Beauty is everywhere if we will only notice it. Some days it’s harder than others to see it.

Yesterday the theme of my blog post was the word indivisible and I thought about the Pledge of Allegiance and the meaning behind it. I said I didn’t have a solution for this problem our country is facing – the divide, the dissent, the anger between individuals and lawmakers. Actually I do. 

It’s something we can all do, but it takes practice. It’s the art of looking and really seeing the good and the beautiful around us every day.

Mitch McConnell announced there would be no vote this week on his GOP healthcare bill. It just didn’t work out like he’d hoped. He couldn’t reach that magic number of fifty votes.

Rather than celebrate I got to thinking about the bigger picture. What this battle boils down to is the GOP wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act. They tried to massage the previous version which passed the House to appeal to the moderates in their own party and what happened? Several of them thought the bill was too similar to the ACA, not mean enough, as they say.

In summary, we have Obamacare which everybody agrees needs improvement. The GOP wants it repealed because it is OBAMAcare. That’s most important to them. They also want tax cuts for themselves. So they hide out in secret manipulating a bill for a few days only to discover it ain’t gonna fly with their own party. They don’t even try to work with the other side to compromise and create something better. It’s personal.

I remember Hillary Clinton saying in a debate that the ACA obviously needs work but we don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. Let’s fix it. The GOP’s main incentive here is to get rid of it and give themselves a tax break. None of which is good for most Americans – nothing in this new bill improves costs or service for the sickest Americans, or for you or me. The administration doesn’t care about this, yet polls yesterday showed only 17% of Americans approve of this bill as it stands.

Sure it’s complicated, (who knew?) and it takes more than a few days behind closed doors to write a bill that will pass. They’ve had seven years or so to consider all options and they can’t come up with anything that works. Improving the ACA might be an option. But this is personal, so they won’t. And round and round we go. There’s little beauty to be found here.

Lawmakers have only a few options, in my opinion. They change their mindsets and look to improve the ACA, they make a drastic change and move to a single payer system (not gonna happen), or they keep hiding out pretending to come up with a better plan that only serves themselves and not most Americans.

There is one more option. They can soften their hearts and go look for the beauty in their lives while contemplating all this on their recess. That’s what I’m going to do.