Author: denis

North Carolina:  Persons may only use bathrooms, locker rooms and showers that are designated for the sex that appears on their birth certificates.

U.S. Department of Justice:  In any publicly-funded facilities, and in the facilities of companies employing more than 10,000 people, persons may use bathrooms, locker rooms and showers designated for the sex they regard themselves to be.

May 9, 2016

Let’s cut the crap.

I’ve listened to so much imprecise, inaccurate and uninformed opinion and description of the elements of this issue in the past couple of days that I feel the need to clear the air.

First of all, this is a question that it was once, as long ago as the mid 1990’s, my responsibility to resolve.  Second, I attended a recent talk at the local Humanist Society given by a dainty little person with a high voice and short hair who insisted he was a man who had once been a woman, but without providing any anatomical details by which the audience could make an independent judgment.  She asked to be called “he”, and frankly I’m not sure how I want to handle that.  By all of the cues upon which I have come to rely during my four score and one years, the speaker seemed to me to be a woman.  So I naturally thought of her as “she”, and that is how I will describe her for now.

Next, I find that our language regarding these matters is so thoroughly euphemistic that it threatens to derail a clear view of the issues.  So for the sake of this essay I am going to jettison words like bathroom, toilet, rest room, powder room, washroom and water closet, most of which describe activities that we do not do in the shitter or the pissoir. For the sake of avoiding jarring or distracting anglo-saxon terms, however, I will employ ‘defecate’ and ‘urinate’ because they are at least direct in meaning, though softer to the ear because they come from the Latin terminology and therefore sound more clinical than vulgate.

As I understand it, the federal Department of Justice (DOJ) rulings regarding the new law in North Carolina actually effect not only places where persons of all ages might defecate or urinate, but also locker rooms where they might change for work or for school athletics. The DOJ rules will also apply in workplace, school and health-club group shower facilities.  The issue has arisen because for the past few years political activists among those people who self-identify as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (often known as the LGBT community) have been agitating to be allowed to use the facilities assigned to the sexual identity with which they feel most comfortable.  And to be complete in our avoidance of euphemisms, let us agree that, despite mythology, homosexual women are not all from the island of Lesbos, and not all homosexual men are caricatures of effeminacy, fey or “gay”.

By the way the term “gender” itself has within recent decades, become a euphemism for sex.   Not long ago gender used to refer only to things masculine, feminine or neuter: i.e., social, cultural or linguistic differences.  Biological maleness and femaleness was called, sex.  Now, in the interest of delicacy, and to avoid saying ‘sex’ out loud, some people have taken to referring to male and female ‘gender’.  (derisive snort)  

In terms of the somewhat militant invasion of facilities for the disposal of human biological waste, that started little more than two decades ago, when women began barging into men’s facilities at sports stadia.  Women’s facilities, given that women generally urinate sitting down and require more booths, were in deplorably short supply and the lines in front of Women’s Rooms were many times as long as those in front of Men’s Rooms.  While unproven, it always seemed to me from accounts at the time, that these invasions were led by women who were somewhat more assertive, aggressive even, and perhaps not as intimidated, nor even impressed, by the thought or sight of male genitalia.  But that’s just an educated guess.  In the Bay Area it was the assertive Berkeley Woman who strode past the urinals to claim a booth for herself, and bully for her!

So in her talk, the LGBT speaker who thinks of herself as a man focused upon the problem of finding a place to defecate or urinate, and basically said it was unfair and hurtful that other users of the facility questioned, by look, behavior or word, her right to be there.  This, she said, was distressingly insensitive and should never be done by a thoughtful person.

During the question period at the Humanist talk, I raised the issue of the expectation of privacy that men or women might have, which heretofore has included the assumption that others using facilities for these particular bodily functions would be of the same sex. I mentioned that the seeking of privacy for urinating or defecating seems to be a common tendency among many mammals, possibly because of the vulnerability to predation that these functions may produce.  I suggested that the instinctive need for privacy might come from a very ancient (limbic) part of the brain and might represent a very strong interest, deserving of respectful accommodation.   To which others suggested that even if real, such an emotional need might easily be overridden by (cortical) reason — that there is no longer such a danger in the modern epoch.  The fear is atavistic, they implied, serves no function, and needs to be relinquished.

It wasn’t until a week or two later that an adventitious rebuttal to that argument appeared in the form of a documentary about India that I will describe in a few moments.

Back in the mid-’90s, as I said, I was faced with these same issues in a real-life case that, for me,  illustrated the complexity of the relevant factors.  As a company medical director I was asked to decide when a male mechanic undergoing sex change could begin to use the women’s locker room and shower.  The thing is, male to female sexual reassignment begins with several months of female hormone treatments resulting in the development of female breasts.  This progresses along perhaps with psychological counseling, and beginning of wearing women’s clothes, perhaps the use of makeup, depilation and so on, but before the patient undergoes surgery to remove the penis and testicles and to create a surgical simulation of a vagina.  In this  particular case the mechanic had breasts, had grown his hair long, had lost his facial, chest, axillary, arm and leg hair, but still had a penis.  So with whom could he share locker and shower space without anyone experiencing the stress of feeling undressed in the presence of strangers of the opposite sex?  With neither sex, actually.

My recommendation at the time was that the man could change from street to work clothes with his female co-workers, but could not undress or reveal the part of him that was still male.  To change those particular undergarments he would have to find a private space within the women’s locker room or not change them at work.  Generally speaking, my thought was that individuals in transition should not expose parts of themselves that identified them as being of the opposite sex than others using a sexually segregated facility.  The compromise worked out well enough in that particular case.

In the North Carolina controversy most of the concern of the public and the legislature seems to be for the comfort and safety of women and girls.  The U.S. Department of Justice is seeking to impose rules that will effect public, school and business facilities for urinating, defecating, showering and changing, and there seems to be a fear that, using the DOJ rules as a pretext, males will seek to enter places designated for girls and women.  

Opponents of the North Carolina law and supporters of the federal action, as well as many journalists in their interviews of the litigants, scoff at any hypothetical danger, and aver that such a fear is irrational, atavistic and bogus, since there have been no such cases ever reported in North Carolina.  Supporters of the state law have had to agree sheepishly that it is true that there have not.

But is our deeply emotional urge for privacy when defecating and urinating, and to a greater or lesser extent during any time we are naked and undefended, as useless a vestige as the vermiform appendix?  Is the human race far beyond any actual need for privacy during these moments?  

Well, first of all I think that even an emotional need is a true need and deserves to be respected, especially when it is this deep and powerful.  But more to the point, I saw a full-length documentary only a month ago about a serious, present-day problem that grows steadily more dangerous in parts of India.  As it happens, there are not only no public facilities for defecating and urinating in those regions, but there are also no such facilities in most private homes either.   Everyone simply has to find a place out of doors to defecate, urinate, or wash.  Moreover, there are no places, public or private, where women may apply or discard blood absorbing products during menstruation.  The report said that it is the common practice was for women to wait until they returned to their homes, and then, at night and under cover of darkness, to steal outside to some nearby field or hillside to relieve themselves.  And this has resulted in a large and ever increasing number of rapes and murders of women and girls, apparently while they are seeking a place to empty their bowels or bladder in the privacy of darkness.

In view of this contemporary phenomenon, one might draw the inference that it is because we have well-lighted sex-segregated facilities that are easily accessible to women, sanitary and private, that there are few or no cases of molestation or assault to which we can point as an indication of the need to maintain sexually segregated facilities.  The irony being that we can’t prove the need for sexual segregation where we urinate, defecate, change or shower, because we have sexual segregation where we urinate, defecate, change and shower.   Given the state of our nation’s plumbing — the ceramic and plastic kind — we might not ever experience anything like the risk level Indian women encounter, but the Indian phenomenon does reveal that there are a significant number of predatory men around even in these modern times, and that they probably should not be given completely voluntary access, solely on their own say-so, to facilities intended for women and girls.

In an age when “gender reassignment”, though still quite rare, has, since Christine Jorgensen, become slightly more common, the North Carolina solution, to have individuals use the facilities with the same label as the sex indicated on their birth certificates, does not seem fair or reasonable.  But it also seems patently naive and foolish merely to accept whatever gender an individual self-selects.  Since the number of sex reassignments is still manageably small, it might be practical to require that sex other than birth sex be certified judicially, with appropriate input from medical experts.

END

May 8, 2016

In one of the weekly reviews of the news to which I subscribe, I ran across three news items between which I saw some tie-ins.  Others, I thought, might have seen the three items as unconnected.

The three items were the following:

1) The British Royal College of Physicians, like our AMA, recommends the use of e-cigarettes as a “harm reduction” strategy.

2) The Wall Street Journal for 4/28/16, (p. A-3), in an article by Arian Campo-Flores, reported that there is an increased demand for qualified addiction counselors because of a [Ed: doctor-driven] boom in prescription opiate addiction, coupled with an Obamacare requirement that addiction disorders be covered by private insurers and Medicaid.  Campo-Flores says there is, however,  a scarcity of addiction counselors due to a history of low pay and rapid burn-out in the field.

3) Suicides hit a 30-year high in the U.S., according to a recent release from the National Center for Health Statistics.

My first reaction when seeing these three items is that in my experience it seems they may be causally interrelated.

Sometime around the early 1990’s, there emerged a new specialty in medicine, designed to deal with “chronic pain”.  At the same time a division was developing among addictionologists.  Most doctors sought to help addicts to abstain from their drugs, by a combination of long-term cognitive therapies, like the 12-step programs, and the brief initial use of medications designed to ease the impact of withdrawal symptoms over a short period of detoxification.  A growing number of others, who seemed to have given up on actually treating addiction, were satisfied to deal with addiction by prescribing similar addicting substances that were less risky than the original drugs of choice.  The best examples of this “harm-reduction” approach were the methadone clinics that provided a free oral drug (developed by the Germans during WW II when they were cut off from access to regions of the world growing poppies, the source of opium and morphine).   The theory was,  while methadone was just as addicting as heroin, it was longer acting, and, could be administered orally, once a day, in a clinic.  Since several intravenous fixes of heroin a day were no longer required to feed the addiction, at least the risks of needle-sharing;  HIV, hepatitis C, etc., could be avoided.  Because the drug was provided free, the need for criminal activity to pay for drugs was also reduced.

The “risk-reduction” approach grew popular with public entities like city and county governments, partly, it seemed to me, because, requiring only minimally trained personnel, it was cheaper and easier to administer than to offer treatment with a goal of eliminating the addiction itself.

This shift in public health policy coincided roughly with the Chinese experiment of providing basic, low-level healthcare to its underserved population by sending “barefoot doctors”, with two years of medical training, out into the countryside.  Here in the U.S. the experiment took the form of allowing supervised practice by former military paramedics, and by nurses with an additional two years of training as nurse-practitioners.  I don’t mean to question the wisdom of the U.S. programs.  As a matter of fact I was asked to be the first private practice physician in Northern California to act as a preceptor for a member of UC Davis’ first graduating class of nurse practitioners.  And later, as the director of a busy occupational clinic at United Airlines, my staff included two other physicians and three nurse practitioners.  With immediate supervision and physician support, a medical team including nurse practitioners both was safe and efficient.  I mention the inclination of the times, to reduce costs by using lesser-trained individuals and changing their title from “doctor” to “primary care practitioners”, because it supported the idea of treating the huge problem of addiction with “harm reduction strategies” rather than actual treatment.

Meanwhile doctors had continued to create opioid addicts by treating the acute, short-lived pain from occupational injuries and surgical procedures with too-lengthy out-patient prescriptions of highly addicting oral pain-killers like Percodan (ocycodone), over which they exhibited far too little control and supervision.  One compounding error often committed to this day is that many doctors prescribe Percodan in the common medicinal dose of “once ever four hours, round-the-clock”, when the effects of Percodan last six hours, and when the recommended dose should actually be:…once every six hours, only as needed for severe pain.

Conservative physicians were in the habit of using addicting opioids only for very short-term problems, prescribing only a few pills at a time with no automatic refills, thereby keeping close tabs on the use of the medication.   Opoids can addict a patient for life after only a very few days of use.

As a private family physician during this period, and later company doctor treating 2,000 employee injuries a month, I began to see increasing numbers of patients asking for Percodan and other opioid medication refills, who had been given the drugs for months by other doctors!  The older guideline was that long-term use of addicting pain killers should be limited to patients with an illness expected to end in death within, say, a year or two.

The doctors who ran chronic pain clinics, often dealing with such controversial entities as “fibromyalgia”, began to exert pressure upon the medical community and the state licensing boards, to train all physicians to recognize and treat chronic pain with opioids, (or to refer patients to the chronic pain clinics).  Physicians who took the more conventional conservative approach and used non-addicting medications and physical modalities to relieve pain were threatened with reprimand and discipline for “under-treatment” of patients in need if they failed to treat complaints of chronic pain with “adequate” doses and durations of prescriptions.  Special courses were mandated by state medical boards for “reeducation” in the treatment of chronic pain.

Thus, chronic-pain and harm-reduction addiction clinics gradually carved out a comfortable economic niche for themselves in the medical market.

Now, after a couple of decades of treating addictions with “harm-reducing” prescriptions of the same or with other very similar addicting substances, we are seeing a huge wave of addictions to prescription pain-killers, along with an accompanying  wave of overdose deaths.   Duh!

From my later career as a general, addiction and forensic psychiatrist, I am aware that alcoholism and addiction are drivers of the suicide rate.  Opiates and alcohol are depressant drugs.  Suicide is most prevalent among the victims of major depression and those with the characterologic depression associated with personality disorders.  Some of the people most susceptible to addictions and substance abuse are those with personality disorders.

Viewed from the other side, addicts often exhibit the personality traits of people with personality disorders, especially those  in what is called Cluster B:  Borderline, Narcissistic, Antisocial, and less obviously, Histrionic Personality Disorder.  Addicts often lie to get their drug of choice, have little regard for those whose lives they impact adversely, engage in relationships based upon rage, are controlling and manipulative. Their denial looks a lot like grandiosity.  Their treatment of the other people in their lives is described as expressing a “lack of empathy”.  But on the other hand, disregarding the feelings of others is not easily distinguished from treating others as if you were angry at them.  This kind of rage-based relationship to others is an explicit feature of some of the the Cluster B disorders, and one might generalize that it features to some degree in all the personality disorders.

In Karl Menninger’s famous and classic treatise on depression, the book called, Man Against Himself”, he describes depression as anger that, when deprived of its important external targets, reflects back upon the self.  Suicide, he says, is acting out that anger against oneself (and others), and serves both as an expression of the anger, and simultaneously as punishment for any guilt one may feel because of one’s unwarranted anger towards others.   Persistence of those dysfunctions over a lifetime is probably the reason why unresolved personality disorders are associated with a suicide rate as high as that of major depressive disorder.

It is probably not a coincidence that the 12 steps of AA can be an effective antidote to many of these dysfunctional personality traits.  Ironically, when one chooses, “harm reduction” as the dominant official response to addiction, a strategy that looks suspiciously like enabling behavior, the addiction is simply not addressed, and neither are the personality traits that may well, if they fester long enough, lead to suicide.  Thus, in this way, choosing what some call, “harm reduction” strategies to deal with addictions may, over time, tend to drive the suicide rate up.

The same flawed logic that lies behind “harm-reduction” forms of “treatment” of opiate addiction, is what some use to justify using nicotine patches and e-cigarettes for the treatment nicotine addiction.  Nicotine is more quickly and firmly addicting than heroin.  As few as four cigarettes can initiate an addiction that lasts for several decades.  While the tars, like heroin needles, carry their own additional risk, nicotine itself is still the largest known risk factor for the arterial damage that underlies heart attacks and stroke.

In a world where addictions can actually be overcome and recovery achieved, maintaining addictions with the addicting substances themselves, or similar ones, is a problem masquerading as a cure.  Utilizing 28-day inpatient programs, mandatory 12-step attendance and long-term monthly monitoring by FAA-appointed airline-physician Medical Monitors, the Human Intervention and Motivation Study (HIMS), conducted conjointly by the FAA, the Airline Pilots Association (ALPA) and several major airline medical departments, demonstrated a long-term recovery rate for alcoholic pilots of above 95%.  The airlines applied similar programs to its other employees with a comparable long-term success rate.  And the HIMS program became the model for intervention and treatment for physicians impaired by substance abuse.

One side issue mentioned in the suicide article: along with the number of suicides, the overall number of suicides by gun has increased in the past several years.  However, while gun ownership has increased steeply during the period studied, the percentage of suicides by gun, for both men and for women, has decreased, once again mitigating against the prevalence of guns as a cause of the violence of suicide.

END

April 4, 2016

It all came up again for me when the local Phoenix Mensa group published its latest membership figures. Those numbers prompted me to return to a question I first asked in the San Francisco Bay area ten years ago.  When I broached the subject at that time I had gotten blank looks, but never a response.  It was  as if people had thought mine was not a serious question, or was one intended merely to provoke anger and consternation.

If you ask most people what characterizes Mensa, they will likely say it is the high intelligence of its members.  But a little simple arithmetic reveals that is not the case.   According to the Greater Phoenix Mensa newsletter, it has about 1050 members.  At the same time I notice that the current population of the area has risen to just about four million.  Of that number roughly 2% are eligible to join Mensa, or about 80,000 people.  Meaning that only about one eligible person out of 80 seeks to become a Mensa member.   An even higher ratio of eligibles to members, about a hundred to one, occurred in the Bay Area when I lived there.

This suggests that “high intelligence” is not the primary or defining characteristic of a Mensa member.  It seemed to me that the question to ask was what characteristics were common to those who joined that differentiate them from the far greater number who could have, but did not.  Or in other words, whatever it is that impels that one person in 80 to join Mensa, is what, in the end, characterizes the organization.  Over the decades, and considering Mensa’s origins in post-war England, I had developed my own idea of what qualities, not all of them admirable, might be driving that impulse.

I asked readers of a local weekly Mensa calendar that carries some brief articles and member letters to give the matter some thought and offer some suggestions regarding the motivation to join the organization.

After a couple of days I had received a response from only one other member, Member A, so for a time we continued a direct e-mail exchange separate from the calendar/newsletter.

These exchanges, other than mine,  have been edited slightly to de-identify the writers.  Member A  suggested the following:

We Mensa members have all experienced the phenomenon that [sometimes] nobody knows what we are talking about in a social setting… [but] at a Mensa gathering, everybody understands or asks the questions that help them understand.  We are able to communicate with everybody else in the room…   We never have to ask ourselves, “Will these people understand what I am talking about?”  This gives us immediate acceptance in a Mensa group… [as we all have] had the same experience.  As [the elected leader of] of a large [city] group, and a Regional Vice Chairman, I have attended Mensa events all over the US.  I always fit right in…   Mensa gives us a social setting which overcomes the obstacles that we have faced all our lives.

To which I responded:

Thanks for your thoughts, the form of which reminded me of that quiz show where the answer is given and one must respond with the question it answers.

You seem to have described what you find when you attend a Mensa event, and perhaps what many of us seek as well, that others present will understand what we are talking about, and being assured of fitting in to a group.

However, that wasn’t quite what I asked.

To recap, what I postulated was:  “Which leads me to dispute that ‘high intelligence’ is the primary or defining characteristic of a Mensa member.  I suggest that whatever it is that impels that one person in 80 to join Mensa, is what, in the end, characterizes the organization.”

From your comments I might infer that what characterizes some, perhaps many, members, the one out of 80 eligibles who actually joins, is the desire to find a place where they fit in intellectually, and that they perhaps have not found that satisfaction elsewhere.

Makes sense to me.  Makes me wonder how and why 79 others may have been able to satisfy that need elsewhere and we have not.  (If that is a fair statement of the case.)  Anyhow, I think this is an important clue as to one factor that characterizes the one in 80 eligibles who chooses to join Mensa. I wonder if there are other factors.

Regarding your motivation to join Mensa, I will share one further thought…  For many people of intelligence, they must find the kind of acceptance and understanding of which you speak, and in satisfying quantities, among professional colleagues or avocational interest groups.  For instance, I’m thinking of university faculty groups, medical, legal, scientific or technical colloquia, or in interest groups devoted to math, science, technology, music, history, art, dance or literature.

The idea suggests itself to me that there is a correlation  between high intelligence and high achievement, and that high achievement would tend to throw highly intelligent people into contact with others of similar ability, thus generating any number of communities of thought.  Which is, I suspect, where the other 79 mensa-qualified individuals may be found to have landed through some sort of natural sorting process.

From time to time it has occurred to me to wonder whether people who resort specifically to Mensa may be that tiny fraction to whom intelligence itself, with or without commensurate achievement, is a preoccupation.  As if merely being intelligent should gain them automatic acceptance.  And I wonder whether that preoccupation is a healthy one.

That is why I have felt that it is not high intelligence that characterizes Mensa.  It is more likely the collective motivation of its members, to which your story provides some clues.

Within a few days there was a similar response from another member, Member B. who again changed the question slightly, and then said:

Subject: What Do Mensans Really Have in Common?

“We are able to communicate with everybody else in the room”

The level of acceptance at a Mensa Gathering is so different than anywhere else is exactly it for me.  comfort vs discomfort  Thank you for the question, article and response.

Meanwhile, Member A had elaborated with:

I have observed that the Mensa membership is not very outstanding in the intellectual advancement of their occupation.  There seem to be rather few Ph.D. scientists like me,  I have also observed that there is little Mensa participation in places where there is a high concentration of highly intelligent people.  For example, when I was [the elected leader] of [a Mensa group in an eastern state], we had not a single member from [the local very prestigious university], where essentially the entire student body and faculty is qualified for Mensa.

This seems to support your idea that people working in an intellectual environment find their peers in their professional environment.

I earned a PhD … the easy way.  My parents supported me through a BA and a year of graduate school.  I got married, and my wife didn’t like the academic life, so I took a job [in my field] in [an Eastern city].  I took evening classes at [another top-flight university], and after a few years, I was accepted in the graduate school there.  I took night classes to fulfill all my class credit requirements while working full time, and got a fellowship to do my research.  I completed my requirements when I was [under thirty], pretty much on track for a full time student.  I ended my education totally free of debt.  I practiced [my profession] for 50 years.  What a great ego trip!  The biggest companies in the world came to me to solve their problems.

I don’t remember ever meeting another Mensa member with an advanced degree.  You are the first!  [Ed. I am sure there must be quite a few.]

To which I responded:

That is an interesting observation.  I once knew an extremely bright and able trial lawyer, often hired by big firms to litigate cases for them, who had earned his right to sit for the bar exam by “reading law” in a judge’s office, after only one year of college and one year at a law school.

He tended to brag a bit, and I thought it was because he always felt “one down” to lawyers, even inferior ones, with a law degree.

It now occurs to me that a person like that, very bright, might think of Mensa as replacing the official credential he could have earned, but didn’t.  And such a person might also place an inordinate amount of stock in an official credential, and in belonging to an organization that excluded lesser intellects.

I myself regret never finishing law school and have felt that something was lacking, despite the fact that I later earned a medical degree and practiced medicine for more than 40 years.  The ego of a narcissist, though large in size is notoriously fragile.

Earning an advanced degree.

I lived in West Philly, just off the Baltimore Ave streetcar line, when I went to medical school at what was then the Hahnemann Medical College and Hospital of Philadelphia.  It was by then fully allopathic, but we did learn a bit about homeopathy from a historical perspective.  I was married, fresh out of the Army and already had one baby when I started medical school in 1960.  Congress considered, but failed to pass a Cold War GI  Bill in 1959, then did pass it in 1965 after I had graduated, so I had no government financial help, but my Dad became terminally ill when I was half-way through school on loans, and set up financing to complement a small scholarship, so that I could  finish after he died.  After a year of internship and a year of surgical residency, with a 36-hour-on, 12-off schedule, my wife packed up the by then four kids and was ready to leave.  So I quit my residency, got a job in an older doctor’s office, and studied on my own in order to pass the then new specialty board exams for Family Practice.  Then I opened and gradually built up a solo family practice.

My student loans were small by today’s standards, about half a year’s salary for a working physician, and I had them paid off within a decade of graduation.

I don’t think people who haven’t done it have the slightest visceral understanding of how much sacrifice, time and work it takes to get an advanced degree.  But when I was 32 my wife and three kids were still eating government cheese, beans and spam.  Not that I am complaining and I haven’t thought about that in years.  In 1965 I made only $3,000 a year, but at least we lived in a hospital-provided two-bedroom apartment in San Francisco that was clean, safe, and a block from the panhandle of Golden Gate Park.

I know from experience that this is not an unusual experience for graduate students, but the grit and determination it takes to do that may have been lacking in those members of Mensa who think that their intelligence alone should be enough to qualify them for life.

As the colloquy ended I had these further random thoughts:

1)  Perhaps while 79 out of 80 mensa-qualified folks find the comfort of automatic acceptance among professional or avocational peers, that last one has not had that need met elsewhere and discovers Mensa as a solution.

2)  Geeks are the most wonderful people!

I watch a lot of movies.  One plot-formula I can occasionally enjoy is the high school film where the “unusual” kids are excluded at first and think it is because of a defect in themselves, which of course we the audience know is not true, for they are both more clever and more compassionate. In the end the tables are turned on the superficial ones and the bullies, and the geeks are relieved of their misery and find their strength and beauty.

There are various plot devices to bring out the reversal, one of which is the school reunion film, where time has worked the required magic.  The fat kid has become slender and handsome/gorgeous.  The nerd is a tech billionaire.

In these films, of course, we, the audience, are all on the side of the geeks from the start, because we can see the qualities to which the others are blinded by their inherent cruelty and stupidity.  It does help that in the Hollywood version the underlying beauty/genius of the geeks is only thinly disguised by heavy spectacles, an unflattering hairdo, dental braces, an awkward lack of self-confidence, or cringing victimhood.  Whereas in reality, geeks are sometimes truly unattractive until they are transformed by life-magic into feeling like winners.  If that happens.

Could this be the conclusion?  For those who are never fully transformed, there is Mensa?

No, that’s not quite it either.  Interesting to think about, but I think it would take a greater number of thoughtful members to answer the question fully, of what characterizes or distinguishes mensans  from other folks.

AFTERTHOUGHT OR BIAS?

Some hears ago, upon learning that Mensa was started in England just after WW II, I began to suspect that it was both a part of, and partially the product of, the post-world-wars reaction against the British class system:  that prototypically  unfair societal rule that conferred nobility upon some and “common” status upon others merely because of birth status.

While in the invention of Mensa there may have been a vague intent to replace aristocracy with some sort of meritocracy, ironically, the founders emulated the key injustice of the thing they were most against, by tying membership in the class to a largely inborn quality, IQ, rather than to achievement.  Perhaps that was because they were focused upon a retributive exclusion of members of the aristocracy from their own favored-class status, which they effected by utilizing a quantifiable test that could never be circumvented.

While Mensa history does support that theory, at the same time knowledge of it may have biased my observations about Mensa.

END

March 27, 2016

Even in people who are purported to be very smart, addiction trumps intelligence.

A few months ago I was chagrined to find an announcement for a periodic gatherings at a local cigar shop in a local Mensa publication called Much Ado About Mensa (MAAM).

I can’t locate the exact words of the response I received from the then editor, but it was to the effect of, ‘if a member wants to announce an event we publish it, which does not imply approval or endorsement’.  Kind of a First Amendment argument, I suppose, though it did not relieve my concern about the apparent endorsement and actual “enabling” of an event that contravenes common sense and the goals of national public health policies.  What follows, for what it may be worth to others,  is the letter I had sent to the editor of the Mensa newsletter:

Nicotine Addiction

For nearly 25 years I was a nicotine addict. Happily that ended for me forty years ago. In those days no one but the tobacco companies realized that the reason people used nicotine was because it is more quickly and powerfully addicting than heroin. And of course they weren’t telling. Most people referred to smoking as a “habit”, and the companies used the euphemism “adult pastime”.   While at the same time, of course, aiming their marketing at children and teens.

When I was in college in the early ’50s, marketing representatives of the tobacco companies flooded campuses with pretty girls handing out little packages of four cigarettes. The girls would extoll the “taste” of the brands they were pushing and encourage kids (along with many other entering students I was 16) to try it for themselves. What the companies had already discovered on an empirical basis, that science finally established only many decades later, was that it takes the nicotine from merely four cigarettes to light up the brain’s nucleus accumbens with dopamine, in a repeated pattern that establishes a very strong need to have a fifth such experience.

Once started, it takes most people several decades to stop using nicotine, if they ever do, short of dying. This despite modern awareness of the severe adverse consequences to health and life itself. (Persistent use despite serious adverse consequence, by the way, is one of the features that defines an addiction.)

As it happens, a cigar or pipe full of tobacco delivers about eight times the nicotine found in a cigarette. And nicotine is easily absorbed through intact skin. There is a famous case of a worker in a plant making nicotine garden spray, for roses, who fell from her stool in a seizure. When no cause could be found she returned to work, only to fall again from her seat at work with another convulsion. It was determined that spilled nicotine spray had puddled on the contoured seat of her stool and saturated the seat of her work clothes. Enough was absorbed through the skin of her buttocks to cause the seizures, and enough had remained in her clothing to cause their repetition.

Inhaled nicotine is absorbed instantly into the blood in the lungs, and reaches the brain in about seven seconds. Many smokers know that it is better to take the first morning drag sitting on the edge of the bed, because a few seconds later a wave of mild vertigo passes through them. While some cigar and pipe smokers think they are safe because they rarely inhale, they absorb the same amount of nicotine through the mucosa of the mouth and nasopharynx as inhalers do through their lungs.

Even ignorant as I was of these matters, after attending my first autopsy in medical school in the 1960’s, and seeing the lungs of that smoker, I quit smoking for a few years. Then, when I was a surgical resident, my intern’s wife had a baby and after a protest I allowed myself to be talked into smoking an “It’s a Girl!” cigar. Still ignorant of the quantity required to re-initiate an addiction, I didn’t want to be impolite. After a month of suppressing an urge to smoke a second cigar, I went to the hospital gift shop and bought one for myself.   Over the course of a few weeks it ramped up to two or three cigars a day, then when I intentionally left the cigars behind on a family camping trip, in a moment of stress, grabbed my wife’s cigarettes and was off to another eight years of smoking a pack a day.

At twenty puffs per cigarette and twenty cigarettes per pack, that’s four hundred fairly evenly spaced intravenous jolts of nicotine to the brain per day. Just what the addicted brain ordered! However, since finally quitting for good in 1976 I have avoided 5,840,000 of those little nicotine jolts to the brain. And at today’s prices in New York City, I have avoided paying out $204,000.00 for them.

The taste of  sugared and flavored tobacco may be mildly pleasant, for the first fews puffs. After which. considered dispassionately, it is more fairly  described as painful and unpleasant. Regarding another oft-advertised benefit, nicotine is only “calming” to a nicotine addict, in whom it relieves the agitation of actual or impending withdrawal. The non-addict, who lacks the agitation of nicotine withdrawal every half hour, therefore doesn’t have need for, nor benefit from, the “calming” effect nicotine.

I am not a doctor who believes that others have to do as I do, or even follow my advice. Initially, it is for each to decide what he or she wants to do about nicotine… with the understanding, of course, that within a very short term of usage, addiction robs us of that rational choice.

Nevertheless I am bemused to find the following announcement in various event schedules and in the MAAM:

“Wed Nov 11 — 7:00 PM to ?  UP IN SMOKE  Fox Cigar Bar has a little of everything and A LOT of some things! C’mon down and enjoy stimulating conversation and the huge walk-in cigar humidor and a liquor selection that would make even the most finicky drinker do the happy dance. Flexible end time. Every 2nd Wednesday of the month. AE – Adult Event, S – Smoking OK indoors, WA – Wheelchair Access. … No RSVP required. Public event.”

And in the MAAM blog, I read a lead article about the new Fox Cigar in Scottsdale, with a huge picture. This goes beyond individual choice. This constitutes organizational behavior and support for the coordinated use of an addicting and dangerous drug with no redeeming social value whatever. This is a position worthy of reconsideration, and consultation with the membership.

[Following 28 years of Board Certified Family Practice, I returned to a three-year state hospital residency that resulted in board certifications in General and Addiction Psychiatry. I worked in that capacity, as a state hospital forensic psychiatrist, until my retirement at the beginning of the millennium.]

In the end, the Mensa publication continued to run the ad and my words were wasted on the editor and the local governing body.  But perhaps you will find them useful.  (Smiley face.)

END

March 26, 2016

In the violence last year in Paris and last week in Brussels, we are being provided with a clear foreshadowing of what is in store for us if we fail to come to grips with our own immigration problem.  Populist support for that Trump idiot reveals this problem to be one that is crucially important to everyone except Republican and Democrat politicians.

March 7, 2016

Reference:

Addicted to War: Why the U.S. Can’t Kick Militarism 

by Joel Andreas

Discussion of the proposition stated in the book title above:

It’s amazing what a good night’s sleep will do.

My bladder woke me up the other morning, and after attending to that matter, I crawled back into my warm bed for another hour’s sleep.  But my mind, once activated, drifted to the discussion at the previous evening’s Idea Exchange, a monthly discussion group to which I belong,  and to my friend Kevin’s proposition that America is “addicted” to war.  As always, I am respectful of his passion and his viewpoint, and I was impressed by the central theme of the book he presented as an example, that the U.S. has intervened militarily in the affairs of other nations 258 times.

But as I said that night, while the sheer number of interventions is impressive, and while I understand that our actions were often commercial or economic in nature, though often hypocritically posing as moral imperatives;  and while I don’t excuse or defend those which were wrong, I caution that when the incidents are considered individually, there may well have been strong and cogent reasons for sending marines to other nations.

The example I used last night was that when we have extended military force into Central America, it was often to counteract highly inflammatory political and military instability in small republics in which we had established major business interests, and where our companies and citizens were in danger.  Our aim, I suggested, is typically to restore stability.  In many cases and countries there was no good way to do that.  Often, the only feasible solution has been to support whichever dictator emerged from their internal struggle, because a dictatorship is the easiest form of government to create, and does at least provide superficial stability fairly quickly.   Democracy, as we have learned to our chagrin, is an incredibly difficult lesson to teach, especially to those who do not possess the prerequisite knowledge, literacy and traditions to understand it.

In any case, I think it is is misleading to merely speak in generalities condemning the nature of the American character, based upon the number of interventions alone, without looking at and judging them individually.

What popped me out of my cozy bed this morning was a sudden memory that had eluded me the other evening during the discussion.  In illustrating his point that we have sent our marines to far-flung places, with the implication that our action was based upon a proclivity for warlike imperialism rather than protecting the legitimate sovereign interests of our own land, Kevin had mentioned Mexico and Libya, the venues mentioned in the Marine Hymn:  … “From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli”.  As it happens, I once knew something about the example of Tripoli.

I recently wrote an essay about the Barbary Pirates, and the writing impelled me to to a little on-line research, as a result of which I remember some of the story about our first War as a nation.

Though not often nor for very long at a time, I have been a merchant seaman off and on since I was 17.  A close relative is a licensed maritime engineer, has worked on merchant ships, and in the Navy as a pilot, and for a time as a civilian pilot he worked on the ships that supplied food and munitions to a ten-nation coalition of warships that were on patrol, protecting shipping from Somali pirates off the Horn of Africa in the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean.  In 2002 I was a volunteer member of a science party aboard a research vessel in the waters between the Indian Ccean and the South China Sea.  On our ship there was always a lookout for pirates, and there was a protocol in place for repelling boarders (using fire hoses as we were unarmed). Therefor piracy, as you may know from my previous postings, is for me not a Disney movie, but a real and personal thing.

As you may also know, the ships of any nation, while on the high seas have always been regarded in international law as representing the sovereign soil of the nation where they are registered and whose flag they fly.

During several centuries after the Muslim conquest of the region, the waters of the Mediterranean Sea were threatened by the Barbary Pirates, headquartered in the Barbary States, including Tripoli, Libya.  They plundered and captured or sank the merchant ships of many nations from the Med to Iceland, and held their crews for ransom.  If the ransom was not paid, the seamen joined the ranks of nearly a million slaves thus taken and sold throughout Islam.  By 1801, the Barbary Pirates were holding some 600 American seamen for ransom, and at home there was consternation and controversy about whether to pay.  Emissaries were sent from the U.S. to negotiate.  At some point in the discussions, the ambassador representing the Libyan caliphate was reported to have said:  “It was written in their Koran, that all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave; and that every mussulman who was slain in this warfare was sure to go to paradise.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Barbary_War

Which was enough for President Jefferson to decide a different resolution was necessary.  He sent what were the first few ships in our fledgling Navy, with their contingent of Marines, to Tripoli to discuss matters further with the Pasha.

My point being that, to be fair to ourselves as Americans, we need to look not at the raw figure of 258 excursions outside our sovereign borders, but also the reasons for and the results of each of those excursions.  Any judgment we reach should reflect our overall behavior considering the options available to us, and should not be based upon whatever worst cases can be found, although there may be some of those.

Moreover, I think it only fair to subtract from the total number, all cases where the U.S. was invited or requested to help by the then duly constituted government of the nation involved.

For instance, here is another story about a military action that may or may not have made it into the collection of 258:

In 1988 a coup d’etat was attempted by Tamil Tiger rebels from Sri Lanka, when they landed armed troops in the Maldives, a group of islands about 500 miles south of the tip of India in the Indian Ocean.  Previously a sultanate, the Maldives had elected a president a few years earlier, and had become a republic.  When the Tamil Tigers attacked, the Maldivian President requested the help of the Indian Navy, which was some distance away.  However, an American naval force consisting of a few warships was just then transiting eastward on the way back from the Persian Gulf towards the Straits of Malacca, passing south of the Maldives.  At the request of the Indian Navy, they dispatched a cruiser and a frigate at flank speed northward, with orders to find the rebels, land a combat team, and seek to protect the American medical students present on the island until the Indian Navy could arrive.

The American cruiser soon encountered engine trouble, but the frigate continued on, throwing a huge rooster-tail in an impressive display of speed.  During the run, the ship’s helos were stripped of their usual anti-submarine sono-buoy gear, and fitted with door guns and a bit of armor plating under the pilot’s and passenger seats, in preparation for encountering ground fire and evacuating the medical students.

The Tamil Tiger force had landed in rubber boats from an unknown “mother ship” and when the helos took off to fly ahead of the frigate and reach the embattled students at the soonest possible moment, they were instructed to keep an eye out for the “mother ship”.  Approaching the islands, one helo co-pilot spotted among a smattering of local shipping, a small freighter that just didn’t look right to his practiced eye. Upon closer inspection it seemed to him to  have been stripped of some of the king posts, booms and winches one would expect to see on a small, intercoastal cargo ship.

The helo reported the suspicious vessel, which proved to be the mother ship towards which, unknown to its pilots, the invading force was already attempting to retreat in their high-speed, rigid-hull inflatable boats.  Shortly after which, having been given its coordinates, the Indian Navy found the freighter and sank it.

Upon their arrival to the island, the helos learned that the rebels had fled, and that the American students were safe and did not need further rescuing.  They returned to their ship, which then rejoined its original convoy home.

This, as I recall, is not very dissimilar to what happened in Granada, when Regan sent troops there to protect a hundred or so American students in their “offshore” medical school.

I suspect that the contrast between the story about Tripoli as told in the “America’s War Addiction” book, and the Wikipedia account regarding the Barbary Pirates might well uncover and illustrate an anti-American bias on the part of the book’s author, but I haven’t read the book and Kevin has, so, for now,  I’ll leave that judgment to him.

END

February 19, 2016

In an on-line discussion group to which I belong, a participant asked:

” Is the pope promoting a world without borders?”

The pope, maneuvered by a reporter into intruding on the current  primary election campaign, had said that a candidate who wanted to build walls rather than bridges was “not a Christian”.  The candidate himself, loudmouth, intemperate narcissist bully Donald Trump, had actually said only that he would bar immigration from Syria until we could be assured that we actually had a way to investigate whether applicants for refugee or immigrant status were who they claimed to be, rather than terrorists bent on murder of Americans.

But my interpretation of the intent of the pope was, “Of course he is!”

The Catholic church has always offered sanctuary and support to illegal entrants, because, it seems to me, it considers their Catholicism more important than the sovereign laws and boundaries of the United States.  And the larger the Catholic fraction of the population, the more likely it is that Catholic dogma will once again influence the formation of the laws of a powerful nation.   Ahhh, just like the old days when King Philip of Spain, a creature of the papacy, was the dominant political power in Europe!

According to my understanding of history, not many centuries ago the Catholic church put kings on the thrones of many important Western countries, and ruled through ecclesiastical and political control of those same monarchs.  Within living memory church control still dominated the laws in Ireland and Italy:  for example laws pertaining to divorce and abortion.

Doesn’t the pope himself live in a theocratic city-state, Vatican City, where he is the high priest and head of state?  As Bishop of Rome he is regarded as the Catholic Christ’s “vicar on earth”. He is regarded as appointed or deputized directly, not merely metaphorically, by their god.

As I learned it, the concept of national sovereignty and the legitimacy and  inviolability of national borders was formalized by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.  As it happened, one of the sovereignties defined by the treaty was Holland, then a secular republic and not dominated by the Catholic church. Whether there were other such antecedents I do not know offhand, but that example set up conditions for a power struggle that persists down to the present day, between the Establishmentarians, who favor linkage between the state and the church, and the Disestablishmentarians, who favor separation between ecclesiastical and secular powers.  (Remember those simpler days when antidisestablishmentarianism was regarded as the longest word in the English language?)

When this country was formed, although by people who were generally religious, a separation of church doctrine from the laws of the state, and the toleration of disparate religious beliefs were chosen as guiding principles, following the persuasive philosophies of John Locke and other Enlightenment thinkers.

Logically, the pope’s position, that the religion that unites people is more important than the sovereign boundaries that separate them, supports the “one world” idea, but inevitably at the expense of the ability of a secular government to rule by its own laws, enforceable and enforced within its own boundaries.

It has seemed to me that there are basically two ways to unite disparate territories into larger, more global, entities:  1) by consensus and agreement among the parties, or by 2) the imposition of a stronger, larger authority and power from outside or above.

Another of our discussants pointed out that the European Union (EU) is an example of the voluntary dissolution of internal borders, with the result that, to the consternation of its member nations, it has recently become apparent that the EU has no way left of controlling its outer borders and has essentially permitted invasion of its territories in the name of immigration and sanctuary for refugees.

Since it seems unlikely that far-flung countries with different languages, economies, cultures and values will be getting together by agreement any time soon, and we do have examples of forced aggregation, like the welding of Serbian, Croatian and christian elements by Marshall Tito to found Yugoslavia, it seems to me that the One World idea must appear to the pope to be an opportunity for Catholicism once again to become the overarching power and authority.

But for now he’ll settle for eroding the critically important idea of the sovereignty of national borders, ours included.

END

[Ed. When the above post was later published on a Mensa blog it elicited two comments from readers. One said, “I don’t know if you wrote anything worth reading because your lack of objectivity reflected by your adjectives early in your writing instantly made me think taking out the garbage was more constructive use of my time.”

Another was from a reader called Patrick, to whom I responded in some detail in a letter to the editor of that blog. That editor responded that she had received my response, and was treating it as a potential contribution, while “trying to give other folks the opportunity to participate as well”.

I understand and respect the role of an editor, having written for editors since 1957, and am comforted that my responsibility and authority end with the submission of a piece. However, it happens that I am the editor of this blog, and it is my editorial choice to include the follow-up discussion here, in continuity with the original piece.

So here it is:

October 2, 2016

This is awkward. So awkward that when a letter first appeared a month or more ago I decided not to respond to it. But the format of this on-line Mensa blog is that a letter personally critical of me by name will remain in the archive forever, and a lack of response on my part would probably be slightly more awkward than this response will be.

First the letter, identified only as from “Patrick”, went as follows:

“In response to your request about the [attraction of the Mensa newsletter in blog format], I did read the recent [on-line Mensa] Blog. That said, doubt I will do so in the future if screeds like the one from Dr. [TheOldDoc] will be the norm. Rather than using the blog as a bully pulpit, if these sort of things are going to be posted then please enable comments from the readership to be posted in response.”

Taking last things first: the letter was published on the Blog among “Responses From Readers”. So presumably, any comment Patrick had wanted to make could have been done in the very letter in which he complained that he hadn’t been afforded the chance to make a comment. But perhaps he may not have guessed that.

Next, the reason I delayed responding is this: I write opinion pieces nearly every day. I had submitted more than one to the Mensa blog, and couldn’t recall which particular “screed” [Definition: long and tedious] might have exceeded Patrick’s interest or attention span. 😉 Some people find everything I write long and tedious. But I grant that by some definitions, “screeds” are also often accusatory or complaining.

So it was a mystery. Curious, I looked back through the blog archive and found that it included an essay based upon a then current news item, which I had called, “Is the Pope Catholic?”, after the famous rhetorical question. In it I had ruminated about the separation of church and state, and the desire for globalization versus the importance of sovereign boundaries. I had mentioned Ireland and Italy as examples of countries in which, until recently, church doctrine still dictated secular law.

Seizing upon the only clue I had, I realized that the writer was named after the Catholic patron saint of Ireland, Patrick.

Thus it was my speculation that Patrick was referring to that particular contribution of mine. Well there was one other half-clue. Patrick had characterized the publication of my opinion as, “using the Blog as a bully pulpit”. This again suggested that an essay about religion might have been involved, the more so if one infers that Patrick misunderstands the concept of a “bully pulpit”, which refers to neither bullying nor religion.

Wikipedia offers this, which is the definition I have always understood as coming from Theodore Roosevelt:

“A bully pulpit is a conspicuous position that provides an opportunity to speak out and be listened to.

“This term was coined by President Theodore Roosevelt, who referred to the White House as a “bully pulpit”, by which he meant a terrific platform from which to advocate an agenda.

“Roosevelt used the word bully as an adjective meaning “superb” or “wonderful”, a more common usage in his time than it is today. Another expression which survives from this era is “bully for you”, synonymous with “good for you”.”

Because of which I can only point out that calling the Mensa Blog a “bully pulpit” is a bite without venom. More of a kiss, really.

Again, and finally, to Patrick’s message. Here is how I read it. Others may differ. He didn’t like something unspecified that I wrote and wouldn’t read the Mensa Blog if things like it became the norm.

Well, I’m fine with his decision regarding what he would and would not read. Who else could decide that?

To the extent, however, that it may imply that the Mensa Blog should be a “safe place”, in the context of the “snowflake generation” as described in Wikipedia and elsewhere, I feel otherwise:

“Generation Snowflake, or Snowflake Generation, is a term that refers to young people, typically university or college students, who seek to avoid emotionally charged topics, or dissenting ideas and opinions. This may involve support of safe spaces and trigger warnings in the university setting. It has also been used by The Daily Telegraph and GQ writers to refer to Millennials.”

To that extent I would respond with a letter reported recently to have been sent to students entering my Alma Mater, the University of Chicago, this fall, which said in part

“Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so called ‘trigger warnings,’ we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.

”Fostering the free exchange of ideas reinforces a related University priority — building a campus that welcomes people of all backgrounds. Diversity of opinion and background is a fundamental strength of our community. The members of our community must have the freedom to espouse and explore a wide range of ideas.”

When that letter appeared I was especially proud of my old university.

With respect,

TheOldDoc

December 10, 2015

The chorus from the rousing World War II song by Don Reid and Sammy Kaye goes, “Let’s remember Pearl Harbor”, the Pearl Harbor of December 7, 1941. Which I do, remembering the radio broadcasts as clearly as I remember the images of planes flying into the twin towers.

Three days ago the Arizona Republic carried a full-page story on page one about what the writer called the “surprise attack” on our fleet in the harbor in Hawaii. It is the sunken wreck of the battleship USS Arizona which lies at the bottom of the harbor, a memorial that still entombs 1,102 United States sailors and Marines killed in the attack.

1941 was a simpler time.  On that Sunday morning we had been betrayed by an act of perfidy that flouted the agreement among nations that war must be declared before any one would launch an attack upon any other.  Therefore, this was not a mere “surprise” attack, as modern historical revisionists like to term it.  It wasn’t like a ‘surprise’ birthday party or being caught napping by a declared enemy, where our side might share some of the blame for the result.  It was, to us at the time, more like the deep betrayal of being stabbed in our beds by a neighbor.  Therefore we called it a “sneak attack” fully intending to remember the event as an international and a personal betrayal. For modern writers to re-name it a “surprise” dishonors the true history of the event as recalled by us who were alive at the time. President Roosevelt called it, “A day that will live in infamy”. A prediction that, in the service of mere political correctness, is being subtly eroded after only 74 years.

Some historical revisionists have gone so far as to declare that it was our own fault that the declaration of war did not reach us until after the attack. However, from a close reading of the sequence of events, and given the slow speed of diplomatic short-wave communications at the time, it is pretty clear that the weekend delay in notification was engineered by Tokyo to catch Hawaii undefended and mainland America sound asleep.

Today the Japanese are our allies. I often chat with Japanese ham radio operators on the air.  But on December 7, 1941, six weeks after my 7th birthday, “the Japs” became, for several years to come, our despised and mortal enemies.

Personally, I do remember Pearl Harbor, and my eight uncles who helped get us through that war, two of whom were high school students when it started, and all of whom survived the war, fighting in Europe and in the Pacific.

Before becoming overly concerned about the possibility of offending our friends, the Japanese, it might be well to consider the following event, which took place in the late fall of 2014.   A Delta Airlines 757 suffered an engine failure between Osaka and Guam and diverted to an airstrip on Iwo Jima where they made an emergency landing.  Iwo Jima is now a Japanese military shrine and only very small delegations of Americans, officials and war veterans, are ever allowed to set foot on the island, and only on four separate days of the year, one of which is the date of the invasion where we lost 8,000 Marines on the first day.

Because Iwo Jima is listed as an emergency landing field by international aviation treaties, the Japanese had to permit the Delta jet to land there. However, because it was an American plane, none of the crew or the mostly Japanese tourist passengers was allowed to set foot on the island shrine.  They sweltered in the disabled airliner for seven hours, until a rescue plane from Hawaii landed and they were herded across a few feet of tarmac to that aircraft, which was instructed to take off immediately.

Two Japanese mechanics from Delta remained with the downed jet, but were forbidden to leave the plane.

Meanwhile, another Delta captain, co-pilot and several mechanics were flown to Osaka to wait for permission from the Japanese government to go to the island with a spare engine, change the engine, and fly the empty plane out of there.  They waited in Osaka for several days for permission to be given… then several more days before a decision was reached by Japanese authorities.

Finally authorization was received for a 747 to land on Iwo Jima with a recovery engine, mechanics and flight crew.  The minute the new engine and personnel were unloaded, the 747 was required to leave the island.  Fresh food supplies sent along for the recovery crew were not allowed to be taken off the jumbo jet.  So for several more days on the island the new crew ate emergency rations, “MREs”, from the disabled plane, slept on board, and used its overflowing and stinking toilet facilities while changing the engine. For the duration of the effort they were confined to within a few feet of the plane itself, and the plane sat far out on the airfield, quite a distance from its tower, buildings and facilities.  The work would have gone more quickly if the Japanese had allowed them to borrow the use of a fork-lift to shift the spare engine into position under the plane, which they did not.  Instead they complained about how long the work was taking.

When the failed and destroyed engine had been changed, the crew undertook necessary hours of complex planning calculations and paperwork required to plan the flight back to Japan.  Again, the Japanese complained at how long it was taking.  They were told it would go much faster if the navigator/communicator could have access to the airfield’s internet, but, incredibly, the Japanese commander claimed not to have any internet connection at their island military base.  Finally, when it was calculated that the remaining fuel would barely get the plane back to Osaka, the Japanese refused a request to provide a small amount of additional jet fuel, though a supply was clearly visible sitting in tanker trucks on the field.  The plane, having sat for so long in the autumn heat and humidity that had made the repair process so miserable, was showing visible signs of corrosion inside the aluminum hull, but was judged airworthy by the recovery mechanics.

Taking off with scant fuel, the crew circled Mount Suribachi, made a last pass over the length of Iwo Jima, gazing down at the east and west invasion beaches where a landing craft could be seen still rusting in shallow water, and headed northwest towards Osaka.  They landed safely in Japan with minimal fuel remaining in the tanks.

None of the crew ever knew why our purported allies and friends were so reluctant to offer even the slightest assistance, but it seemed clear that someone in the chain of decision in Japan and on the island was remembering World War II.

As the once-disabled plane was taxiing out to leave Iwo Jima, around the corner of a hanger and out of sight of the base commandant and officialdom, a dozen Japanese mechanics stood just inside the hanger door waving and holding up Japanese and American flags, presumably flags used during the four official days annually when, on Iwo Jima, the war dead of both nations are honored. Mutual respect within the aviation family had finally triumphed over the bitter pettifogging of officialdom.

END

9/6/15

A couple of years after taking a job as a flight attendant a young woman converted to Islam. Last year she learned that in addition to not drinking alcohol, she was also not supposed to serve it to others.

Since that time her employer airline attempted to accommodate her inability to perform that part of her job and she has been able to get co-workers to serve the drinks requested by her passengers. Until another flight attendant lodged a formal complaint, saying that the Muslim employee was not doing her job.

Subsequent to which the airline fired her and she is suing to regain her position.

This is the slippery slope down which the Hobby Lobby, Wheaton College and Ave Maria University cases have launched us. From which it has become clear that evangelical protestants, the Catholic church and now Muslims refuse to understand the concept of separation of church and state. What is far more disturbing is that the Supreme Court of the United States appears to share that lack of understanding.

Hobby Lobby and Wheaton College, each acting in the capacity of an employer, claimed exemption from state and federal laws regarding the provision of medical insurance to employees, to the extent that those laws required the provision of medical coverage for contraception and abortion services.

The claim was that to require them to provide such coverage contravened their religious principles and infringed upon their religious freedom.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; … ”

It seems to me that the key factor here is that rights are not absolute.   My mom used to say, “The right of a man to swing his hands around ends where my nose begins.”

A person is free to exercise his or her religion up to the point where it infringes significantly upon rights of others: rights that are equally guaranteed under the Constitution and our laws. The “antiestablishment” clause means, among other things, that the rules of no religion may automatically become law governing or adversely affecting others not of that faith.

In Hobby Lobby and Wheaton College, the employers, by denying certain insurance coverage to their employees, sought to deny those employees, no matter what their religious beliefs might be, certain medical treatment that contravened the dogma of the employer’s religion. In the context of the Constitution, the free exercise of one’s religion does not include exercising it over someone else!

 Therefore, in those prior cases I would argue that the institutions were acting not in the capacity of religious organizations, but “in the capacity of”  (qua) employers within the state and federal definitions of that term, and as such they could be held to the requirements of employers with regard to such things as safety standards, taxation, and the provision of medical insurance benefits.

When cultural dictates or religious dogma conflict with the law … the law wins. If this were not the case, how could we hold fathers legally responsible for the “honor killing” of their daughters. Would any American suggest that we should not?

Sometimes it is helpful to look at or to pose a more extreme example in order to clarify an issue.   Suppose a woman were to work as a bartender. If she then became a Muslim and declined to serve alcohol, could she continue to collect her paycheck by claiming religious freedom?

In an analogous situation, the case of a medical disability, a company is required by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to provide “reasonable accommodation” to the person with the disability. Some things are reasonable and some are not. For instance, an airline is not required to hire or retain a totally blind pilot.

I believe that even with one Muslim flight attendant working a flight, given that the serving of food and beverages, including alcoholic ones, is a significant part of the job description, and given the workload shouldered by each employee, it might not be reasonable to offer accommodation. What if one day the staffing computer assigned four Muslim flight attendants to the same flight?

Though people of many religions may not see it that way, and Islam chief among them, adopting a religious belief or ideology is a matter of free and individual choice. In this country, according to our traditions, values and laws, no one is permitted to act out a religious belief that seeks to impose behaviors compliant to its rules upon others with different, or no, religious beliefs.

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