Politics, for many years now, has been in my blood. It’s been said to me that, once it gets into your system, there’s no antidote. Well, I’m still waiting for evidence to prove that wrong. There are, for sure, some parts of politics and government that intrigue me much more than others –meeting people during a campaign more than the fund-raising needed to run it, the intense belief you can hold about the justice of a particular idea more than the criticism you might get for it – but all of these make politics what it is: a valuable chance to make a difference in people’s lives, though this chance comes with its bumps and bruises.
Now, it’s probably of no surprise to anyone that the issues of health care in general and stem cell research, in specific, are particularly important to me. Where the private sector of society comes up short in these issues – and I think there are many instances where this happens – I think government can and should step in. This means government providing universal health-care. This means government controlling costs for prescription drugs. This means federal funding for stem cell research. These are things that the government should be striving to do – they are too important not to.(More on these to come...)
My passion for these issues doesn’t lie in my personal connection to them, though I do certainly have one, but because they are the right thing to do. When we aren’t investing in those who need protection and care the most, then we should reevaluate our priorities. Things come with price-tags, but the U.S. government has the pockets. “We just can’t”, or “not now”, or “we’ll see” shouldn’t be used as euphemisms for what we are choosing not to do.
I have believed in and fought for this for quite some time, and will continue to do that. All of these might not happen immediately and all at once, but progress graphed in a stepwise function always beats out the horizontal line.
