Do you ever listen to NPR's weekly feature, This I Believe? It is always interesting to learn how other people think and why they believe what they do--and often most enlightening to discover what events got them to where they now are.
This morning, I heard an essay for the feature by Kenneth Weinberg, an attorney who, among other tasks, helped determine the distribution amounts of financial compensation to the family members of the victims of the World Trade Center attacks on 9/11.
After having accepted for his entire professional life the premise at law that the major method for determining such compensation is to determine the economic impact on the survivors of each victim's death, Weinberg's actual experiences relating to 9/11 changed his mind. He no longer thinks that an attorney who, say, represented (among other clients) Emeril Lagasse should automatically be worth more than a firefighter who lost his life trying to rescue others on that horrible day, just because the attorney had more education and training and thus a higher lifetime earnings potential. Mr. Weinberg now believes that all life should be valued equally.
Hallelujah and Amen! He didn't say it in so many words, but Mr. Weinberg's conclusions directly support several things I've been saying for years. First, that life itself is the most fundamental and important of our unalienable rights. Therefore, under our system of government, the things that directly affect life--like health care--should be made available to everyone, equally. Second, that financial worth is not a proper fundamental social value, for it promotes greed above other, more important social values, such as honesty, integrity, and yes, heroism. Third, that our adversarial system of justice doesn't necessarily provide the best way to learn the truth about any contested/litigated situation. Taking people who already disagree with one another and forcing them to adopt the most extreme version of their respective positions so they can maximize their chances to win a lawsuit is no way to guarantee long-term successful dispute resolution. Much better to have everyone sit down together and act like rational grown-ups and work out a solution with which everyone can live comfortably.
[However, this does not go so far as Dubya and Sen. McCain would have you think and make you into a wimpy "cheek-turner" to terrorists. Self-defense is never wrong. But note the prefix: self-defense. Hence one of my biggest problems with the US invasion of Iraq. That is not what the USA does. Not my USA, anyway. Especially when using Dubya's own reasoning, other targets of invasion would have been better, like, oh, North Korea. Then again, North Korea has no oil. And so the moral, intellectual, and policy bankruptcies of the Dubya administration are revealed.--Ed.]
I was half-asleep when Mr. Weinberg's essay started, but I was wide awake by its end. Now if we can only get the rest of the county to wake up, too.
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