Having ideals is a good thing. Our ideals help us to make good choices as we navigate the complexities of our day to day lives. They’re a sort of standard of conduct to compare our behavior with and to judge how close to perfection we can get. They’re not an absolute mandated behavior to be followed without exception of any kind.
Remember the old saying to “Never say never” about anything. As soon as we commit to never doing something along comes a situation in life that will demonstrate the need for an exception. Never kill someone seems like an ideal we should be able to follow without exception, but then we find ourselves in uniform on the battlefield facing an enemy whose primary goal is to kill us and our ideal of never killing anyone seems to have an important exception. Ideals, like anything else in life, become a real problem if we treat them like absolute rules in our lives.
I happened upon an article last December that really helps to explain the ideology based partisan dysfunction we witness every day in our government. The article comes from the Associated Press under the title Politics color governors’ decisions on Medicaid. The article was carried in a host of newspapers around the country so it may have appeared in the paper on your doorstep. As an aside, I have discovered that the various newspapers might run an article from a news service, but they often change the title for some reason. I would just say that a unique title does not original reporting make, but let me get back to the reason for my blog.
The article offered a recap of which states have implemented the expanded Medicaid program offered by the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) and it seems that the political persuasion of the governors is a pretty good dividing line especially, if the governor in question is feeling pressure from the Tea Party in the next primary election. The article also points out that the people in the state are paying into the tax pool, but getting less out when they have the same needs as people in other states where the program has been implemented.
According to the article, “Every Democratic governor has called for accepting larger-than-usual federal subsidies to expand Medicaid, the government health insurance program for the poor. The only three who failed were blocked by Republican state legislators.” That leaves thirty states where the Governor is a Republican and “Of the eight Republican governors who will expand Medicaid, six are from states carried by President Obama.” Ideology is complicating matters in the other states and the people who live there are being denied the services that are available elsewhere in the country.
The article asserts that a few Governors are seeking ways to quietly implement the expanded Medicaid program by applying labels that would disguise their actions, but in this age of the internet I suspect their hypocrisy will be noticed.
In this same vein, have you noticed that some of the obstructionists have softened their stance of fiscal responsibility? Some of the same Legislators who lead the way to a shutdown of the Federal Government and refused to support a compromise on the various budget proposals for several years quietly supported the bipartisan budget from Senator Murray and Representative Ryan late last year. Another inconvenient ideology has been reconsidered by a few of our leaders and found to be no longer appropriate.
We need our ideologies to help us live our lives in a manner we think is appropriate. We all want to be good citizens and good neighbors and our ideologies are important to that end, but when we start to act like our ideology is absolute and must be observed at any cost, it becomes an inconvenient ideology.
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