As my mother always said, "What is this world coming to?"

On Tuesday night, NPR Court Correspondent Nina Totenberg observed what a change there had been in the American people in ten years as she reported on the health care debates at the Supreme Court. She remembered the time of outrage when citizens discovered that people were dying or becoming injured for life when they were turned away from emergency rooms for lack of the means to pay. This had led to a unanimous decision that if care was available and could stop death or severe injury, it shouldn’t be withheld based on money.

Now she is witnessing rallies when crowds posed with the question of what to do with these people at emergency rooms calling out “Let them die!” (How Lenten – they sound like the crowds shouting for the release of Barabas.) And three court justices have queried whether we should do this, a question that would not have even been acceptable in times past.

Our hottest movie for youth right now is “Hunger Games”, where adults from the government force youth to play “games” in which they have to kill each other to help their part of the country get food.  And the kids try to rebel against this extreme form of cynicism, selfishness, and evil.

What a metaphor for the national psyche and what little we have to give our children in terms of values and hope. In our media and politics, all of the traditional virtues, such as generosity, kindness, patience, humility, etc., are dissed and the vices of greed, selfish, pride, etc., are touted as good, and even Godly.

It makes me wonder, how many across the country rallying with such virulence are people call themselves Christian, or most particularly Catholic. Have they forgotten that so many of the hospitals across the country were started by nuns who devoted their lives in the name of Christ to serve those who were poor and could not pay for private doctors? They felt God, who made every person out of love, and God’s Son, believed in health care, of the Good Samaritan variety. And so many Christians of all stripes do the same today, sending their youth and adults into ministry to other countries to offer health care to those who cannot pay. Yes, this is all charity. But is also a decision about identity.

Who are we as Americans when we have descended into such meanness and dog-eat dog living and forget the better parts of our spirits? This debate isn’t just about health care -- it’s really about who we are. Do we bond together as an American people for higher values or lower ones?

And do some Christians use Christ as a badge for political power rather than as a teacher and Savior in service?

It also makes me wonder, if one of the causes of this decline in the American spirit is the decline of Catholic Sisters among us. Catholics complain about the priest shortage while ignoring the far more expansive loss in the number of nuns, creating and running hospitals and schools and social services. Though they have a bad rap in society, with memories and jokes about nuns who were mean, the vast majority of nuns never were, and they taught generations of us what it means to live for higher standards of civility and love and nobleness of spirit and prayer. They were like a sweet yeast in the bread of not just Catholic society, but all of American society, and the world, as they gave us models and institutions of service and caring for the poor.

They still do, in far smaller numbers, and because of their smaller numbers and their choice to live more among us, many without their signature habits, we do not notice their loving examples or listen to their voices. Perhaps if Catholics as a whole remembered who they once were, they could help remind the country. 

These health care debates, no matter what perspective you come from, should not be run by vices disguising as virtues, but on the level of our higher natures speaking in civil dialog to find the most practical, workable solutions for the needs and resources at hand.

Yes, the health care debate is one of money -- how do we best pay for medical services - -but it is also one that says who we are as people. Are we from the countries of the Hunger Games  -- or from the America that designed the Marshall Plan that healed the nations and economies after World War II, the nation that created Social Security so our elders wouldn’t die on the streets, the nation that fashioned the Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps to put the unemployed to work doing needed community arts and infrastructure projects to rebuild the country in the Depression – not just to rebuild its economic body but its psychological body as well, to give it hope.

We need to give more to our kids than hunger and eating each other up to survive. They are looking to us for more idealistic caring models throughout our world. Just look at the overwhelming youth response to the Stop Kony 2012 video. They got the heart of the message. Kids shouldn’t be used to kill others. Adults need to stand up and say this isn’t okay and do something, Now.