SiCKO

I had the privilege of attending the sneak-preview screening of Michael Moore's latest movie, SiCKO, last night in San Diego. I want to take a few minutes to tell you how important I feel this movie is, and to implore you to see it when it opens nationally this coming week. Seeing this film is the first step in an important and long overdue process in our country.

I know what some of you are thinking. I know that Michael Moore can be a divisive figure. But there's something conspicuously different about this offering from Mr. Moore: it isn't partisan.

You heard me.

Oh sure, there are a few cuts of George Bush lisping along in his I-drank-too-much-in-college way, discussing health care and speaking in patriotic platitudes, but this time around Michael Moore and his documentary rise above the easy punches. (Even as the audience hisses and boos at W's face on the screen.) Moore isn't even sarcastic about the most unpopular president since Nixon (who also happens to make an appearance in the film). There's something much more important going on here, and that is clear almost immediately in Moore's most mature and, undoubtedly, his most important work to date.

It's enough to make a Republican support Moore--as many have since the movie began making private screenings. Forget liberal. Forget conservative. Remember American?

"Who are we?" Moore asks two thirds of the way through his documentary. "Are we a country which abandons its own citizens?" The fact that America ranks 37th in the world in its health care, the fact that we have the worst infant-mortality rate of any Western nation, and the fact that millions of insured Americans--like the ones to whom I address this--face draconian insurance tactics once they become sick, is wholly un-American. Isn't it?

Moore's movie takes us around the world and across the country, but it isn't just a story about how badly things are screwed up or how they got that way. This is an empowering movie, and as Bill Maher pointed out during the first interview with Moore in four years, this movie might be just what it takes for the citizens of this country (citizens who seem, as the movie points out, more afraid of their government than the government is of them) to finally say enough is enough: it's time for universal health care for our fellow citizens. And it's time to fix the health care the rest of us have.

That's the Christian thing to do. That's the American thing to do. That's the right thing to do.

Please take the time to see SiCKO this coming weekend. Buy your ticket ahead of time if you can, get there early, and be ready to cheer, cry, and grow angry. Get ready to change this country with your voice and your vote.