Waiting to connect with a customer yesterday, I perched myself comfortably on the ledge of a stonewall in front of our agreed upon meeting place. It was late afternoon, sunny, quiet and serene and just an idyllic moment to relish some reflective time.
To my immediate left there was a bicycle stand with a lone adult sized man’s bike leaning upright at it. Not too long into my wait, the bike’s owner appeared, pulled the bike from the stand, and took off at a speedy clip.
The bike rider carefully held something up in mid air in his left hand. It was something I recognized intuitively, but which did not immediately register due to its seeming random, out of context appearance. And so I looked more carefully as the rider passed close by me and noted that he was indeed holding a clear plastic bag filled with a pint or so of water. And darting about inside that bag, inhabiting that clear water was a healthy looking, medium sized gold fish. The fish was bright orange in color and its odd appearance out of the blue took me back down memory lane. Off my thoughts went to fun fairs of my youth tossing a ping pong ball into rows of glass bowls each containing a gold fish unknowingly awaiting a new home.
“Do they even do the gold fish toss anymore?” I wondered to myself, thinking that some gold fish organization would have, by now, made it illegal to give gold fish such unregulated destiny.
But the gold fish going for a bicycle ride surely had no clue of what was in store in the moments ahead, let alone into the future. And it occurred to me that the gold fish did not know to be afraid or concerned or to even wonder about the path now taken. The fish did not know that his or her destiny was tied to the biker’s riding ability, the rush hour traffic and all those bumps soon to appear in the road.
And like the gold fish, we Americans are going for a ride with an untested driver, an uncharted path and a big dose of complacent blind faith to comfort us along the way.
I am troubled by the uneasy quiet that has settled in following the passage by Congress of the health care overhaul legislation.
Like the gold fish going for a risky ride, I feel we are off and running but that the populace is totally without knowledge or control or input.
And I have a hunch.
I cannot watch a half hour of television without receiving the following advise:
“Ask your doctor” “See your doctor”
“Consult with your doctor.”
Each piece of advice is a tag on for an advertisement for some kind of medication.
Because in today’s America, there is a pill for everything and a mind-set to match. Feeling sleepy, there’s a pill for that. Feeling down, or maybe frisky, or got an ache, there’s pills for all those things. There’s medication for just about every condition. For the young and for the old and for lifelong conditions, there is a pill.
And the ask the doctor, see the doctor, consult the doctor advice from the commercial – it’s not to examine lifestyle or to get some practical advice about stress or nutrition. And it’s not to get on an exercise program, or to chart out healthy lifestyle choices. There’s no time for that in America’s waiting room. The advice to see the doctor is to get the prescription to take the pill – the whatever-ails-you pill.
I fear the dirty little secret to health care is that we can’t afford it – and that truly we can’t come anywhere close to implementing or paying for the fix that’s been promised. And so the solution will be to embrace a mind set already in place – to see medication as the normal, easiest path to wellness.
Like the gold fish suspended in mid air going for a ride into the unknown, off we go. And the virtual silence after the dubious celebration of landmark legislation – it tells me something. Something is amiss.