Fairness

Have you ever walked into a store, picked up the items you wanted and walked past the register without paying for them? I did once, with a pack of gum when I was about three. My mom drove me back and made me apologize for stealing.

But, what if I really needed something, and I didn't have the money. But I really really needed it. Does that justify stealing? How about this, say you are on food stamps, and you know you won't have to pay out of your pocket for the food you're buying. Do you just walk out without giving the cashier the food stamp card? That's still called stealing, because the store will not get paid back for the items.

How about this one. You walk into the Phunny Pharm where I am behind the counter. You drop off a prescription and tell me “I have medicaid,” and then leave without giving me the billing information. When you come back and I tell you that it costs three hundred dollars and you repeat “I have medicaid,” and then grab the prescription and leave, you are still stealing that prescription because the Phunny Pharm will not be paid back for it.

But the Phunny Pharm is part of a big evil corporation right? They can stand to loose three hundred dollars right? The thing is, the Phunny Pharm and all the Phunny Pharms across the country loose money every day because of thieves and insurance companies who take money back for every prescription they can get away with. The Phunny Pharm isn't just one evil head of the corporation lounging on a throne made of money, it's some guy who I think my dad actually knew growing up, who is a person just like the rest of us except that he risked everything and started a company. The Phunny Pharm is also lots of little techs like me, who, when they look at their pay check find that they have money taken from them to pay for medicaid. The people on medicaid seem to think that everything is paid for by magical government money, and in a way it is, except that magical government money is taxes. Taxes that come from people who work so that the government can fling it at people who don't.

I know this isn't news to most of you, in fact I really hope it isn't news to anyone at all, but the whole thing is weighing on me because of it's blatant stupidity. Yet, as stupid as it is, it seems like no one ever tries to fix it! I've seen people who will leave their child's medicine that they made us fill right now because it cost less than three dollars. One woman had spent the entire time we were filling a prescription for her child's inhaler telling us how the child was wheezing badly and desperately needed the inhaler, only to tell us it could wait five hours until the insurance company came back online.

She did say that she didn't have any money, and as much as I try to understand that I really can't. I can understand not having money in my wallet, but not having so little money that I couldn't go and find some. I understand that there are poor people, but I do not understand the “poor” people in our culture today. The people who are on medicaid and food stamps come into the Phunny Pharm and buy cigarettes before they think about their prescriptions, they'll buy booze like there's no tomorrow, they come through the drive thru with a hamburger shoved halfway through their face using their newly manicured plastic fingernails to shove it there, and then say that they don't have money. They have money. Medicaid doesn't pay for all the television channels they watch. Food stamps won't buy your beer. It's the priorities I see in these people that sickens me.

The movie Hunger Games just came out. I read the book series not long ago and loved it. In the world of the books there is a city called the Capitol and twelve districts surrounding it. The people of the Capitol live a life of excess. They want for nothing because the districts provide them with everything. The big highlight of their lives is watching the Hunger Games, where each of the districts is forced to give them two tributes who all have to fight to the death. The survivor is named victor and gets to live in luxury the rest of their life. To the people of the districts it is a terrible display of the Capitol's power and very possibly a death sentence, but to the majority of people in the Capitol it's just a really fun television show. And that's all they care about.

It doesn't matter who they hurt when they urge children to murder their peers, it doesn't matter to them that the people in the districts starve to death while they work to provide for the demanding Capitol. As long as they have food overflowing their tables and really great television they're completely happy to have the world fall to pieces around them. And their world does fall to pieces. In the third book the Capitol is taken over by rebels, basically led by a communist society. The people from the Capitol have no clue how to live in a world where food is scarce, where it doesn't matter how they make themselves look, and where their lives are in danger instead of the tributes from the districts.

When I finished reading Hunger Games I was sickened by television. Someone in the house had a reality show on, one where you can vote for your favorite singer or whatever. The announcer said “Your vote can keep your favorite contestant alive in the competition.” And all I could think of was Rue in the books with thousands of people watching, and only a handful actually mourning her death. Maybe it's a bad analogy, no one actually dies on tv. But there are so many shows out now, and audiences are getting bored. All it took to bring the world of the Hunger Games to it was a civil war against the Capitol where the Capitol won and had to exercise it's power.

But back to the point. I was talking about stealing in the very beginning. No, I was talking about selfishness this whole time. Customers who come in to the Phunny Pharm and demand that we cater to their every whim, like calling their insurance companies left, right, and center, demanding that they never have copayments, walking off with their prescription and messing up our computer records because they don't want to wait to be rung up and “it's free anyway.” One of my future sisters-in-law works at a grocery store where she actually had to deal with a woman who ran out of the store with her groceries when her foodstamp card wouldn't work, because they were free anyway. These people don't seem to see that someone has to pay for it, that it comes out of my pay checks, out of your pay checks, out of our taxes. The people in the Capitol didn't see that the people in the districts were paying for it, with their own blood and the lives of their children.

I liked the ending of the Hunger Games books because the people of the Capitol ended up having to learn that if they didn't work they wouldn't eat. The lesson the main character, Katniss, had learned well before the start of the first book. It's a lesson my mom taught me through the example of my Great Grandfather's life, and I cannot understand the world we've made where we reward those who do not work and punish those who do. All we're doing is feeding selfish human desires, creating a generation of people who don't know how to take care of themselves, and watching people depend more and more on the government that, in the end, doesn't actually care about them. Someday they or their children will figure out that the system is broken, but then what will they be able to do about it? And why would we give up our selfishness now to make the lives of future generations better?