Leaders are Made Not Born

My vision is that one day in America every child will have free health care. So that no child, based solely on social-economic class, should have to suffer. I have a plan to set out this vision. Through preventative medicine and community development, health care cam become a means to healthy living and a more harmonious society. Children don't need to attend schools without vaccinations, without proper dental and eye care, and having there parents free from the fear of illness.

I remember the Norman Rockwell paintings, the quartet, with the basic human rights. Freedom from Want, Freedom from Fear, Freedom to Worship, and the Freedom of Speech. Each picture showed different family scenes and I remember one most specifically. The Freedom from Fear, with a mother and a father looking at their sleeping children with a paper in the father's hands reading "Bombings" and "Horror." Pick up a paper today and see the headlines, "The Issue with the Health care System" and articles that begin "1 in 3 not insured." Put that article down, look at your children or your husband or your wife or you parents and reflect on what fear is. It doesn't have to be terrorist or war, but the fear ultimately of death. And what greater form of that fear of death than the slow pain of having to watch loved ones die, while the cure for the disease is ever readily at hand.

When my grandmother was a nurse for the Health Department in the 1960's, she often found herself in communities that were social-economically poor. The old grandmothers would sit on their porch and talk, and while they talked my grandmother took their blood pressure for free. She would find out about the pregnant women in the neighborhood and encourage the old women to send those girls to the health department. Soon, the girls would come and my grandmother begin to start community programs informing people of what the health department could give for free. She once went to a house of a woman with seven kids, and gave all of them the polio vaccine. The mother was hysterical with how her family was going to pay and my grandmother just politely smiled and replied, "Oh, but it's free." She would carry around cards for five ingredients meals, each one being something you could purchase on welfare. She improved and changed the lives of countless people, but she also taught an important lesson.

Skip ahead 45 years and I myself am learning about community development. What if we established programs that children could join a sports team for free? What if we could give talks in the homes of trusted citizens about prenatal care, nutrition, and personal care? What if kids wrote their own programs to talk about drugs and alcohol, and we didn't teach them they choose themselves? What if we had free diabetes testing, free STD testing, free clinics for acute diseases? I think these things are possible, and I think we can change the system. I'm just one person, but I have A Revolutionary Vision.