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In Chapter II of Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll Alice is talking with the Red Queen:

‘It’s a great huge game of chess that’s being played—all over the world—if this IS the world at all, you know. Oh, what fun it is! How I WISH I was one of them! I wouldn’t mind being a Pawn, if only I might join—though of course I should LIKE to be a Queen, best.’

She glanced rather shyly at the real Queen as she said this, but her companion only smiled pleasantly, and said, ‘That’s easily managed. You can be the White Queen’s Pawn, if you like, as Lily’s too young to play; and you’re in the Second Square to begin with: when you get to the Eighth Square you’ll be a Queen—’ Just at this moment, somehow or other, they began to run.

Alice never could quite make out, in thinking it over afterwards, how it was that they began: all she remembers is, that they were running hand in hand, and the Queen went so fast that it was all she could do to keep up with her: and still the Queen kept crying ‘Faster! Faster!’ but Alice felt she COULD NOT go faster, though she had not breath left to say so.

The most curious part of the thing was, that the trees and the other things round them never changed their places at all: however fast they went, they never seemed to pass anything. ‘I wonder if all the things move along with us?’ thought poor puzzled Alice. And the Queen seemed to guess her thoughts, for she cried, ‘Faster! Don’t try to talk!’

Not that Alice had any idea of doing THAT. She felt as if she would never be able to talk again, she was getting so much out of breath: and still the Queen cried ‘Faster! Faster!’ and dragged her along. ‘Are we nearly there?’ Alice managed to pant out at last.

‘Nearly there!’ the Queen repeated. ‘Why, we passed it ten minutes ago! Faster!’ And they ran on for a time in silence, with the wind whistling in Alice’s ears, and almost blowing her hair off her head, she fancied.

‘Now! Now!’ cried the Queen. ‘Faster! Faster!’ And they went so fast that at last they seemed to skim through the air, hardly touching the ground with their feet, till suddenly, just as Alice was getting quite exhausted, they stopped, and she found herself sitting on the ground, breathless and giddy.

The Queen propped her up against a tree, and said kindly, ‘You may rest a little now.’

Alice looked round her in great surprise. ‘Why, I do believe we’ve been under this tree the whole time! Everything’s just as it was!’

‘Of course it is,’ said the Queen, ‘what would you have it?’

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Alice says that in her country you get somewhere by running very fast. And the Red Queen replies that in Looking Glass land it takes all the running you can do to stay in the same place, and if you want to get somewhere else, you have to run at least twice as fast.

Looking Glass land is, of course, Washington D.C. For the President, Senators, and Congressmen, while running all the time are staying in the same place.

This week the three will be running together grasping an Alice-like or reasonable idea that together they might reach the goal of reforming our present system, really a non system, a hodgepodge, of providing for the nation’s health-care and health insurance needs. Nobody believes they will.

But the real lesson of the Red Queen is something else. The lesson is that just to stay where we are, and not lose ground, let alone move ahead, we have to be running all the time. A kind of running in place as those joggers who wait interminably for a hole to open up in the early morning traffic before dashing across the street, to get where? Well, to the other side.

Things in Washington are also much like the situation described by the Sicilian Prince Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa in his novel, Il Gattopardo: “If we want everything to stay the same, everything must change.” Again, a kind of running in place just to be able to stay where we are.

The line from Il Gattopardo could mean two things. One, that things will not stay the same if we do nothing, and that things could even get worse.

And, two, even if and when we do make changes, as, for example, the endless series of reforms that we have made and are still making to our health and education infrastructures, the result will be more of what we had before the changes, the same, and not visibly worse for the changes or reforms.

Should we abandon reforms altogether? Running with them while staying in the same place is clearly failure. Perhaps as the Red Queen suggests, if we were to run twice as fast? But who knows what she meant by that. Not Alice, seated propped up against a tree and clearly at the end of her rope.

We might look to the Red Queen for a slightly different principle, and it might be this: For any evolutionary system, in this case our system of providing health care through insurers, doctors, nurses, hospitals, health clinics etc. we might look less at the parts of the system and more to what we might do in order to maintain the fitness of the parts of this one system relative to the systems it is co-evolving with. For everything is evolving, and evolving along with everything else.

The principle? Well we may be running as Alice and the Red Queen, and at the end of the run be still in the same place. But things about us will have changed, and we along with them. Evolution is making sure of that.

This means that we ought no longer to look at our health care system in isolation from everything else, no more than we ought to look at our country and its problems in separation from the world. Health care exists in the context of a changing world, is a part of those changes, has problems stemming from those changes, and is only exacerbated by our refusal to adapt to those changes.

That might be what the Red Queen meant by running twice as fast. Real improvement in our  health care, educational, and other systems will only come about as we treat all of them as evolving parts of a rapidly evolving world.

In his Times piece yesterday, February 13, Charles Blow points out that the President’s language  (the President’s thinking?) has not changed much between press conferences, that of 2/9/2009 (his first) and that of just one year later, 2/9/2010 (his last).

On February 9, one year ago, the President said: “I am the eternal optimist. I think that over time people respond to — to civility and rational argument.”

And that on February 9 of this year he said much the same thing: “I am just an eternal optimist…. And all I can do is just to keep on making the argument about what’s right for the country and assume that over time people, regardless of party, regardless of their particular political positions, are going to gravitate towards the truth.”

Blow concludes from these two statements that the President hasn’t changed during his first year in office, that he still naively believes that people, and in particular members of Congress, can be changed by reasonable argument. Of course this is not how things work and as a result the President has accomplished little or nothing in respect to the country’s real problems.

Get tough, Mr. President, Blow seems to be saying. Crack some heads. Stop being Mr. Nice Guy.

I read the same two texts and come to quite different conclusions. In my opinion the President is not, in spite of his statements to the contrary, telling us the truth about the country’s problems. Is he covering them up? Probably not. But he is, at least in public, not facing up to them, that which he would be the first to admit that he has to do if he would find solutions.

For example, two spending areas, one discretionary and one mandatory, are consuming larger and larger portions of our tax dollars. The one is defense, in this year’s budget some 663 billion, well over half of the total discretionary budget, and nearly 13% up from a year earlier.

The other is entitlements, social security, medicare, and medicaid, together accounting for two thirds of all the mandatory spending budget. In particular Medicare at $453 billion is up nearly 7% from a year ago and Medicaid at $290 billion is up 12%. The CPI rose only 2.7% for the year, and most of that was because of higher energy  prices.

These are facts and the President is not addressing them. It’s ironic in that Obama himself, in his recent press conference tells a story about Senator Moynihan. Moynihan was in an argument with a Senate colleague who, getting flustered with Moynihan said to him, “Well, I’m entitled to my own opinion.” And Senator Moynihan replying, “Well, you’re entitled to your own opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own facts.”

Well while listening to the press conferences on u-Tube I was asking myself if the President was confronting the “facts,” or was he only interested in his own facts. He is certainly implying, and he is most likely mistaken about this, that his facts are ones that we might all agree on and that we should have them in mind when we set about trying to solve the country’s problems.

As a country we haven’t yet agreed to the so called facts about anything at all, not even the meaning of the First Amendment to the Constitution. Be it Guantanamo, global warming, bank regulation, surges in Irak and Afghanistan, let alone the perennial favorites, education and health care, we’re not, although citizens of one and the same country, looking at the same facts.

What facts did the President have in mind when he was ready to go along with the Senate Health Care bill? Well among others, there were such as these: One in Ten Americans are without health insurance. Preexisting medical conditions prevent some from obtaining reasonably priced health insurance. And many, who lose their jobs, also lose the health insurance that went along with the job.

And it’s true that the Senate bill would address these facts, do something about these unsatisfactory conditions, but what about other facts, the fact, for example, that public and private health expenditures are consuming a larger and larger portion of the country’s gross national product, over 16% in 2008.

The US Department of Health and Human Services makes the following projection: “Over the projection period (2009-2019), average annual health spending growth (6.1 percent) is anticipated to outpace average annual growth in the overall economy (4.4 percent). By 2019, national health spending is expected to reach $4.5 trillion and comprise 19.3 percent of GDP.”

This fact alone should call for a complete retooling of how we provide health insurance and health care in the country. The present arrangements are no longer viable. The country cannot become primarily about health care, when one of every five dollars earned, perhaps one of every four in the near future, goes to the health industry. There are too many other things, now neglected, that the country should also be about.

Other facts in regard to health care that the President is not directly confronting. People are living longer and longer, entering into that period of life when health care and health insurance are most in demand, that which results in increased insurance costs for everyone, especially for those who are still working and can pay.

In addition, the care itself is becoming more and more expensive, especially during that period of old age when there are more people living longer. The care is more expensive, much more expensive because of new treatments, miracle drugs, wonder machines fueled by wonder technologies, improved hospital and surgical procedures, and other such, all now available, but at a greater and greater cost, one we cannot afford to pay.

These facts are all well known. But no one is confronting them. Not the President, not the Congress, not the private insurers, no one. Why? Because these facts are a political third rail. He who would take away available treatment because of an inability to meet the cost, he who would balance the budget over health care, well that person or persons will not be returned to Washington. And those in Washington know that. Is the President no different?

The old, we’re told, will remain young by caring for the young, by caring about the young. Show me a real old man or woman, someone who looks and acts old, and I’ll show you someone who is probably no longer close to children.

Children are not only ours and the country’s future, but in the present they are our sanity, contributing mightily to our well-being. In spite of the really difficult work involved in bringing up children there are very few who ever choose not to do this work. And there are very few grandparents who do not pitch in and help with this work, seeming to understand that this is to their own benefit no less than that of their children.

Who would defend the old if the inevitable selfishness of old age, the selfishness arising from long years of living for oneself and one’s survival, were not attenuated by the presence of the young, by what is the transforming and life giving presence of one’s children and grandchildren?

In the words of David Brooks, “One of the keys to healthy aging is what George Vaillant of Harvard calls “generativity” — providing for future generations. Seniors who perform service for the young have more positive lives and better marriages than those who don’t. As Vaillant writes in his book “Aging Well,” “Biology flows downhill.” We are naturally inclined to serve those who come after and thrive when performing that role.”

Now enter into the old/young equation the Federal government. Not only do our leaders in Washington seem not to have read Vaillant, but they are, by their redistributive policies heavily skewed in favor of the old, turning Vaillant’s conclusions on their head.

“Far from serving the young, as Brooks tells us, “the old are now, [by the number and extent of the Federal programs directed to their benefit] taking from them. First, they are taking money…. the federal government now spends $7 on the elderly for each $1 it spends on children.”

Then they are taking, as Brooks goes on to explain, their freedom, and with the loss of freedom, opportunity, there being for the young considerably less of both as the old receive more and more of both in the form of generous Federal entitlements.

Brooks points out the extreme irony of the situation. While we are there for our children and grandchildren the government, more and more, is there for us. As if they considered it our job to care for the country’s future, and their job to care for us.

Again a situation where one group of citizens, in this case the old, has powerful friends in Washington, and the other group, children, does not.

The situation is doubly ironic in that the old, if they were to demand and accept less for themselves from the Federal government, if they were to insure their own brief future less, they would be insuring more the only future that counts, that of their children and grandchildren.