A week or two ago, we all got in the car for a short drive. Something about the car upset Russell -- I think maybe his car window was fogged up -- and he was fussing about it. I said my car window was fogged up too, and he wailed, "But David and Silas' windows aren't fogged up! It isn't FAIR!" to which I callously replied, "Life isn't fair," and changed the subject.
A mile down the road, we stopped at a stoplight near a newspaper box. The headline had something about numbers of emergency room visits, and David started telling me about how he had read that ER visits of people on Oregon Health Plan (roughly speaking, our state's Medicaid) had dropped, not because people were getting more preventative care, but because they had instituted a $50 copay and people were just not getting any care at all because they couldn't afford $50 to see a doctor. Russell heard that and asked some question, and I explained to him, "In our country, sometimes if a person is poor and can't pay a doctor or hospital, they don't have any way to go. David and I don't think that's right. We think our country is rich enough that everybody ought to be able to go to a doctor or hospital if they need to, even if they're poor."
From the back seat, Silas sighed in his tiny three-and-a-half-year-old voice, "Life is not fair."
In the front seat, his parents gaped at each other, as they so often do.