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By Adam Holmberg

"No culture can live, if it attempts to be exclusive."
-Mohandas Gandhi

My mom and I recently saw the Denzel Washington movie John Q. As a piece of cinema, it’s horribly clichéd, ridiculously biased, and unforgivingly leans on the Democratic side of the fence.

However, it’s also one of the most important movies of recent memory because it deals with universal health care, something that most Americans have been discriminated from.

Yes, I said discriminated. That "d" word we usually associate with an African American getting kicked out of Denny’s actually applies to white people too, and I’m betting it applies to almost every college student on this campus, being a boy or girl, being white, black, brown, tan, light purple, green, burgundy, and florescent blue.

As far as I’m concerned, anyone in this country who doesn’t have insurance is being discriminated against.

It true that we’re all Americans, one nation under God, with liberty and justice for all. Trouble is, that liberty and justice is dependent on your ability to pay for it. That god in which we place so much of our trust is green and comes in these really neat funny money bills. It’s like George Orwell wrote: we’re all equal; some are just more equal than others.

Recently my mother has been suffering from migraines.

She happened to have an appointment with her doctor, and she mentioned the headaches during her visit. He checked her out, and he wrote her a prescription for one of those medicines with the horribly long Latin-derived name. It cost her $12, a hell of a price for headache medicine in the first place. Without insurance – and her coverage happens to be unusually comprehensive – the 20 pills would have cost almost $300.

We are one of the richest, most technologically advanced nations on the planet Earth. We’re the only superpower left. We allow clever men to defy our own laws and gain fortunes of tens of billions of dollars. We’ll start wars and overthrow government because an American company is being forced to play by that "hostile" government’s rules.

But we refuse – yes, refuse – to give our citizens universal insurance, something that our allies in Europe began long ago.

These wonderful congressmen and senators and presidents tell us that they understand. They tell us that we’re just like they are – we’re their fellow Americans. They tell us they feel our pain. But, you can be certain that they’ll never have to watch their wife or their son or anyone else they love die of cancer or a bad heart because no matter how much they "care," they’ll never lack the money to save that person’s life.

I love the United States, but we are barbaric. Know why? Because we have the audacity to save only the people who can afford health care. We can pay to remodel Soldier Field. We can’t pay to save a poor child in the ghetto.

I wrote earlier that most of the students reading this are likely being discriminated against, and I’ll tell you why. We’re a two-year college – 18, 19, 20 year olds mostly. Definitely a majority of our student body are part-time help at their jobs, and therefore likely don’t receive benefits. I’m going to be 21 in August, and two years after that I will fall off my parent’s insurance. Most of the people of my age will too.

Here I speak to those people - if one of us would get in a bad car accident and need a blood transfusion or an organ or even some cancer drug, we would be out of luck. Sure we’d like to think someone out there would swoop down to help us, but unfortunately that kind of thing often only happens in the movies.

President Bush is a man of strong, deep conviction, and I admire him for his willingness to see a goal and work through to it. He is a good man who surrounds himself by good men and women he knows will get the job done.

He will infuriate me sometimes – he shot down the Kyoto global warming treaty but offered no alternative, and proposed drilling for oil in the arctic, yet he talks about a need to preserve the environment. But when I watch him speak, I feel like he cares deeply about America. Unlike his predecessor, he cares about me.

Since Sept. 11, I have not doubted that his administration has done everything in its power to keep me safe from enemies abroad and within who would threaten our freedom. I just hope that he remembers – I hope all our leaders remember that protecting and preserving our democracy starts at home.