Fair and Balanced

I was just reading an article in the latest time about Milt Romney, the governor of Massachusetts and his plan for mandatory health care for everyone in his state. While that seems like a good idea, one worthy of being a topic of this fine blog, something snatched that honor away quicker than Star Jones at a KFC.

In the article a word comes up that I’ve heard so many times in my life, coming from me or someone else. It’s the one word that supposedly sums up our justice system, our government, the way we treat each other. It’s a word that means something to me, another to you, but very rarely the same to everyone. That little word is: fair.

What’s so damn funny about the word fair? Either it is or it isn’t. It works in baseball like a charm, in politics not so well. Fox News uses it as if they know what it means, but then so do just about every five year old in the world. Do kids in Thailand stamp their feet and scream things aren’t fair like I did?

But it really is the most important word out there. To me more so as we continue to populate the planet and deplete it’s resources. It’s going to become increasingly more important that we are fair about how we split up what’s left of the oil, the land, the food and the sunshine. We are our brother’s keepers.

For me what’s missing is the sense of fair play. No body wants to take responsibility for themselves. No one wants to do that extra little thing that makes it better for everyone. What ever happened to working together? Now we pretend that Jesus would have wanted us to be mean, hateful and greedy. Wasn’t it Jesus who said, “Go get yours before he gets his”?

The sense of doing your share, of pulling your weight, of being fair, has slowly been disappearing from our culture. More of us are out to take what we want, help our family and friends, screw the other guy. Let him and his posse get there’n. It’s what the Lord would want. For those who don’t believer in evolution they sure subscribe to survival of the fittest.

I wonder what it would be like to live in a world where everyone took a second to think “Is that fair to everyone?” Asking themselves, is that really the right thing to do?