Posted: Friday, December 19, 2014 8:04 pm


by Ben Schwartz Editor, Lexington Clipper-Herald | 0 comments


This week I’d like to share a thought experiment from a Youtube video by a man named Steve Jacobs.
To be more precise, it’s a thought experiment Steve came across in the books “Moral Tribes” by Joshua Green and “The Life You Can Save” by Peter Singer.


Say you are sitting by the water at Plum Creek Park, watching the ducks. Suddenly you see a child drowning across the pond. You jump up and sprint over to help, but stop short when you remember that you are wearing a brand new $500 suit.


Question: is it morally okay to let the child drown to preserve your $500 suit? Well of course it isn’t.
That begs a follow-up question: since $500 would go a long way toward rescuing a child from starvation or dehydration in an extremely impoverished nation, is it morally okay to spend $500 on a suit instead of donating to an organization like Save the Children or Oxfam? As Steve said in his video, “To judge our society based on its actions, the answer is, ‘Yep.’”


I’m not here to try to criticize consumerism, believe me. The small mountain of Christmas presents stashed in our closet testifies that I’m as enthusiastic about buying stuff as anyone. What I really think is interesting is that we make the determination that one child’s life that must be saved at any cost to ourselves (the drowning child) while another child’s life can be more easily dismissed (the child about to expire for lack of a few dollars worth of food and water in a faraway land).


Helping those we can see and ignoring those we can’t was easy for much of human history. However, the world ain’t quite as big as it used to be and I wonder how much longer we will still think in those terms.
What’s most disappointing is that sometimes the child is right in front of us but we still manage to somehow classify them as “the Other.”


And that, dear friends, is what I am likely to most remember about departing governor Dave Heineman’s decade-long run in office.


Exactly how much credit Heineman deserves for the good stuff and how much blame he deserves for the bad stuff will have to be determined by people more knowledgeable than myself, but what sticks with me most is Heineman’s opposition to giving illegal immigrants access to state-funded prenatal care in 2012. As you may remember, the Unicameral passed the law, Heineman vetoed it, the Unicameral overrode the veto, and Heineman publicly pouted about it.


It struck me as a pretty grotesque example of putting political “principle” before basic human decency.
I’ll admit that it’s not possible for me to be objective on this particular topic.


On May 6, 2011, the staff at the OBGYN clinic in North Platte detected that my wife Amanda’s hypertension was putting severe pressure on her placenta. We were ordered to immediately drive to St. Elizabeth Hospital in Lincoln and at about 11:30 p.m. our son Archer was born via emergency c-section. He was 12 weeks premature. One pound, six ounces. He stayed in the neonatal intensive care ward for four months and was on oxygen for the first year of his life. Yet he survived, and today he’s enrolled at the Early Learning Academy here in Lexington and is doing great.


At the time Amanda got pregnant, both of us were working full time but for very low wages. We didn’t have any insurance, so Amanda got on Medicaid.


It’s very simple: without access to government-funded prenatal care, Archer would not have survived that weekend. He wouldn’t be learning how to write his name, he wouldn’t be insisting on wearing his favorite Batman pajamas every night, he wouldn’t be so excited about Santa coming that he talks about it constantly. He wouldn’t be with us, and the hole that would have left in our lives isn’t something I even want to imagine.


What Heineman said at the time was, "Most Nebraskans and I agree, we support prenatal care, but in the case of illegal immigrants, it should be done by churches, private organizations, charities, private individuals — not the use of taxpayer funds.”


So who does Heineman think deserves taxpayer dollars? Based on his beloved “Nebraska Advantage Act,” it’s Monsanto, Tyson, BNSF Railroad (disclosure: BNSF is owned by Berkshire Hathway, which also owns the Clipper-Herald), TD Ameritrade, Verizon, and other corporate giants. A 2012 report from Nebraska Watchdog indicated that from then until 2024 those corporations are set to receive over $500 million in tax breaks in exchange for “job creation.”


It has to be that Heineman and others who don’t think human beings deserve taxpayer assistance but support giving hundreds of millions of dollars in handouts to corporations simply haven’t given it much thought. I hope that’s what it is, anyway, because the only alternative is that they looked right at a drowning child, and decided to keep their suits dry to make a political point.


That’s an ugly thought, and it is what will linger for me as Heineman says goodbye to the governor’s mansion. However, decency, reason, and compassion trumped politics in 2012, and I trust Nebraskans to carry that forward into the future.

http://lexch.com/news/columns/politi...d5a7ca1bc.html