Reddit Challenge #35

Reddit user wanttoknownowandhow submits: "failed ideas from the worlds greatest minds."

At any given moment, the world has only so much room for great ideas to thrive. Throughout history, one can only wonder what revolutionary insights have failed to see the light of day...

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On January 11th, 1944 Americans didn't have much to be happy about. War was still raging in Europe and and the outlook in the Pacific could not have been more grim. But in the midst of leading his nation though a war, President Theodore Roosevelt had the future on his mind. On January 11th, he brought a radical idea to the nation in what would be his penultimate State of the Union Address. That idea was a second Bill of Rights.

Of course, since it couldn't be that we all collectively missed that lesson in Elementary School, it should be mentioned that the second Bill of Rights never came to be. But what it could have been is worth thinking about, what it could have been is worth exploring even today.

Roosevelt saw that the nation he led- though politically free and protected- did not have adequate protections to ensure that all could engage in the pursuit of happiness. The Bill of Rights protected us politically, but not economically. These are the rights Roosevelt wanted to guarantee:

• Employment, with a living wage
• Freedom from unfair competition and monopolies
• Housing
• Social Security
• Education
• Medical Care

I put medical care last because we find ourselves in the midst of a national debate about this very subject. President Obama has found his party and his legacy in jeopardy for his attempt to follow-through on a vision proposed more than 60 years ago by the leader of a nation fighting two wars whose most minor skirmishes dwarf the size of both wars we're engaged in today. That is a sad state of affairs.

We can wonder and wonder why ideas fail, and there are certainly plenty of reasons why Roosevelt couldn't get his bill passed, but rather than toil on those reasons I think it is better to look forward. The right to health care seems to me to be the most basic right we should have as humans, and there is no reason we should not continue to fight for it.

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Ideas fail, but ideas never die: they live on in the minds of the people who share them...