MAY 28, 2025 – (Cont.) ME ONE: Moving on from the basics—clean air and water, decent nutrition and affordable housing . . . I’d say what are most important for our well-being are universally affordable, accessible and effective public health and public education systems.
ME TOO: I couldn’t agree with you more. Public health should be obvious. In the first place, who doesn’t want to be healthy? In the second place, when it comes to communicable diseases and epidemics, viruses and bacteria don’t observe many of the barriers we erect for ourselves. Measles, for example, doesn’t distinguish between believers of one religion and adherents of another; between Democrats and Republicans. The virus knows and cares only whether a person is vaccinated or unvaccinated, and the scourge runs out of fuel only when a super-majority of people are vaccinated. Achieving the requisite vaccination rate is inescapably a matter of public health.
Likewise, education of the individual improves the prospects for the collective. Conversely, ignorance on the part of the individual weighs down the progress of the group. Moreover, if we agree that democratic rule is preferable to autocracy, democracy can’t function optimally without a well-educated society.
The challenge of course, if devising public education and a public health system that deliver the best possible results. Both constructs require value judgments and myriad choices and compromises to achieve established objectives. But who and by what means are those objectives defined?
ME ONE: Yes, especially in a pluralistic society such as ours with mind-numbing disparities of all kinds—economic, cultural, geographic, political. Moreover, don’t forget that we’re not starting at square one here. We’re entering the crowded, pitted, unruly, cacophonous eight-lane expressway at mile 417 (from founding of Jamestown)—or is it mile 533 (from the First Voyage of Discovery by Columbus)?
ME TWO: Now you’ve plunged into the deep end of the political pool.
ME ONE: Yes, you’re right. Let’s swim to the ladder and huddle back on the deck.
ME TWO: Good choice. But at least we’ve identified a couple of what should be universally desirable societal priorities—good health and strong education.
ME ONE: Everything in society, of course, is interconnected. To support strong public health and public education requires resources, and resources are generated and sustained by an economy—the production and exchange of goods and services.
ME TOO: Can I toss science and scientific research in there?
ME ONE: Absolutely—especially in the case of public health.
ME TOO: I’d add the obvious that scientia—knowledge—is just as critical to high quality public education.
ME ONE: Bingo. But again, you need resources, and to gin up the resources, you need an economy; the better the economy, the more resources at your disposal.
ME TOO: Agreed. But here we go—you can’t discuss the economy without going political pretty much out of the gate.
ME ONE: How do you mean?
ME TOO: The kind of economy you’ll have to live with depends on the political system you adopt.
ME ONE: Oh boy, now you’ve done it.
ME TOO: What do you mean?
ME ONE: Are you kidding me? Now we’re talking weeds and swamp.
ME TOO: It didn’t take long, did it? Now all that’s left is religion.
ME ONE: And the threat of thermonuclear war.
ME TOO: But all kidding aside . . . it seems to me that concurrently with identifying society’s needs and wants, we need to devise a means of marshaling resources in order to satisfy those needs and wants, and the method by which that’s accomplished—whether by the magic hand of the market or by a deliberate, intentional process—depends on what conditions are imposed or allowed to develop.
ME ONE: So far we’ve focused on material needs and wants, but what about the intangible ones—freedom of choice, freedom of movement, freedom of speech, freedom to innovate, freedom to grow, freedom to live big . . . or not big, freedom to do as you damn please?
ME TOO: The freedom to be stupid, freedom to squander, freedom to distort, freedom to pollute, freedom to steal, freedom to oppress?
ME ONE: By implication you raise a good point. I think the hallmark of America, as it turns out, isn’t freedom or, for that matter, liberty, or equality. It’s disparity. That’s certainly the principal theme of our history.
ME TOO: Yes, as in disparity between white men with the guns, germs and steel vs. the indigenous people without firearms, without immunity, without hard metal; between owners and the owned; between rich and poor; between those with ambition and those without; between those with advantages and opportunities and those with none of either. Fast forward in the culture of disparity and eventually you reach the discord and distortions that limit our national prospects.
ME ONE: So maybe intertwined with our mission here should be a study of disparity—and how in critical contexts disparities can be reduced or eradicated, which inevitably takes us round to economics and politics . . . z-z-z-z-z-z.
ME TOO: Uh oh!
ME ONE: Say what?
ME TOO: You’re falling asleep. In fact, you fell asleep.
ME ONE: Sorry. Maybe we’ve reached a juncture in the conversation where we need to . . . sleep on it.
ME TOO: Good idea. (Cont.)
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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson
