The Politics of Sensitivities : Critical Policy Issues Fester Under Fear of Offending

In a society as diverse as ours, virtually every major issue is bound to be viscerally important to one segment or another. Yet the natural human response to an issue that is emotionally important to someone else is simply to avoid it all together.

Thus we find ourselves with a Social Security/Medicare system that is paying enormous benefits to today’s elderly but will pay tomorrow’s only a fraction of what they have put into the system. We have a health-care system that sucks up $2,000 a year for every man, woman and child in the United States and still leaves 35 million Americans without access to adequate health care. We tolerate an alarming underclass to develop in our minority communities because we fear that raising the issue will brand us as racist. In foreign policy, our politicians shy away from offering a critical assessment of events in the Middle East so as not to bring anti-Semites or anti-Zionists out of the woodwork.

It is important to recognize that our sacred cows got their status for some very good reasons. Nevertheless, we cannot run a society if we remove such issues from the arena of public discourse. A problem ignored is a problem made worse.

Today’s elderly can remember a time when old age and poverty were virtually synonymous. Social Security has become a sacred cow for precisely that reason. Talk of limiting benefits immediately conjures in the minds of today’s retirees the images of hardships endured by previous generations of elderly. Never mind that poverty today is far more likely to be wearing a diaper than a hearing aid--the subject of Social Security is taboo.

But the fact that Social Security and other programs designed to help the elderly have, indeed, kept many elderly Americans out of poverty should not preclude debate on the issue. The increasing tax burden that Social Security places on today’s workers in many cases cuts into their ability to support their own families. Surely we can discuss whether generous benefits should be paid to wealthy retirees without undermining the system itself.

Another of the sacred cows dotting the political landscape is the issue of health care. It is not only taboo to ask whether it is wise to be spending $511 billion annually--11% of gross national product--on health care, it is also politically suspect to even state the facts. The unspeakable, though, is the fact that we do ration health care in the United States. But unlike some societies where rationing is based on a patient’s age or potential for recovery, we ration health care by ability to pay. Medicare rations in favor of seniority. While 35 million Americans are denied basic health coverage for lack of money, we spend countless billions to extend the lives--the suffering?--of terminally people by a few days or weeks.

Like programs designed to help the elderly, our inability to deal squarely with the health-care morass that we’ve created is based on some very admirable qualities. Understandably, our hearts compel us to use all available resources to treat the most seriously ill--even when our brains tell us that there is no reasonable hope for that individual’s recovery.

No matter how reverently we value human life, the miracles/curses of modern medical technology make a frank discussion of medical priorities a matter that we can no longer avoid. At $511 billion a year, this cow is no longer just grazing in the meadow, it threatens to consume all the cash crops on the farm.

Race and ethnicity has also become a sacred cow that nobody dares address forthrightly. The fear of rekindling, or relegitimizing, America’s dark history of racism and bigotry has made discussion of the deep racial divisions and persistent patterns of failure by some racial and ethnic groups a taboo subject. Important social issues such as drug addiction, teen-age pregnancy, the breakdown of the family, illiteracy, educational failure, crime and many other matters are rarely addressed honestly for fear that they will be seen as a subtle form of racial bigotry.

All sorts of buzz words must be employed to avoid stating the truth: America is a racially and ethnically divided country, and the nation’s failure to assimilate blacks and Latinos into the mainstream is the fault of both the society and those minority groups themselves.

We can no longer pretend that racial and ethnic equality will come about on its own. We now have 25 years of incontrovertible evidence that achieving racial and ethnic equality will require more than mere legislation to combat discrimination.

Why do Asians succeed in large numbers and Latinos fail in large numbers? Uncomfortable as it makes us feel to criticize other people’s cultures, there can be no doubt that the culture of the ghetto and the barrio has contributed to the failure of large numbers of blacks and Latinos to take their place in the American mainstream.

Israel is another sacred cow in American politics: Woe be unto the politician who does not give blind support to Israel and all of its policies--even if those policies are being hotly debated within Israel itself. Money from the Jewish community is a very significant source of political campaign funding. This is to their credit; they care enough to give and work for candidates of their choice while most of the rest of America sits back, doesn’t contribute and often doesn’t even vote. But Israel is the single largest recipient of American direct cash assistance, yet American politicians can’t debate how Israel is spending that money or following misguided policies. The litmus test is total support.

As a nation we must be mature enough to deal rationally with sensitive issues and sensitive enough to deal with the legitimate emotions they evoke in many people. We can’t go after sacred cows with an ax, but all except the most fanatic devotees of these sacred cows would agree that they need more honest discussion.