Ward on Words

Death panels. Rationing. Morality . This is what we talk about when we talk about health care reform. The conversation seems to have veered in a direction that takes us further away from reform and closer to chaos. The simple truth is that the health care system we have today is unsustainable. We cannot continue to afford steep increases in the cost of health care. If we focus our efforts on adding more people to a broken system, health care will bring us all to bankruptcy sooner, rather than later. As one who is self-insured, I've got a huge stake in the health care debate surging across the country right now. To me, the issue is not really an issue of morality, nor should it be reduced to a conversation about providing health care to the uninsured. It's about fixing a broken system that touches each and everyone of us at different points in our lives. Birth requires health care. For most of us, dying takes us into the health care system as well. And at nu...

When listening to NPR yesterday, I heard an interview with Callie Shell, Time's White House photographer, a story that included an interesting comment about Obama's changes to the Oval Office: "When presidents move into the White House, they often put their own mark on the space with photos on the wall and various personal knickknacks. Shell says that Obama hasn't done much to the Oval Office. 'To me, he appeared to go in the first day and just start working,' she says. 'He wants the room to look good and make people feel welcome. And I've heard him say that, 'This is the people's Oval Office.'" So the most powerful man in America made the decision when he took office at a moment of crisis to leave decorating decisions aside for the time being, choosing instead to focus his energy on developing solutions for the myriad problems the nation faces today. The Oval Office, says Callie Shel, remains essentially as it did when Bush was...

Martin Luther King, Jr. was 39 years old when he was gunned down in April of 1968. A young man with a young family. A preacher. A man of faith. An American citizen who was jailed for acting on his belief in the equality of all men. A forceful advocate for justice. A man who was murdered during the war on racism. Today is Martin Luther King Day, a day set aside to celebrate the life of a remarkable man. King was a man who cautioned against waiting for time to heal the wounds of slavery and racism. He knew that "time was neutral." He understood that the actions of people determined whether time was used constructively or destructively. And in his short time on this earth, King worked tirelessly toward his dream of freedom and equality. Today, we honor his legacy, his spirit, his dream. Tomorrow, we celebrate the time-honored American tradition of swearing in a new president. The peaceful transition of power from one leader to the next is a hallmark of our v...

Chicago. The City that Works. Urbs in Horto . City in a Garden. City of Broad Shoulders. A city with a complex relationship to race. A city that Martin Luther King, Jr. visited in 1966 in an attempt to bring the civil rights movement north. A city where, during that same visit, Dr. King was hit by a brick thrown by angry whites during a march through Marquette Park. "I've been in many demonstrations all across the South," said King after the march in Chicago. "But I can say that I have never seen – even in Mississippi and Alabama – mobs as hostile and hate-filled as I've seen in Chicago. I think the people from Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate." Last night, in a Chicago park that had been a key battlefield during the 1968 Democratic convention, an enormous crowd gathered to witness history. White people. Black people. People of all ethnicities came to Grant Park to see Barack Obama. They didn't come to hate....