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Billy Graham and solidarity Reading the discussion about the solidarity that one should feel with companions in misfortune, as was the point in the Billy Graham thread, my reaction was different from all who participated in it. This different reaction is caused by having grown up in a different society. Maybe some of you remember my reaction on the statistics about the number of deaths due to PD. I repeat them briefly. The fact that that number for whites was so much higher than the one for blacks was the most eye catching in those numbers. Earlier I had read about epidemiology of Park, that it was found all over the world in about the same frequency, with two exceptions: blacks in S. Africa and blacks in the USA. I had read too that a rather high percentage of the population of the USA only have access to medical facilities when in a life threatening situation. The two things together made me think that the explanation of the differences among white and black to die from PD , could be: blacks are simply less frequently diagnosed. I don't know for sure whether this is true, because I don't know enough about how things are in practice in the USA. But being a PWP one doesn't need much fantasy to understand how terrible a situation it is to suffer from this desease and additionally have no med's. To feel solidarity with all PWP's in ones society is, for people in Western Europe, much easier than in the USA. I don't know exactly how things are in the other European countries, but I suppose it is not verry different from what it is here in Holland. We don't have National Health as in the UK., but everyone has health insurance which pays all costs. (I, for example, have no idea about the price of my med's.) For all people who have an income of fl. 60.000 ($ 33.000) or less a year before taxes, (which, it is true, are high) the insurance is collective and the price is a percentage of ones income, for the most part irrespective of how many dependent children are insured too. Every adult person has an income even if he/she never worked. Most people living in a situation like this, feel health care is a fundamental human right, the same way as it is ones right to have a lawyer when accused. Recently this was illustrated. Some months ago a law was accepted to exclude a part of dental care from the collective insurance. When it was clear that the conseqence was that some old people would not be able to have new false dentures in time, all political parties (the conservatives included) wanted the false denture back into the insurance, and so it happened. But having said this, the right to health care is not felt to be a right to the point PWP's, who are deprived of it in their native countries, are invited overhere to get their sinemet or pallidotomy. The confrontation with these facts of life is more difficult for PWP's than healthy people because, if they realize their existence, they tend to identify more with the victims. So we exclude them from our solidarity. Things like this are an example of " la condition humaine" (the human imperfection?) It needs a coming to terms with that "condition" to be able to stand the confrontation. Maybe Billy Graham, whose most eye catching talent is not, I suppose, his ease to accept the fact of this "condition", for this reason doesn't want to be confronted with all those companians in his misfortune. In other words, maybe he can't feel the influence he can have by talking about his disease as a positive thing, because it is too small in respect to the influence he wishes to have. Maybe this is the same as our refusal of the confrontation with that companians in misery of ours, who have the additional misery of not having health care, because we feel all help that we are willing to give is too futile. Ida Kamphuis, 53/12+ Holland