Heartwarming stories

I’m ambivalent about a lot of heartwarming stories. No. Not the one that read “High school junior makes a dress from his prom date because she couldn’t afford her dream gown“. Grisly as that sounds, it was just a typo. He didn’t really carve up his date and turn her into a dress as punishment for being poor. He just made a dress for her because he is a nice guy. MSN unfortunately corrected later, deleting much hilarity from the world.

No.  What I mean are heartwarming stories like:
A teacher battling cancer ran out of sick days. School employees showered him with theirs

Or the 55,200,000 GoFundMe cancer stories of heartwarming generosity.

Or the scads of heartwarming videos of troops returning from our eternal wars overseas to meet their children for the first time.

Or this heartwarming story of a high school robotics class that build a wheelchair for a disabled kid.

Why am I ambivalent about such stories? Here’s why:

After determining that the family couldn’t afford a wheelchair and that their insurance didn’t cover the cost, Tyler Jackson contacted the robotics team at his former high school, KARE reported.

Or to put it more bluntly:

Walter is here to remind you that when you read a “heartwarming” story about people giving up their sick leave for a cancer victim or vets coming home from Afghanistan to children who have never met them or people raising money on GoFundMe for a child with leukemia, what you are really looking at is a story testifying to systemic failure, militarist politicians, and massive calculated Republican greedy assault on elementary decency designed to harm and hurt these people for the sake of a buck.

All praise, glory, and honor to the good people struggling to put their fingers in the dyke of malignant dysfunctional policy held in place by the GOP. All sympathy to the victims. But the fact is that an evil politicized socio-economic system protects and perpetuates this and sane systems must be instituted so that we don’t have to read more stories of people rescued from GOP greed and lust for power and contempt for the common good.  GoFundMe is not a health care plan and the lie that the state should have nothing to do with guaranteeing access to health care is false, un-Catholic, and unbiblical.  Health care is justice, not charity, and the state exists to ensure justice.