Manifest Destiny

In 1830, President Andrew Jackson passed the Indian Removal Act, and by 1831 the first of five Native American tribes was uprooted from its homeland in Georgia and forced to walk 1,000 miles to a barren territory we now call Oklahoma.  Most of them walked the entire distance without shoes or moccasins on their feet.  Around 15,000 began the journey, but almost a quarter of them died of disease, starvation or exposure along the way.

By 1837, 46,000 Native Americans had been similarly relocated by the U.S. government, making room for white settlers to own and farm the choicest land.

The nation founded on religious ideals justified this treatment of the Native Americans with two words:  Manifest Destiny.  Attributed by some historians to unbridled Calvinism, Manifest Destiny was the idea God had called His chosen people out of Europe, helped them cross the Atlantic Ocean, and mandated them to establish His chosen nation in North America.  White Americans could use any means necessary to settle this new land and claim it as theirs.  After all, they had been called by God to achieve this utopia.

Under the guise of Manifest Destiny, Native Americans were given blankets infested with small pox and forced to walk the Trail of Tears.  A few decades later,  European immigrants were housed in crowded tenements where tuberculosis was rampant.  Those who didn’t die of TB were forced to work in dangerous factories, where many of them lost their limbs or their lives.

Over the decades, Manifest Destiny has been watered down and repackaged into the ideal we now call “the American Dream”.  In his 1928 presidential election bid, Herbert Hoover promised a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage.  It was a new slogan touting an old ideal, one white Americans had held for more than a century.

In the 1960’s, we went a step further and entitled ourselves to the moon.

Judging by our current standard of living, God now owes white American Christians a chicken, a car, a job, a house, a spouse, 2.4 children, and – wait for it – health insurance.

In the recent discussions about health care, there has been a lot of debate over whether health care is a privilege or a right.  We forget that when you’re the wealthiest strata of society, these terms become interchangeable.  It doesn’t matter.  We get what we want either way.  And in the process of getting what we want, it becomes easy to resent the disenfranchised among us.

“We don’t give free rides,” we say.  “Those who would eat must work.”

We have an amazingly advanced health care system, cutting edge treatments, designer drugs, and some of the most highly trained clinicians in the world.  But one in five Americans doesn’t have the health insurance it takes to utilize these resources.  While we posture and debate and lobby, the uninsured population grows larger every day.

I’ll be the first to admit I don’t know how to fix this problem.  I don’t know if there should be more affordable privatized insurance or a government-sponsored health care plan.  I don’t know if health insurance should be mandatory or optional. I don’t know.

But I do know this:  the first step in helping our fellow man is not taking action; it’s changing our attitude.  It’s one thing to tout ideals like compassion and equality, to affirm the Golden Rule that tells us to love our neighbor as we love ourselves.  Putting these ideals in motion is an entirely different proposition.

I went into medicine because I wanted a tangible skill to use in helping people and alleviating their suffering.  However, at the end of a 12-hour shift when the drunk guy comes in because he shot his toe off, I do not feel compassion.  I feel resentment and exasperation.

I want to help patients in general, but not in specifics.  When I’m forced to live out my ideal — to treat someone who brought this on himself, to love someone who is unlovable — I fall very, very short.  In our Christian culture, we tote the parable of the Good Samaritan, even naming hospitals and non-profit organizations after this famed charitable citizen.

I think we like this story because we think we’re the Good Samaritan.  We imagine Jesus telling this parable to the religious leaders and we think, “Yeah!  Give it to ‘em, Jesus!” Or, as constituents at one national convention chanted, “Harder!  Harder!  Hit ‘em harder!”

What we fail to see is we are not the Good Samaritan.  Most American Christians are, in fact, the religious leaders in the story, who were just as guilty of stepping around their downtrodden brother as they would have been for stepping on him.

We don’t know from this parable where the religious leaders were rushing off to.   They probably had a good excuse for not stopping to pick the wounded man up off the ground.  Maybe they were off to deliver a sermon.  Maybe they were off to lobby the Jewish leadership to overhaul the health care system and provide more access to those beaten by robbers on roads.  Maybe they were off to a fundraising dinner, whose proceeds were set to be given away to a community clinic.

But no matter how good or bad their intentions, Jesus still condemned them for neglecting the one God had placed in their path.

The wounded God places in my path may be different from the one He places in yours.  I don’t know who God is calling you to help or how, but I can tell you this: if we fail to help a brother in need…if we resent him for needing a hand…if we look down on him for asking us to spare a dime…we become not only a part of the problem, but its deep, dark heart.

It’s easy for us to urge others to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

Except those most in need don’t have boots; they’re walking the trail in bare feet.