Bipartisan decency
by digby
Caleb Howe, a regular contributor to Erick Erickson’s conservative RedState site, is in the hospital with liver failure. Because Howe doesn’t have health insurance, he and his family are worried that they won’t be able to handle the impending bills — but the Internet stepped in to help.
On Tuesday, a page for Howe was created on the crowd funding website GoFundMe, explaining that his family needs to preserve his health for the benefit of his two daughters. “It would lift an incredible burden for Caleb [and his wife] Donna if they could get even the smallest amount of help with these upcoming expenses and with anything extra that comes in,” Howe’s page explains.
Erickson promoted the fund on RedState with a short post entitled, “Please Consider Helping Caleb Howe’s Family.” And the left-leaning Daily Kos also picked up the story, encouraging its readers to help, too. “Allow me to ask you to do the Christian thing and donate to this young man’s fund,” DailyKos user SemDem writes. “He has two young, beautiful and innocent daughters who need him — and that is who the fund is for. He does not deserve to suffer, much less die.”
The appeals worked. As of press time, Howe’s fund had been shared over a thousand times, and ultimately topped its $25,000 goal.
This is a very decent thing to do especially considering that Howe is a fellow with quite a history of cruel online behavior, particularly toward Roger Ebert when he was sick and dying.
He later apologized. But even if he hadn’t, that wouldn’t mean people should be cruel in return. Nobody “deserves” liver failure. And he does have kids who need him.
More importantly, nobody “deserves” to go without health insurance in a wealthy country like the United States. Howe would undoubtedly disagree, and perhaps this fund drive convinces many of his compatriots that charity can pick up the slack for those who have no insurance. But Howe is a celebrity, even in a small way, connected to many important people who can make a fund drive like this bring in some serious money. Most people without health insurance don’t have such friends in high places.
Here’s hoping that Caleb Howe fully recovers and that his family isn’t bankrupted by this illness. Here’s also hoping that it isn’t long before nobody in America has to worry about that anymore.
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