The biggest fights of the health care debate aren't going on in Congress. At least within my life, they're happening in me.

On the one hand, I am a freedom fighter for the rights of the individual. Each soul is vested with the right of self-determination, and I have never accepted the fact that a tyrannous majority can force their desires upon a dissenting minority and run roughshod over Constitutional protections.

On the other, I recognize the problems with our health care system, and shudder at many of the harsh policies followed by insurers regarding pre-existing conditions, dropping or denying coverage. After all, much of my legal career was spent fighting insurance companies to part them from their dollars to right wrongs. So there's little love lost when they do their best not to pay claims.

For myself, I think that if such matters are to be addressed, it is best to do so at a state level. After all, that's the way our system was designed, and protects individual liberties against a run-away federal government.

But the reality is that most states haven't been interested in addressing the problem, so many want to use Congress to solve it -- even if the majority of people don't want them to do it the way they're trying now.

All these energies are swirling around in me, and I'm torn as to where to come down on the issue. It's eating me up, because if I support government-mandated coverage, then I am acting in contravention to a core principle by which I've lived my life.

This is the quandary many of us are facing, not only with health care, but with the escalating war of the extremes in our society (and within us). Picking one side and denying the other eats away at us from within. At least, it eats away at me.

Somehow I have to find a way to integrate these energies within me. That probably means letting go of my beliefs about self-determination being threatened by an overreaching government, so the polarized forces can balance within me.

I suspect this is what we are going to have to do as a society as well, for we cannot continue denying the perspectives of those who oppose us. They live here, too, and somehow we have to find a way to accommodate both.

This is the process of integration. At this stage it doesn't feel very good. Maybe one day it will. But we've taken these stands for a reason. Perhaps the challenge before us is to begin dissolving the bonds of our beliefs in hopes of finding a way we can move forward together.

And maybe along the way, find a little peace as well.