six-pack

I was wondering how to broach this subject of experience without a) being overly political or b) without rehashing things all of you have heard a million times in the last 6 months. I think it might help if I mention that Sarah Palin, although the impetus for this post, is not the only reason I'm writing this. As I am in the process of gaining deep specific knowledge for the first time in my life, and grappling with fears that I may never get into medical school, issues of knowledge, expertise, and training have become increasingly pertinent for me.

I'll just come out and say it: I am scared to death that someone as unapologetically average as Sarah Palin could possibly become our next president.

Sure, I've whined a lot in the past 8 years about George W. Bush not being as bright as some sixth-graders I've known, but at least he'd gone through the motions; he pretended that he was competant. Ms. Palin hasn't gone to college. More than that, she seems to demean the importance of intelligence and experience, relying on the innate goodness that supposedly comes from being normal.

For these last two weeks I have been going to a graduate-level Principles of Neuroscience class. During the course of the three-hour class, Dr. Singer seamlessly switches between complex physics concepts, math I've never seen, biochemistry, and evolutionary biology. Although I'm not expected to have as deep of mastery on all those subjects as he has, it's becoming clear to me that it is simply not possible to understand the human nervous system without having a pretty substantial chunk of other branches of science down pat.

I'll admit that it can be uncomfortable (read: humbling) to listen to Dr. Singer lecture. His brilliance adds a layer of seperation between himself and anyone who hasn't done the preparatory work to understand his lectures. It's not that he can't explain difficult concepts simply, it's that difficult concepts need to be understood within their natural context if they are going to be of any use; "Shia=good, Sunni=bad" might get you through a high-school history test if it's multiple choice, but would-be presidents require a slightly more nuanced understanding.

Palin has proven that she can be charismatic, but I worry deeply about her ability--in the same way that would worry about any other Joe six-pack--to understand the world in complex enough ways to lead our country.

I recognize that I am in no position to pass judgement. Ms. Palin has had a lot of success and some real-world experience in governance. Furthermore, she is probably much more intelligent than the Couric interview would lead us to believe; heaven knows that I stumbled over arguments all the time in debate.

I guess what finally gets me angry in the end is that I am struggling so hard to gain expertise, only to have the very concept mocked by national politics. Since when was being average a virtue? What self-respecting company would hire the most middling applicant they could, simply because they were unexceptional? Do you go to the most average mechanic you can find? The most average dentist? So for those of you Republicans out there (and I know that some of you read this blog), when you vote for McCain/Palin, please do so because you think they will be the best suited to run the country, not just because you can relate to them better.

Note: I stand corrected about Palin attending college. I misinterpreted her statement in her interview with Katie Couric in which she said: "I’m not one of those who maybe came from a background of, you know, kids who perhaps graduate college and their parents give them a passport and give them a backpack and say go off and travel the world.No, I’ve worked all my life. In fact, I usually had two jobs all my life until I had kids. I was not a part of, I guess, that culture. The way that I have understood the world is through education, through books, through mediums that have provided me a lot of perspective on the world."

Thanks to Charles for pointing that out to me.

Laodicean health care

Having as much time as I do, I listen to podcasts constantly. Quickly depleting my old wave of standbys, I recently found a podcast of the Intelligence Squared debates and have been working my way through their archives. In much the same what that you will hear a newly-learned word a half dozen times in the week after you learned it, the subject of health care policy kept popping up this week after I listened to the debate on this subject.

I promise that I am not going to turn my blog into a forum for me to continue my days of college debate. As much as I miss debating, an activity where I could be unnecessarily mean to nice kids from Colorado and could argue passionately about meaningless platitudes or policy decisions that would never possibly be considered, it too often devolved into a pedantic exercise in defining terms or nit-picking the rules of debate. Instead of trying to have a debate with all of you, I wanted to point out a few things about health care in America that are somehow missing from the national debate. I'm not trying to indoctrinate anyone to my particular view--you'll see that I am still very torn on the issue myself--but rather to raise the level of dialogue beyond what can easily be found in the popular media.

Do you realize that we already have socialized medicine in America? In most debates about what America can do about their health care system, the socialists line up against the capitalists to debate whether America should switch to a one-payer system or whether we should keep the market-based system that we have now. Individual anecdotes are then traded ad nauseam about the beauties or horrors of either system.

In actual fact, U.S. law prevents hospitals from refusing basic care to anyone who shows up at at an emergency room. This prohibition means that emergency rooms nationwide have turned into the primary care facilities of everyone who can't afford normal health care. This continues until the emergency room goes out of business (someday the national government will learn the same lesson: you can't keep on spending without taking anything in before you eventually become insolvent). After a hospital goes bust, the government steps in to shore up the hospital's finances if it decides that that hospital is necessary for the public health of that area.

My point is simply that we should stop pretending that nationalized health care would be such a departure from where we are right now. Either we should have the resolve to be capitalists, shooing the poor out of our hospitals to die of their gunshot wounds, diabetes, and emphysema (I mean really, they should have moved out of the ghetto if they didn't want to get shot), or we should simply embrace the fact that we're going to pay for them anyway and try and find the cheapest way possible to do it.

While I'm talking about uncomfortable issues, I should probably mention rationing. No one is so naive as to believe that we can give away MRIs, chemotherapy, and AZT for free and still have enough for everybody. The classic argument against nationalized health care is that the rest of the developed world--all of whom have a one-payer system--has long lines (I guess they would be queues, since they're in Britain) for specialized care. The rich, as well as the poor, have to wait for months to get treatment for diseases such as lung cancer; many of them die as a result because the most important factor in surviving such diseases is how soon you start treatment. Clearly, rich Americans, the ones who directly or indirectly end up paying for most of the medical costs in this country, are not going to stand idly by while a poor person gets life-saving treatment instead of them. Most of you would probably chaff at the thought too; how many of us are really so charitable that we would give our lives so that a poor person can get top-rate care (on our dime)?

In closing, I just want to point out that health care in America could probably be better. We spend more than any country in the world yet we have, by many measures, a system which is wildly inefficient and ineffective. We have neither a free-market system nor a universal one. If the government is unable to reform health care in any meaningful way, might I recommend that you do what I do--lie to BYU about having health insurance, put away the money saved by not having insurance, and then blow your entire bank account by traveling to Europe if you don't get sick.

P.S.-if any of you are religious, please pray for me that I don't get a horrible disease that isn't covered by my cut-rate insurance; you'd end up paying for it anyway after I declare bankruptcy, so I suppose it's already in your best interest.

We believe in the literal gathering of Israel . . .

Speaking of Y-groups, I was a Y-Group leader once. I still have as proof the verdantly green shirt with its cute little circles of slighter lighter, slightly more emetic shades. Even though I have never been known for my school spirit, I am still puzzled by the color choice. So yes, they entrusted me with a new batch of bright-eyed Freshmen. I was to show them around, encourage them to participate in activities, and yes . . . galvanize excitement with some rousing rounds of duck, duck, goose.

I'm sure it is of little surprise that the first thing I did with my little Freshmen was to tell them that they were not special. "Everyone else here is just. Like. You," I said. "If you think these buildings are ugly on the outside, just wait until you're stuck in one of them." I wasn't completely a demotivator: I did give practical advise for each person based on their majors, I clued them into Smith's as being the place to get caffeine. I told them which religion teachers to avoid and how to get out of compulsory dating (most of the students were amle). I taught them to say "hell." Game time was to be conducted during and after lunch. I stood awkwardly half in and half out of the globular circle my little group had attempted to form and told them to do what they wanted. After a half-hearted attempt at some head-tapping goosery ended in several people in the circle refusing to chase when goosed, they all gave up and started mocking the other group members, who earnestly ran the requisite goose-laps, determined to convince themselves that they were having fun. As orientation activities dragged on, I told my students truncated, disillusioned versions of what they would learn at the activities and encouraged them to skip. I was most adamant about skipping the Honor Code song. By the last activity, not a single student in my group showed up, and I got to go home, mission accomplished.

My last year at BYU, I saw one of those students. He was apparently very excited to see me. He said I gave "awesome advice." I thought it was funny. Anyway, if there was a point to that anecdote it was probably this: Daine and I were officially put in charge the Little Ones this last week at church.

or of good report

During my first week at BYU I went to a "Y group" activity, basically a day camp for disabled 9-year-olds that has been appropriated, unchanged, as a bonding activity for new BYU students. As I struggled to think of something to draw on my name tag (we had to draw things we liked so that other people could see a rudimentarily drawn basketball and know immediately that they wanted to be your friend), I feared that I had gone to the wrong university. That feeling grew stronger as my group, following the cues of every group on DT field, started playing Duck Duck Goose. Finally, after we had all shared our thoughts on why we loved BYU football so much, I was able to escape while they were dividing us into teams for Red Rover. I was in full-blown existential crisis. Although I had never fit cleanly into any group in high school (my best friends and I shared no discernible demographic or overriding interest), I always held out hope that I made sense within the broader LDS community. That first "Y-Day" activity showed me that my impressions of what I thought the Church to be were wildly mistaken. I was annoyed by much of what I saw in Mormon culture and I gravitated towards people and things which were often critical of it.

Now this is not to say that I plan on leaving the Church, just because it has made embarrassing mistakes in the past, has a membership I don't particularly like (speaking collectively and not individually), or because I strongly disagree with some of the current policies and stances (I will probably rant against a few specifics in later posts). The reason I bring this all up is actually because I have seen some things lately that make me proud to be alive, proud of other's accomplishments in ways that I am so rarely proud of my own, or my Church's actions.

First off, I just got back from seeing Wicked. I was blown away. It wasn't merely the fantastic singing, fabulous spectacle of costumes and dancing, or even the distractingly cool Oriental Theater as much as I was impressed by the fact that the show had profoundly good messages. Too often I hear derisive comments directed at "the World" as if non-LDS people were some homogeneous group, hell-bent on killing babies, kicking puppies, and burning American flags. I must admit to feeling a pang of shame that I felt more uplifted by Wicked than I feel most of the time that I go to church. As with all good art, however, I do feel proud to appropriate it into my theology, believing that God has directed me to seek out things that are virtuous, lovely, praiseworthy, or of good report.

Earlier this week, I listened to the latest episode of This American Life entitled "Go Big" which documents Geoffrey Canada's attempt to make Harlem a better place. I won't go into the specifics, because I think that all of you should listen to the first part of this episode yourselves, but this show has made me happier and full of renewed hope for humanity since I listened to it.

At such a time as this, where my anger and disillusionment are being stoked almost daily by the presidential race, Proposition 8 (again, more to come later), and ball-jointed dolls, I wanted to share some hope that there is some good still in the world. If you find yourself in a situation where you need something to draw on a name tag, might I recommend a tiny caricature of Ira Glass or the Wicked Witch of the West? On second thought, I think I would recommend that you leave immediately when asked to make such a name tag. Duck Duck Goose is sure to follow.

Schadenzwiespältigkeit

My title for today would roughly translate into "ambivalence at other people's sorrow."

So the bailout failed. I would love to deliver a long diatribe about whether it was a good thing that it failed or about how the world is now going to careen out of control, killing us all. Unfortunately, I don't think that I have a good enough grasp on what is really going on to have that passionate of an opinion either way. But for whatever reason, it made me really happy to learn that the bailout had failed.

On the one hand, I am kind of scared about the possibility of a recession. It would be rather unfortunate if people lost their jobs, got evicted from their houses, or were unable to, say, take out massive student loans to get superfluous Master's degrees in Neurobiology and Physiology. For all the damage that big business sometimes does to hurt the environment, screw over customers, and enslave the third world, it also makes electricity, chocolate, and Harry Potter books, all things that I'm rather fond of. Maybe I've just read too much Ayn Rand (a little goes a long way, I'm learning), but a functioning world economy still sounds like a good idea to me.

The rest of me, however, wants a lot of people to suffer for this whole sub-prime collapse. People have been recklessly chasing the idea of owning a home--chief among suburbanite concerns--to such an absurd degree that they borrowed more than they should have, spent more than they had (take out that second mortgage to pay for those much needed cruises and extravagant weddings!), and gambled on the fact that the economy would always pay for their irresponsibility. The lenders were equally the blame, convincing poor, stupid people that they should borrow more than they could ever repay, just so long as the closing costs get paid upfront.

When the dust settles I think we (or any of us who do or will pay taxes in the future) are going to have to pay for the irresponsibility that so many of us indulged in. The idea of handing Henry Paulson, someone who has apparently done a wretched job keeping our economy from tanking, $700 billion dollars to give it another go just doesn't really sound all that appealing. I'm rather glad that they're going back to the drawing board to come up with something better.

I can't really resist taking a pot shot here, so feel free to stop reading now if you don't want to indulge in the vile sentiments that inevitably come from horrible people like myself. 

When the world starts to fall apart like this we are supposed to be able to look to a leader to console us, explain the problem, and take positive steps towards fixing whatever is broken. Unfortunately for all of us, however, we don't really have a leader in America anymore. George W. Bush has done such an abysmal job, shown himself so unbelievably incompetent, and has practiced such mind-bogglingly irresponsible and obvious nepotism and corruption for his tenure in the White House, even his own party wants nothing to do with him. When he most wanted to step in and do something to help prevent the world from falling apart, he realized that he'd so badly botched his previous chances that nobody is listening to him anymore. The Republicans won't listen to him, Americans don't trust him when he tells us that the world needs this plan, and people like me smile contentedly when his best efforts now fall on deaf ears (even when it's possibly to my own detriment). Maybe Mr. Bush finally got a little bit of what was coming to him. Maybe we all did.

Behold your little ones

Yesterday Amanda and I started our first day of our new church calling, teaching the CTR 6B class (there are two, of which we were given the tamer group). Now as a general rule, kids make me rather uneasy; children, much like dogs, can sense my fear and (justifiably) like me less for it. 

Unfortunately, the calling means that we're gong to have to be much more punctual than we're used to being. Sunday school might start twenty minutes late, but primary actually starts almost on time; the kids with late parents just miss the opening song. On the plus side, however, I get to be with Amanda for the whole block of church.

Who, you might be asking yourself right now, would trust us with their children? Ironically enough, the second councillor in the bishopric, the father of one of our class, is the one who offered us the calling. He didn't even seem worried that we might teach him things that he might not agree with.

We told our class that Jesus drank wine.

I know that their well-intentioned parents were simply trying to keep their world a little simpler. It's also possible that their parents honestly believe that Jesus actually drank grape juice, citing the fact that the Greek words would be the same. Still, I don't believe in teaching half-truths or faith-promoting lies; how can we expect kids to be able to the tell the difference between Santa or the Tooth Fairy (who are patent fabrications we claim are real) and God (who is real but whose characteristics are complicated and often uncertain)? Why should they believe us when we tell them that God is real after they find out we lied to their faces about where their Christmas presents come from?

All told, I'm surprised at how attached I already am. Our kids, Taft, Anna, Kaela, and Tayan (I think I screwed up the spelling of that last name, but that's what you have to expect when you invent names), all seem incredibly smart and earnest. We made cranes and colored them during class and Kaela's turned out better than mine (this is the girl who said that she wanted to be an artist when she grows up. Once, she apparently made a plate into a frisbee!). They seem to like me well enough too--they picked me to wear the silly sombrero (picture forthcoming when I remeber to bring our camera to church) when they won the contest for who could sing loudest. I have some ideas already about how I make class fun for them as well as teach them some things that will probably help them.

I think I might just be overwhelmed the by sentimentality of it all. I still have very fond memories of teachers I've had the past. The Holts, Brothers Krieg, Aamodt, Birkensha, Jefferson, Carter, and Sanders, as well as Sister Price all taught me to be a better person. I'm optimistic that I'll be able to be a good and memorable teacher to those kids like I've had in the past. That is, of course, if they don't release me from my calling first for teaching them that Jesus drank alcohol.

NPR Overload

For those of you who have heard my ranting against the suburbs, you have probably already guessed that I love living in a big city. Mostly I am loving the fact that I haven't had to drive my car for over a month.

According to mapquest, my commute would be 45 minutes if I drove (it actually takes longer with Chicago traffic). Instead, I take a bus to downtown and then the "L" up to Evanston. Depending on when I leave, if I can catch the express train, and how long it takes me to walk from the train stop to my lab, it takes me between an hour and a half to an hour and forty-five minutes each way.

As a result, I have tons of time to listen to music and podcasts and I have turned into a podcast fiend. Every day I listen to NPR's story of the day, most e-mailed stories, Marketplace (secretly and unexplainably my favorite show), and The Onion's audio program. I also listen to Science Friday, This American Life, The Economist, Science, Cell, the Brainscience podcast, Futures in Biotech, Word of Mouth (the BYU writing center podcast--you're welcome, Lina) and some stuff from the BBC when they are new.

Soon enough I'll have exhausted the available archives for most of these podcasts and will be forced, either to find new podcasts to listen to, start listening to music, or, heaven forbid, interacting with my lab mates while I work.

Right now I'm very much enjoying being well caught up in what's going on with the stock market, technology, politics, and even pop culture (I have opinions on which shows should have won the emmy, for crying out loud). Classes start for me on Friday, so I'll have to wait and see just how much that class work takes away from my NPR time. If the class doesn't end up being terribly time-comsuming, my current life-style will guarantee that I'm well on my way to becoming one of those self-satisfied and arrogant "city-folk." You all might want to just spam my e-mail address now before I start sending you mail about how you can reduce your carbon footprint, that one funny joke Paula Poundstone told last Sunday, or how you can donate to your local NPR station.