Ben Sasse announced his diagnosis the way most politicians never would. No focus-grouped language, no soft-focus video with stirring strings. Just the raw fact: “Last week I was diagnosed with metastasized, stage-four pancreatic cancer, and am gonna die.”
That was December. Doctors gave him 90 days. Six months later he’s still here, kept alive by clinical trials at MD Anderson in Houston, and he’s spending the borrowed time doing something most of his former colleagues would find incomprehensible. He’s telling the truth.
Sasse has been on EconTalk with Russ Roberts, on 60 Minutes with Scott Pelley, on his own podcast with Chris Stirewalt called “Not Dead Yet,” a name his wife Melissa came up with after also suggesting “Dead Man Talking” and “I’d Rather Die Than Do a Podcast.” The man is bleeding from cancer treatments and he’s still cracking jokes. That I respect. That is a man who knows who he is.
Here’s what sticks with me, though. Sasse has spent these interviews talking about the “shattering of idols.” His word. The workaholism. The chasing. The credential-collecting. Harvard, St. John’s, Yale, the Senate, the University of Florida presidency. A resume that reads like a roadmap to the American elite. And now, staring at the wall, he says the thing that every truck driver and waitress and small-business owner in this country already knew by age 25.
Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America (CC BY-SA 2.0) via Wikimedia Commons“Lots of dumb stuff that I cared too much about,” he said. “The foolishness of our works is pretty apparent when you try to really look at the accounting of a life.”
Funny how it works. A man spends decades climbing every ladder the establishment built for him, and it takes pancreatic cancer to teach him what the guy pouring his coffee could have told him for free. The idols were garbage. The titles were noise. What matters is your wife, your kids, your faith, and whether you were actually present in the room.
Sasse has a 14-year-old son still at home. He talks about wanting to “knock him upside the head and wrestle with him and tell him how much I love him.” He says he wishes he’d taken the Lord’s Day more seriously. He quotes Philippians: “To live is Christ, to die is gain.” He tells Scott Pelley he believes in the Resurrection and in a restoration of this world, and that he was “incredibly blessed to be quickly at peace.”
I’m not a man who trusts institutions. But I trust a man who says “I’m not going down without a fight” and means it, and who can also say “to whom would I go?” in the same breath. That is not a press release. That is a human being.
Kenneth C. Zirkel (CC BY 4.0) via Wikimedia CommonsAnd here’s the part the swamp really won’t like. Sasse, from the quiet of a cancer ward, is diagnosing the people he used to work with. He calls out Congress for its “abdication of responsibility.” He names the crisis inside American universities, which he had a front-row seat to as UF president. He describes a republic “distracted by the digital casino in its pocket.” He says we give all the voice to the loudest, angriest people online and pretend they’re representative. “Most people aren’t that angry,” he says.
Ask yourself who benefits from a country that confused scrolling for living and outrage for citizenship. Not you. Not your family. Not your neighborhood. The people who benefit are the ones selling the casino and the ones in Washington who need you too distracted to notice they stopped doing their jobs.
Sasse calls it the “shattering of idols.” I call it what it is. The establishment sold a bill of goods, and one of their own is now saying so from the other side of a death sentence. The difference is he figured it out. Most of them still haven’t.
“The process of dying is still something to be lived.” That line is worth more than every committee hearing Sasse ever sat through.