Sitting at a gate waiting for my connecting plane last week in Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport I couldn’t help but hearing a disturbing conversation between a couple of other passengers. A white woman in her 60s loudly moaned to a white man in his 60s about the futility of Obamacare and how much she hates the president.
It became apparent, in listening to her babble on, that her real target for wrath is anyone who doesn’t work as hard as she does. The irate female, a Tennessee nurse, told of how she had assisted in a surgery of a 15-year-old boy who had been shot by a police officer after a run-in with the law. She matter-of-factly mentioned that, because the intubation tube had been erroneously inserted into the boy’s lung instead of stomach, it left him brain dead.
That medical mistake didn’t upset this woman. No, she lamented that the boy’s parents had wrangled from the hospital and insurers not only a settlement for lifetime care but the loss of $10 million in potential lifetime earnings.
“You know that obese kid was just going to keep getting into trouble,” she declared. “He would have been dead by 18 anyway.”
I wanted to go engage the woman in conversation, but I figured I wouldn’t change her opinions on the insurance industry, non-whites or chubby kids. I just hope before I go off on some group of people I stop to check that my attitude isn’t so callous. No matter how worthless a life may seem to me, everyone has value in God’s eyes. There can’t be a dollar value placed on the loss of that life.
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