Like stuck in traffic

The Oscar-winner "Crash" begins with this quote from Don Cheadle's character, setting up the tone and message of this metaphor-movie about racism, prejudice, and solipsism in crowded places: "It's the sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We're always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something."

I find metaphors about cars and traffic particularly illustrative of American society. As we all know, Americans love their cars, and road rage, wasted fuel, rising insurance costs, expensive gas, maddening traffic, melting ice caps, and billions of dollars in bailouts will not change that. Invariably, the Americans I meet have sharper and more coherent opinions about the 14-billion-dollar rescue package to keep Detroit afloat than about the more than one trillion dollars haphazardly dispensed to save the banking and mortgage industry. We might not know our ABCs, but we know our cars.

I have always found that driving a car and trying to navigate traffic brings the worst in us. It's a very antisocial behavior. Behind the wheel, we are always the good guy, and everyone else is a suspect, a faulty driver, and you can only rely on yourself. Driving would be a pleasant activity if it wasn't for all those terrible drivers out there (which I have yet to meet - I have met self-defined "aggressive" drivers, but never self-defined "bad" drivers). We all consider ourselves relatively good, play-by-the-rules drivers, and when we cut someone off or merge too late, we consider it an exception that we can allow ourselves for all those times that we were the victim of such infraction. And, protected by all the metal and glass, we can yell, and feel aggravated, and say all the impolite things that we don't say in the subway when we're standing shoulder-to-shoulder with annoying strangers.

Too many of us see the world as if we were always driving a car, always behind the wheel. As if we were always virtuous and good citizens, and a few maladjusted, misbehaving party-poopers were ruining it for everyone. Around us, people morph easily into welfare queens, cheaters, and system-abusers. It is hard to conceptualize the intricacies of capitalism, or the hydraulics of our imperfect government, or the lobbying tentacles of Big Pharma, but it is easy to remember that person in front of you at an overcrowded emergency room. Mike Huckabee, a presidential contender in this past cycle and a likely candidate in 2012, just published a new book, "Do The Right Thing," in which he essentially concludes that in order to get government off our backs we just need to be better people. We don't have a health care crisis in America, he would say. We have a health crisis. No need to fight over single-payer universal health care or the other patchy, piecemeal approaches in the menu if we just start eating right, and taking care of ourselves, and exercising daily. I hear this often in my classes, and I call it the New Year's resolution approach to government. Frankly, I think James Madison put it much more eloquently when he said "if men were angels..."

Most people remember Obama's 2004 DNC speech by his "there's not a red America, and a blue America, there's the United States of America" line, but my personal favorite is when he laid out the basic creed of progressivism: "If there's a child on the South Side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me, even if it's not my child. If there is a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for their prescription drugs, and having to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it's not my grandparent. If there's an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties." And although he often appeals to our sense of personal responsibility -especially in front of African-American audiences, to Reverend Jackson's chagrin- his most important trait to me is his fine sense of empathy, and the belief that we have a crisis of empathy in America.

It feels strange to speak ill of American individualism and selfishness only a few weeks after record-breaking Americans elected this man to the highest office, but I fear that he convinced lots of people less empathetic than he is into voting for him, and very soon we will have to have our seventh national conversation about universal health care since World War One. Maybe it is true that 2008 is not 1993, but Princeton University's Uwe Reinhardt, America's leading expert on health-care economics, is not so optimistic. Why? There is no social solidarity in America. Maybe it's just one of those days, but I happen to agree.