Brother

The family and I were heading out to meet friends at a pumpkin patch to enjoy a day of farm fun. It also coincided with my daughter's birthday, so the atmosphere was one filled with celebration, memories and a child's joy.
We stopped at a local convenience store to put some air in the car's tires and as I was snaking the compressor's air tube around the front of the car to tackle the second tire, I happened to look at the vehicle parked next to ours. The driver was slumped over in his seat, apparently unconscious. A cold chill settled over me as I studied the gentlemen. If you have small children, or remember when, I'm sure you can recall nights of sneaking in to a child's room to stare intently at their little bodies for the tell tale rising and falling of their chests that lets you know they are still breathing, and the relief that brings the irrational parent's brain. I found myself repeating this same scrutinization while looking at the man in his car, half a snack cake package resting in his limp hand. Rise, fall. Rise, fall. Still breathing. I rounded the front of his car and lightly knocked at his window. He slowly roused and opened his door sheepishly, already apologizing for his state saying that he hadn't slept the night before and was just trying to catch a few winks. I merely said to him that I was just making sure that he was okay and he proceeded to thank me, "Not many people would have cared enough to even check," he said and thanked me some more for my "kindness" while I stammered out my own apology for disturbing his repose.
My wife and I talked about it as we drove down the road; comparing notes, she had noticed him before I had. As I tried to tell her what he had said to me, I battled the lump in my throat that had formed from my heartbreak in the face of the fact of his surprise at my action. The fact that the only kindness he might experience that day would have been my paltry knock of concern.
The fact of the matter is, I wasn't battling tears just because a guy appreciated what I did on the spur of a moment. I was remembering some silly discussion I was having the night before on Facebook with a surgeon who was demanding that I prove to him that health care was a right. It was silly, but, also sobering. I was not a little dismayed that a life giver, a healer, had forgotten that, while he may be technically performing a service, he was not some cabinet maker dealing in a cold, inanimate medium. A surgeon is an artist, yes, as surely as the painters and musicians I know, but his canvas is the human body. He deals in life.
My feelings about the roiling debate surrounding healthcare spurred on by the current controversy that is the Affordable Care Act are centered around the idea that we need to change the paradigm about how we view our collective relationship with the social contract. The old judeo-christian question of "who is my brother?" haunts me.
What brought tears to my eyes this morning, was how little it takes to answer that question in everyday life(a simple knock on a car door to check on a fellow human) and how complicated we make answering that question as it telescopes out to the macro and to the abstract.
Who is my brother?
Who is my mine?
And what, in the end, do I owe him?