We Have All Gone Crazy
10/03/05 05:24 PM
We have all gone crazy, or at least we are getting there. The devastation of Hurricane Katrina is real and awful by any measure, but it is curious how such disasters re-center us on what really matters. America has for decades been blessed and protected from so many threats. We have resources and natural physical protections that so many others lack. But with that we have become complacent and entitlement-minded. The 9/11 tragedy was awful, and we should have been horrified. But, we were also shocked “that it could happen here”, and we had no basis for that. We all knew that New Orleans was an aging city sinking slowly into its own muck. We knew that a hurricane such as Katrina would be catastrophic. Capable experts have been predicting it for decades, but we all chose to ignore it, from the poorest resident to the highest politician. After all, it’s the Big Easy, and we’re America.
And so the craziness creeps in. It starts with the insidious idea that we can live without being violated, without tragedies big or small. Politicians of all ideologies allow us to believe that and to believe that we only need them in office to live free of danger. Their political lives depend on the wealthy maintaining an illusion of influence and the poor feeling afraid and dependent. Our current administration has turned the trafficking of fear and hate into a high tech science. They have bankrupted the country in a vapid plan to police the world and “get the bogeymen”, and in the process have decimated our ability to respond to problems at home. And why? Because catastrophes at home just don’t happen. They never expected to have to own up on the scale that Katrina is demanding.
We are also lulled in by our transformation into a litigious society. The illusion is the same, that we can and deserve to live lives free of misfortune. Under that assumption, any misfortune that does occur must be someone’s fault. Claiming 30 to 40% of monetary awards, trial lawyers have tremendous financial motivation to keep us all believing that. The same delusion pays advertising for increasingly seedy but popular entertainment. From reality TV to Jerry Springer to the lives of self-serving athletes, we worship the idea that you can have it all without necessarily possessing any ability or character or accountability.
We even take this to the point that we vilify those who do have character. Physicians are an example. Like all professions, the medical profession includes people of varying levels of integrity, but the defining characteristic of the huge majority of medical care givers is that they serve the basic physical needs of people. This distinguishes them from professions with more purely material motivations. In spite of this, trial lawyers have made an industry of seeking out clients and selling them the idea that if something is wrong, it is somebody’s fault. We could radically improve the malpractice crisis that is crippling our country if we simply adopted a different approach. Politicians keep focusing on limiting damage awards and ignoring the lottery-sized attorney compensation. Bad medicine could still be policed and we could remove the financial treasure hunting quite easily. A generation ago, we placed physicians and hospitals on fixed, resource based fee scales. We need simply to do the same thing for trial attorneys. A specific type of case should be compensated on a specific fee schedule, not a percentage of the “winnings”. When lawyers are receiving a percentage, there is awesome motivation to make those winnings as obscenely huge as possible, regardless of the merits of the case. If they were paid on a fee scale, we could then for the first time actually focus on those merits. This could also be easily modified to assimilate the current movement toward “pay for performance” in medicine. In other words, lawyers get less if they lose and more (on a pay scale) if they win. There would then be less motivation to pursue cases without merit.
We need to celebrate and reward those of us who have character, whether they are physicians, nurses, lawyers, fisherman, or cab drivers. It takes a disaster like Katrina to refocus us on those things. We have seen looters responding according to the philosophy that they deserve something for nothing, and we have seen nurses risking their lives to bag ventilator patients by hand while snipers take pot shots at them.
The lottery mentality also presumes that closure is possible; that if we make the big score, things can and will be good forever. But there is no closure in real life. There will always be tragedies and there will always be blessings. Bad things do happen to good people and no one from the FEMA Director to the cop on the street can change that. What defines good people, whether they are victims or onlookers is that they address the misfortune and rise above it. There is a time to analyze and criticize, but they focus first on response and rising above.
So, who shall we celebrate, the looter who sees tragedy as an excuse to get even, or the cop who stays at his work even when it seems hopeless? Will we celebrate the cracked out parent who blames politicians for their plight or the grandmother who is raising that parent’s children. Will we praise the doctor who does everything right and gets sued anyway for a bad result, or the personal injury lawyer who believes that a $40,000,000.00 award is noble and justified, as is his $15,000,000.00 commission.
No, life is not perfect, and we all need to face misfortune sooner or later. We must constantly prepare and constantly respond. Tragedies can never validate the concept that we can all be compensated, that we are deserving or even able to remain whole. They do however prove and refine the good character in most of us, and to that end tragedy can have some good effect. Katrina has proven to us again, in case we weren’t paying attention, that good and bad befall us all, whether rich or poor, regardless of color or condition, and such times demand that we care for each other. The alternative is anarchy, the most unbiased tyrant of all.
