What is Broken?

This is question we should have addressed a long time ago. Broken is a very important thing to understand. And very tricky. Broken is more than a physical state of something. See, before Man, nothing was broken. Everything was as it should be. It might have been busted, or different than before, or all messed up, but it wasn’t broken until Man was there to deem it so.

Let me apologize for using the chauvinistic “Man” here. Nevermind. I’m not apologizing at all. I’m just recognizing that I’m doing it. It’s a useful enough term. Human, person… very cumbersome. And I don’t think that Man is chauvinistic anyway. But I’ve been wrong before. Give me a better word and I’ll use it.

Anyway, broken is a philosophical state. Things can still be busted, of course. I can bust my bicycle. That means, though, that I just throw it away and buy a new one. Then again, I can render my bicycle broken, then, I can try to fix it. And that is the difference.

Anything that can be broken can be fixed. Fixing it, though, never restores the exact same thing to a state where we could be convinced that it was never broken in the first place. It has changed. It had more effort put into it. It fills the same functional role, probably, but it does so in a little different way.

Let’s get right to the heart of it. The Republicans are right when they say that healthcare is broken. And it can be fixed. The same is true for everything. Everything, depending on how you look at it, is broken. It all needs fixing. Fixing is how we improve things. And everything can be better. So why not?