Andrew Koenig appears to have completed suicide in Vancouver. My condolences to his family and friends. My heart goes out to them.

A certified suicide prevention trainer, I’ve put suicide in the context of health care reform before. Commenters object, saying I use suicide to try to score a political point. I disagree. Going back to Kitty Dukakis and Betty Ford we have tried to raise awareness of mental health in order to have these issues taken seriously — and covered by health insurance — rather than treated as a personal failing.

Yesterday NPR characterized the Republican position on health care reform this way:

Republicans say health reforms should focus on lowering costs for people who already have insurance rather than expanding coverage to people who don’t. They want to do this with business incentives and competition, rather than government regulation of insurance companies.

Nothing I’ve read before or since — and I’ve read a lot — calls that characterization into question. The Republican “plan” unabashedly and primarily cares only about lowering costs for those who already have health insurance. It would expand coverage to 3 million people. Obama’s would extend it to 30 million. Estimates are that up to 50 million Americans are uninsured.

I honestly don’t know how that lack of concern for our fellow citizens reconciles with our Christian heritage. Especially troubling is the fact that it seems to be those who cling tightest to that Christian heritage who are least likely to support extending care to their countrymen.

David Weigel of the online magazine The Washington Independent recently covered both the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) meeting and National Tea Party Convention. He was on Fresh Air last week:

GROSS: So I think I hear you saying that people who were considered to be very fringey like Ron Paul, like Glenn Beck, are now representative of a more almost mainstream part of the conservative movement, that they’re more in the mainstream of the movement now and not on the far edges.

Mr. WEIGEL: They definitely are. After a really tough relationship of the past few years, Ron Paul fans were banned from a lot of top conservative sites. They were – again, he was banned from debates. But I think, and I talked to Paul about this, and he says, well, I have more -he said I have more credibility now. I have credibility on economics. I have been saying for a long time that if we didn’t abolish the Federal Reserve, get back to the gold standard and basically roll back most of the American social welfare, we would have an economic crash, and now we have one.

I mean, the irony there is that America before we introduced the Federal Reserve had economic crashes all the time. And before we got off the gold standard, we had more severe crashes than this one. This is a severe crash, but if you go back to the history of boom and bust in the 19th century, when – which all these people are trying to get back, it was so painful that that’s one reason conservatives didn’t talk about this stuff for a while.

He just happened to ride this wave, and after talking for 40 years about a crash, lived through one, and everyone who was around him, making fun of him, decided to embrace. And when I say everyone, I mean conservatives who didn’t really have much of an economic philosophy, apart from cutting taxes all the time will grow the economy all the time.

Obviously I agree with Weigel’s take on the conservative movement, but even if you don’t you have to agree that their agenda is all about rolling back programs. It only looks forward in so far as it wants to move us back to an idealized past.

In another of my posts, about the 15-Year-Old Set On Fire By Classmates, I stretched to make a connection that was not clear. I blamed the criminalization of our culture and the imprisonment of so many kids. It was my effort to make sense of a senseless act.

A regular commenter, Dr J, called me on it. Said he to me, “I find it helpful to keep historical perspective in mind. Violence has always been part of life, and society’s struggle against it is a huge success story:”

Social histories of the West provide evidence of numerous barbaric practices that became obsolete in the last five centuries, such as slavery, amputation, blinding, branding, flaying, disembowelment, burning at the stake, breaking on the wheel, and so on. Meanwhile, for another kind of violence—homicide—the data are abundant and striking. The criminologist Manuel Eisner has assembled hundreds of homicide estimates from Western European localities that kept records at some point between 1200 and the mid-1990s. In every country he analyzed, murder rates declined steeply—for example, from 24 homicides per 100,000 Englishmen in the fourteenth century to 0.6 per 100,000 by the early 1960s.

On the scale of decades, comprehensive data again paint a shockingly happy picture: Global violence has fallen steadily since the middle of the twentieth century. According to the Human Security Brief 2006, the number of battle deaths in interstate wars has declined from more than 65,000 per year in the 1950s to less than 2,000 per year in this decade. In Western Europe and the Americas, the second half of the century saw a steep decline in the number of wars, military coups, and deadly ethnic riots.

Zooming in by a further power of ten exposes yet another reduction. After the cold war, every part of the world saw a steep drop-off in state-based conflicts, and those that do occur are more likely to end in negotiated settlements rather than being fought to the bitter end. Meanwhile, according to political scientist Barbara Harff, between 1989 and 2005 the number of campaigns of mass killing of civilians decreased by 90 percent.

I take his point. And with that I want to keep moving forward. We are the last of the modern western nations to NOT offer our citizens health care. I find that barbarous.

The title of this post comes from a song by the late jazz great Billie Holiday. Listen to its lyrics, hear its meaning. That old pain is with us still:

Them that’s got shall get
Them that’s not shall lose
So the Bible said and it still is news
Mama may have, Papa may have
But God bless the child that’s got his own
That’s got his own…