On Monday night at the Tea Party Republican Presidential debate, which aired on CNN, there were cheers from the audience and shouts of “let him die,”
when a hypothetical question was posed about how to handle the care of a man in
his thirties who opts out of buying health insurance because he is in good
health, but winds up injured and in a coma at the hospital. Those cheers erupted from the Tampa, Florida audience. It had been just a week earlier that death got a similar round of applause at the mention of 234 executions in
Texas. That was when the Republicans were debating in California at the Reagan Presidential Library.
I found it odd that the party most associated with the
right-to-life movement would be so gleeful about gruesome incidents of
death. I also was surprised that the Tea
Party, which was appalled at the (false) notion of “death panels” in the
healthcare bill, had people in its audience advocating that someone without
insurance should die.
In another way, however, the cheers and applause we heard
makes sense. The Tea Party advocates individual and personal responsibility and
looks down upon any kind of government handout. It’s an attitude of, “I work hard for what I
earn, I want to keep it, if someone else wants a job and healthcare, let them
earn it themselves.” Now that I’ve got that all worked out in my head, it
sounds a lot like “survival of the fittest.”
And that makes me confused again, aren’t these the people who hate
Darwin’s ideas?
At any rate, I get a little nervous when groups of people get so cavalier and even gleeful about the deaths of others. Does anyone remember reading "The Lottery," by Shirley Jackson?
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I must amend my remark above about “survival of the fittest.” My friend Don has reminded me that “social Darwinism and the ‘survival of the fittest’ in the social, economic and political sense has historically provided the foundation for the emergence of super-nationalism, fascism, and myriad lethal ethnic superiorities.” Now it all makes sense.
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