a personal experience to open my eyes

In class the other day, I think we can safely say we were pretty hard on Marx. By the end of class Dr.J had one thing left to say: “Just be a little more open minded, Please don’t underestimate your ability to make the world a better place.” I don’t know about anyone else, but this really hit home with me. I think like many people I am adverse to Marx on the front end, but the things that we discussed in class, and some things that I have talked with Dr.J about outside of class made me see Marx, and communism for that matter, in a different light.

Now I think like some people in our class I am pretty adverse to the ideas of communism, and the way it is affecting America these days. With all the stuff we see in the media talking about nationalized health care, and more socialist/ communist principles leaking their way into our way of life it is hard to ignore communism anymore. Most recently I have been wary of socialized medicine entering into our society. However, something that happened to me this week made me think twice about my stance on the issue.

On Tuesday I talked to my mom. We went through the usual stuff about how everyone was, and how everyone at home was doing. Then after talking for about thirty minutes she told me something very disconcerting. In short, what she told me was that for the past two and a half weeks, my family did not have health insurance. I was shocked of course, and asked her if it was back on now, she said it was. But, then I started thinking about the range of things that could have happened in thoughts to weeks, and how not having health care could have ruined my bright (Rhodes) future.

I started thinking about the fact that if during those two weeks, me or any member of my family had had lets say… a car wreck, nothing life threatening, or even too serious, and for them to be back safe at home would have cost a low medical bill of say $50,000. Now I don’t know about most people out there but my family just doesn’t have 50,000 dollars lying around to pay sudden medical bills with. I would no longer have had the money to stay in school I would have had to drop out get a job at the nearest wal-mart or burger joint, just to put food on the table, and hopefully if im really lucky my parents would get to keep their house. It suddenly made the issue of national health care very real to me, and now I don’t know how I feel about it. But, Dr.J will be glad to know that it did open my eyes just a little bit more.