, not a particular president or party. I must say, however, that Clinton broke that string, not so much by direct action, in my opinion, but, rather, by a failure to recognize and control what some of the more ideologically driven people surrounding him were doing. Maybe he was just distracted. I don’t know. The fact is that it was the Clinton era which made me hang up my spikes, so to speak, because, after all those years of combat, I began to feel like someone had handcuffed me. I am still constrained from going into the details of this. I have for the most part gotten over that period, largely because of 9/11 and the old, retired, patriotic warhorse part of me.
I must say, however, that Clinton actually did surprise me eventually. That early on business with the health care reform under Hillary appeared to me to be a really botched job by people who did not yet have a real grasp for how Washington worked. After the Repubs took the Congress in 1994, I really expected a cat fight, with Clinton digging in his heels and going ideological. I hate to use that goofy term “triangulate”; but the guy actually did figure out how to deal with the Opposition in many ways and come out of it looking not half bad and not leaving the rest of us that pissed off. Unfortunately, the Lewinsky thing sort of ruined it for him, especially the tortured way he tried to get out of it. Nevertheless, from a purely political vice professional standpoint, I will have to confess that I felt a lot less worried about that “sense of freedom” cited in my previous post during the Clinton era than I do now.
Quite frankly, I believe that Obama has really gone ideological and that, very unfortunately, he has let the most ideological people on the Hill lead the charge on too many issues. I was hoping that, despite the vast ideological chasm out there, this President would find a way to calm the waters and serve much more as a legitimate referee once he found out what sitting in the Oval House was really like. By golly, on the Afghan War, in my opinion, he did get it, and thus far he appears to have gotten it mostly on terrorism (with a few slips in my own opinion), where I keep a sharp personal eye on the issues. But on so many domestic issues, where I would at least like to see a fair and genuine chance at participation followed by a straight up and down vote after a fair battle, I am left instead with the feeling that the door is being slammed in my face every time I approach it. I spent nearly 30 years toiling within my government, and now I often feel like I don’t even have a connection to it. Maybe that is also the way you felt under Bush II. My own conclusion is that something has to change in our governance so that none of us feels like we are always going through alternating periods of being welcome and having that door slammed in our faces. We have to inject some genuine continuity into our political landscape. Otherwise, I just don’t know what the future will be like.
Very interesting, very eloquent posts under this thread. I would like to add my $0.02.
I agree that there has to be balance between collectivism and individualism. But the real dichotomy is between producers and consumers in society. Producers are the rugged individualists who promote capitalism, create wealth, and generate new ideas that lead to new jobs, new growth, and enhanced government revenue. The producers are the capitalists and inventors that have produced the revenue that allows the government to provide for the “collective good.” The consumers are the people that rely on government programs for their well-being and have benefitted enormously from collectivism.
The rapid growth in government has started to produce more consumers and fewer producers. As the consumers begin to outnumber the producers, spending on government programs will rapidly increase until it becomes unsustainable. We are already seeing signs of this with the AAA bond rating of the U.S. government in doubt. The HCR bill compounds an already serious problem.
The HCR bill is problematic in that it does two very important, but very negative things. First, it further discourages those producers who dislike government mandates in their businesses and resent the redistribution of their hard-earned wealth to support HCR. Second, as more people get insurance, the HCR bill will encourage more spending on expensive medical procedures for which most people only pay about 10% to 20% of the true cost. This will cause the cost of the healthcare system in the United States to increase dramatically, leading to further taxation and redistribution of wealth.
I can speak from experience that the barriers for starting a high-technology business are truly daunting. HCR will only make it more difficult, because income for small-business owners puts them into higher tax brackets even though they are barely breaking even. The barriers make it very tempting to sell the rights for new technology to a large corporation, rather than creating a new business with new employees.
Wolverine, I think maybe we are supposed to feel the way you feel. I know that isn’t comforting but I can relate to much of what you have said in a totally different field.
Perhaps it is best not to dwell on it. I simply find myself light years away, and it hasn’t been all that long ago.
Wolverine, you said:
“Maybe that is also the way you felt under Bush II. My own conclusion is that something has to change in our governance so that none of us feels like we are always going through alternating periods of being welcome and having that door slammed in our faces. We have to inject some genuine continuity into our political landscape. Otherwise, I just don’t know what the future will be like.”
AMEN to that!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
US health care reform is good for economy
Posted: March 23, 2010, 7:54 AM by Diane Francis
For instance, workers in Canada, Europe or Japan who lost their jobs lost income. But, until now, unemployed American workers face financial ruin if sickness strikes them or their families because they lack health care coverage. Bridge coverage has been available but unaffordable for anyone but the wealthy. Worse yet, if a major illness was diagnosed during unemployment, a worker became unemployable, bringing about a life sentence of poverty.
The catastrophes disappear under these reforms. Consumer spending, which ground to a halt in the United States, can increase as people realize they don’t have to set aside huge amounts to pay for a catastrophic illness, do without necessities to pay medical bills or go bankrupt because of an appendectomy.
Above is from:
http://network.nationalpost.com/NP/blogs/francis/archive/2010/03/23/us-health-care-reform-is-good-for-economy.aspx
A not unexpected submission from Diane Francis, a Canadian journalist and regular contributor to the Huffington Post. Diane has the solution for us poor old Americans on how to solve our economic problems: ratchet our taxes way up there so we can be like the Canadians and Europeans. We Americans just don’t get it. We’ve got to be more like our Canadian neighbors, the same ones who come here when they are in need of quick, serious resolutions of their health care problems. Eh!
Here’s an interesting item regarding immigration:
Ready for Your Biometric Social Security Card?
By Katy Steinmetz / Washington Monday, Mar. 29, 2010
Could a national identity card help resolve the heated immigration-reform divide?
The sheer scale of the project is a potential problem, in terms of time, money and technology. The premise of using a biometric employment card (which would most likely contain fingerprint data) to stop illegal immigrants from working requires that all 150 million–plus American workers, not just immigrants, have one. Michael Cherry, president of identification-technology company Cherry Biometrics, says the accuracy of such large-scale biometric measuring hasn’t been proved. “What study have we done?” he says. “We just have a few assumptions.”
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1974927,00.html#ixzz0jkmvFzzd
Papers, please.
Yep, and the minute that the hackers recreate it, we will have an even bigger problem with identity theft.
Blaming the Tea Party for all this anger is like blaming Greg L for anti-illegal immigration sentiment … they are an outlet for anger, not the cause of the anger.
I agree that what’s needed on the part of more Americans is a sense of balance, an understanding of natural tensions, and less extremism and simple-mindedness.
But I still wouldn’t blame the Tea Party. We’ll never acheive balance or improvement until we start to give Americans a choice beyond the Demicrans and the Republicrats.