Effect of Culture - Health Reform and The Sound of American Culture

My son, Spencer, a nationally known poet on the verge of becoming an Episcopalian priest, was recently quoted as saying of Seamus Heaney, the great Irish poet, who taught Spencer at Harvard and who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1995.

“Heaney said that poetry was the beat of the tribe – a sound that culture is making. I never forgot that. Poetry is the sound of the soul.”

The noise over government-centered health reform is the sound of American culture. Correctly or not, Americans believe in the sound of individualism, freedom of choice, limited government, access to high tech high touch care, equality of opportunity rather than equality of results.

Whether that culture has a soul is for others to decide.