The sky is falling! Or so it seems.
You remember Chicken Little, the clueless chicken who, struck by a falling acorn which she mistakes for a piece of the sky, bursts into hysterics, convincing every animal she meets along the way that doom is upon them. A sly fox, manipulating the animals’ panic to satiate his own appetite, demonstrates the folly and potential danger of jumping to conclusions.
Our nation’s congressmen and political correspondents must not have paid very good attention in their second grade Language Arts classes; the moralizing tale of Chicken Little seems to be lost on them. Case in point: the right would have us believe that we might as well punch in our tickets now—if the bad doctors that are to be the inevitable byproducts of socialized medicine don’t kill us, the taxes surely will.
On the other, equally frustrating hand, instead of inciting mass hysteria the left would prefer us to rejoice in the streets in utopian gratitude that salvation has finally come and every man, woman and child in America will be taken care of. With no access to clear and relevant information, I find myself mighty confused.
You see, for a democracy to even feign functionality, it requires an informed populace. But with mass panic being preached on cable news, on the radio and in our newspapers, it has become nearly impossible for us to sift fact from fiction. And the prospect of actually reading the health care reform bill, whose page number soars into the thousands, is even more distressing.
However, even if anyone had the patience to read through that massive piece of legislation, they would almost certainly be looking to answer only one question: How is this going to affect me? The Obama administration should acknowledge this need to satisfy our selfish curiosity by allowing us easy and straightforward access to the heart of this controversial legislation. In my opinion, it is time the White House got a bit more tech-savvy.
I propose that the executive branch launch an interactive Web site in which visitors can insert all of their personal statistics—age, income, medical history and current insurance information—to see exactly what changes will come their way in the next few years. It would take little time to create and it would allow concerned citizens to digest the goings-on of Capitol Hill and become better-informed voters.
Launching such a site in the wake of this controversy would be an interesting case study, hopefully paving the way for a move towards honesty and straightforwardness in the politics of the Digital Age. Such a drastic change for the better might be, however, too good to be true—something that will happen only as the sky begins to fall.
Rebecca Quinn is a junior art history, Spanish and French triple major. She can be reached for comment at [email protected].
