The Mercy Deficit in the USA

There’s a great post by Charlie Stross on his blog today, link­ing the cur­rent noise in the USA about health­care reform and also the release of Abdel­ba­set Al Megrahi from prison in Scotland:

Even if Al Megrahi is a mass-murderer, the fact remains that he is dying. It is long-standing policy in Scot­land to exer­cise the prerog­at­ive of mercy when pos­sible; in gen­eral, if an imprisoned crim­inal is ter­min­ally ill, a request for release (for hos­pice care, basic­ally) is usu­ally gran­ted unless they are believed to be a danger to the public.

That’s because the justice sys­tem isn’t solely about pun­ish­ment. It’s about respect for the greater good of soci­ety, which is bet­ter served by rehab­il­it­a­tion and recon­cil­li­ation than by revenge. We do not make ourselves bet­ter people by exer­cising a grue­some revenge on the bod­ies of our van­quished foes. Kenny MacAskill, the Justice Min­is­ter, did exactly the right thing in send­ing Al Megrahi home to die.

I’ve been watch­ing the war of words with increas­ing dis­be­lief for the past month, try­ing to get my head around the reason why so many loud, vocal cit­izens seem to be so adam­antly opposed to some­thing that’s in their own best interests — the US health­care sys­tem is utterly dys­func­tional, even for those with health insur­ance costs are spiral­ing out of con­trol, and the cur­rent sys­tem is becom­ing a major drag on eco­nomic pro­ductiv­ity — many busi­ness start-ups abort because the founders can’t obtain health­care, many nov­el­ists of my acquaint­ance are in ser­i­ous fin­an­cial trouble or are ter­ri­fied of giv­ing up the day job (that comes with insur­ance), and so on. The cur­rent mess is respons­ible for 22,000 avoid­able deaths per year — a 9/11 scale cata­strophe every six weeks.

The sub­jects vary — crime and penal policy, health­care, don’t get me star­ted on for­eign policy — but there is an ideo­lo­gical approach in Amer­ica that is dis­tin­guished by one com­mon char­ac­ter­istic: words and deeds utterly lack­ing in the qual­ity of mercy.

This is very true amongst the sub­urb­an­ised middle class of Amer­ica. It’s worse than just a lack of mercy — it’s an ingrained con­ser­vat­ive selfish­ness — all I care about is that I get what I believe I deserve.

Unfor­tu­nately, I’m hear­ing this a lot again from people here who don’t remem­ber the Thatcher years. Listen­ing to a party in the garden two doors up from me last night, there was expres­sions of exactly the same selfish­ness. Expect the four to twelve years after the next elec­tion to be fright­en­ing, people.