We have to make room for others

We are pushed and pulled out as irritable little balls of humanity, wailing that our warm, watery life has abruptly emptied us into harsh fluorescent light and lower air temperature. Things are being inserted into our mouths to suction out amniotic fluid, medicine is squirted into our eyes, and, if we are boys, there is a special treat for us. We arrive in what they call the fetal position. The fetus in the womb is curled up for the sake of space. We start the lifelong process of stretching out of that self-protective posture, resisting all the way.

As we grow, we have our parents help us with this new requirement of relocating ourselves away from the center of the universe. All the doting attention and the delightful milk can fool us into thinking it is all about us. The business of sharing our toys with siblings does not go down well. Let them get their own stuff. Symptoms of paranoia in later life reflect this infantile self-absorption: systematized delusions of persecution and of one’s own grandeur. This afflicted person imagines that any negative experience is actually other people ganging up on them.
Others are responsible for whatever goes wrong in life.

Someone has to say to them, “What makes you think we have nothing to do all day but sit around and plot against you? It’s not all about you.” Sometimes the logic is a revelation for the sufferer.
This is how a psychiatrist might look at human development and the serious disorder of paranoia. It takes professional care and therapy to free up the victim. This care cannot be substituted by the Christian attitude of other-centeredness. But such a worldview is the goal of parental attention to the child. Have him or her become a healthy member of society. And society means all the other people. Overcome infantile selfishness. Give a hoot about one’s neighbors. Don’t confine the word “neighbor” just to people like me, with the same color skin or origins or beliefs or culture or language or sexual orientation. God seems to want a big variety of people, so who are we to object?

For society to work with different kinds of people trying to live together, there has to be government, which can be seen, if we adults are careful, as an extension of parenthood. That is, we have to make room for others, sharing the space and the resources God meant for us all. He did not mean these just for white or male or American or straight people. While we don’t want a nanny government, an excessive, suffocating force intruding in our lives with unnecessary bother, we have to admit we need some kind of organization for the common good. This costs tax money, so we have a real incentive to keep it minimal. In fact, we need to retire obsolete laws to simplify life. There are still speed-limit requirements on the books dating back to when cars competed with horses a century ago, fixing a maximum of 10 miles per hour at city corners. Police and courts do not enforce these.

The great temptation is to dump laws and whole institutions that do not benefit me. In a culture of selfishness, this means jeopardizing life for those of less means. If I do not need WIC (Women, Infants and Children nutrition assistance from the state) because I am a bachelor, my inclination is to call for ending this because I have to pay for it. But let a Hurricane Sandy roar through the area and yesterday’s libertarian becomes today’s progressive liberal, calling – shouting – for Big Government to rescue me and my beachfront mansion, seeing no inconsistency. Whole institutions of commerce, such as insurance, will collapse if people become too selfish. In the Great Depression, President Roosevelt braved the harsh charges of socialism by taking tax money and redistributing it to the poor with agencies like the WPA, CCC and many others.

When critics of universal health insurance charge that this will be socialism, they are faithful to their forebears who argued the same thing about Social Security, an attempt to provide a minimal sustenance for seniors. This has been eminently successful. Universal health insurance is enjoyed by nearly every other industrialized nation now for many decades. If the Hyde Amendment continues to see to it that government does not pay for any abortion, we should be in good stead, consistent with Catholic social doctrine of the last century.