March 26, 2018
The box on the front seat of my truck is loaded with medicines. Over the counter stuff like vitamins, Tylenol, decongestants, and even bandaids. These are things to which we usually give little thought because they are so readily available any time we need them. But for Cubans, the relief we so easily come by is often unavailable at any price. One year when we visited, we opened two suitcases filled with even prescription medications in the presence of a physician who simply sat down and wept at the sight of life-saving medications that were unavailable to him.
If I am to believe the news polls, our young adults are favorably viewing socialism in record numbers, apparently bewitched by its promises of equality and generosity. But as the UK’s former prime minister Margaret Thatcher once observed, socialism works just fine until you run out of other people’s money. Like every other country where it has been implemented, socialism impoverishes and enslaves its people. These same young adults who famously recite Santayana’s quote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” apparently haven’t done much more than remember the quote. They certainly haven’t studied the past.
Capitalism isn’t perfect. It hasn’t ushered in Utopia, but it has enabled more people to prosper than any other system. It will not produce the Kingdom of God, but no less than Jesus himself taught us to make friends with “unrighteous mammon,” (i.e. money), that it may serve higher purposes—not quite kingdom building, but close.
I do not write tonight to rant about economics or politics, but simply to state my gratitude for a political and economic system that has enabled me to take for granted such things as aspirin and vitamins. Many live and die without the benefit of stuff we don’t even think about. I’m thinking about it tonight, and am humbled.
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