The rarely sung second verse of America The Beautiful contains these words:
America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!
At a time when criticisms of US history are condemned as un-American, it’s worth listening to this.
As we noted in a previous blog post, the Founding Fathers expected a number of flaws in our country--and created a constitutional process to address them.
Often, this process requires prolonged citizen pressure to get political leaders to address a major neglected issue, such as gender inequality, voting issues or racism...or a multidecade child health epidemic and a crushingly expensive health system--both fueled by government mismanagement.
Unfortunately, our advocacy experience so far reinforces this.
Why are political leaders so resistant to change? Sure, they've got a lot on their plate. But how about prioritizing the big issues that matter deeply to the public?
Powerful special interests gain from the status quo, as reflected in their lobbying and campaign donations. After first ignoring the mounting pressure, they start to give lip service to change--while avoiding actually doing anything significant about it. Then when it looks like you are making progress, they start to fight back--ideally for them, behind the scenes out of public view; or with deceptive public messaging; because what they are doing is not in the public interest.
As Healthy Future US makes progress, we will need to keep raising our game--because those benefiting from the current sorry state of affairs in health have a lot to lose, and will keep fighting harder.
Thankfully, in America we have the freedom to work to help “mend our flaws”.
Comments
Post a Comment