"the hardest thing in this world is to live in it"
power plays and other stories
Well would you look at that. It would seem that five of the Supreme Court justices went at got medical degrees when I wasn’t looking. How lovely, that they’ve decided they have the medical acumen to decide what is the proper treatment for individual patients.
All the rest of us who are now collectively soldiers in the war on terror…
The words there are not as surprising, nor do they leap out of the page so much as when they are summarized by others. Over the course of my weekend academic readings
So today, taking a break from virtual work, I grabbed Smart Nice, Not-So-Smart People off my bookshelf, to see if the oft-cited article was in the compilation of essays. Indeed it was, and I could read the entire article. Having read it, I feel more comfortable with the statement Caplan was making, and am a bit amused at seeing it taken so dramatically out of context elsewhere, most likely because it’s imminently quotable taken ever-so-slightly out of context.
But reading the article as a whole, it was really the end of it that hit me. Not for its Caplan-esque quotability, but for the deep sadness knowledge brings about. Caplan says
After the World Wars, Korea, Vietnam and the Gulf War, those who served knew that they would get the medical care they needed. A grateful nation promised them what they had earned.
Medical care that includes falling down rooms, leaking ceilings, mold, unwashed linens. Discharing our veterans with medical injuries and then losing them to followup, or flat out deny their care – that is, if we’re not re-deploying the seriously injured.
If this is how we treat our actual veterans, why do we have any illusions that we will treat the people of our country any better, by granting universal access to health care? Caplan says in his article that “[i]n the new world where each of us is a target and every American is a veteran, we must make the same promise to one another.” I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but we have, and we do. We treat our veterans like we do the rest of the population: we offer a safety net that isn’t actually there, and hope no one actually falls and needs it.
Google demonstrates just how reliable their Google Maps service is: they’ve replaced satellite imagery of New Orleans with pre-Katrina documentation, effectively erasing (and hiding) all the damage done in New Orleans and the surrounding Gulf Coast area.
Google’s response, when questioned by a Senate subcommittee? It seems to boil down to scratching their heads and saying “woops”.
Many moons ago, I had my subliminal biases called out and to the front by a classmate. She wasn’t just targetting me, she was slamming the entire class – the entire class of white kids who turned to her, the only black student, to see her reaction whenever slavery, Tuskegee, Jim Crowe laws, and whathaveyou were brought up. She was rightfully angry – why did we expect her to be the face of every black person? On the one hand, we were only 12, so I think it’s an acceptable reaction for the age. On the other, it’s something that’s stayed with me, and I pay particular attention when I find myself either reacting in an exceptionalist way towards someone, or have it happen towards me.
In the last couple of days, more than a few people have asked me what I think about the Edwards continuing the campaign trail, with the news that Elizabeth Edwards now has incurable bone cancer. Do I think it’s right? Don’t I think they should go home, be with family, allow her to die in peace? Shouldn’t I know the proper thing, speaking as someone whose family has been affected by cancer? (There might even be an underlying “well, tell us if you think it’s ethical!”)
The thing is, most of the people who ask seem to be looking for condemnation, and that’s not something I can give. I think that the Edwardses are doing the right thing. She has incurable cancer, but you can live with incurable cancer for a very long time. Why should she flee back to the ‘safety’ of a home that can offer nothing more than she’ll get anywhere else? Why should she – or for that matter, her husband or children – stop living their lives? Can you imagine how that might make her feel, to have everyone drop everything and rush to be around her 24/7? Might that not feel like they’re all just waiting for you to die, so they can get on with their lives?
Elizabeth Edwards is choosing to live with cancer. Yes, eventually it will probably kill her – and she’ll make a choice prior to that to be dying with cancer. But that’s not the choice she’s made right now, and I’m not sure why anyone should want her to lie down and give up well before it’s time to accept an oncoming death.
I think a lot of naysayers are bitter about two things: the potential for this to give Edwards a needed bump in the election process (and frankly, I think that speaks worse to voters, that they would vote for someone out of sympathy instead of qualifications), and the fact that someone who is sick is refusing to hide. By Elizabeth being out there and campaigning for her husband, people can’t pretend cancer doesn’t happen, that good people don’t get sick, that our health care system is fine. Elizabeth, like previous celebrities before her, bring a human face to an illness and remove our ability to create an invisible, stigmatized individual to assign to that disease. And unlike Lance Armstrong or Kylie Minogue, Elizabeth’s celebrity-ness is in a field where she might be able to do more than raise money – she might be able to change the entire way the game is played.
And that, I think, makes people who’d rather not see universal health insurance and health accesss a reality, very very nervous.
Thomas had voiced some concerns about how NYS was going to implement their stem cell funding, and now it looks like he might have been right to be concerned. An assemblyman has raised significant flags about the stem cell bill, calling much of it “garden-variety economic development pork that’s hiding behind stem cells.” It seems that Mr. Brodsky is not opposed to stem cell research, but instead the fine print in the proposal, which would allow the money to be used for a number of purposes, including new agribusiness, security technologies and nanotech. This appears to be in violation of NYS bond law, which requires bonds to be issues for a single purpose.
And frankly, even if that law wasn’t there, I would want someone to object if the money for stem cell research could potentially be diverted into other projects. If we’re going to fund stem cells, let’s do it right – and not in a sloppy way that will shoot us in the foot rather than contribute to the whole of scientific knowledge and progress.