Where are we? What are we living through? Where are we being taken? What have we lost? How to continue without a plausible vision of the future?
– John Berger

The volume of the national health care debate is rising. The tone is sounding accusatory. Old polarities are starting to peak through the veneer of common ground. The speed with which the media dispatches every nuance, and every superficiality – and explains nothing — is mind numbing. The collective din is making it more and more difficult for thoughtful voices to be heard. Presidential candidates are beginning to harden their positions on health care.

We are praising the messengers like Michael Moore (SiCKO) without examining the message. The debate, in truth, has become a media commodity itself, with people seeing, and reacting, but not really responding. The public is losing comprehension about what is being proposed. Private vocabularies, technical jargon, and obscure argumentation dominate the terms of the discourse.

Commercialism has insinuated itself so deeply in the debate, private interests and public interests are blurred and indistinguishable. Conversely and incredibly ironic, good ideas labeled and pigeonholed as those of special interests lie like discarded jewelry in a pawn shop. It may be that we don’t even know a good idea when we see it, dressed up as they often are in health care reform’s iconoclastic verbiage.

When we are fed up and turned off, we collectively fall into a rhetoric of victimization, evil doers and secret agendas – right against left, corporate against community, global against local – whatever that may mean in the world of increasing political surrealism. And it gets us absolutely nowhere.

So let’s slow down a little. The pressure is on, but much is to be gained by taking our time. Consensus needs comprehension. Comprehension needs time: quality time with the proposals at hand. New media can help. Some health care bloggers, for example, could be more deliberative (see my Seven Tasks Manifesto for Health Care Bloggers) others, more accessible in their arguments.

Let’s find what sticks.