3 February 2010 Random musings, muttering, & ruminations

3 February 2010 Random musings, muttering, & ruminations


On this date in 2000, we buried Gloria’s father, Jacob Rutstein among his fellow soldiers in the Florida National Cemetery, Bushnell FL. He was the 1st Sergeant in the 1st United States medical unit to arrive at the Dachau KL. While he was there he organized the first Shabbat services and the first Pesach Seder held in the camp. He was a wonderful father-in-law and a man to be admired and emulated.

In the midst of the tremendous grief caused by any death in one’s family, I could not help the random thought that I was glad we weren’t burying him on 2 February instead.

I wonder what he would think, sitting in a class on History of the Holocaust and hearing so little interaction from the class. The lack of response from my classmates is disturbing. I would really like to hear some indication that they are bothered by the facts that they are hearing, I find it hard to imagine anyone not being outraged when presented with the fact of a national policy of anti-Semitism such as that of Germany after Hitler’s rise to power. I find it impossible to forgive any institution which supported the disintegration of Jews as members of society.

Yet, some of the things embraced by the Nazis were potentially of benefit to all humanity. Eugenics, as a means of improving the genetic makeup of the species comes to mind. By selectively breeding or by excluding from the breeding population many genetic diseases might be eliminated from the populace. In my own heritage, Tay-Sachs and the other lethal diseases that plague Ashkenazim could be eliminated. Myopia, perhaps diabetes, and less common diseases such as Huntington’s chorea might be removed from our gene pool.

The forced sterilizations that the industrialized nations and great powers visited upon their citizens were, by and large, well intentioned. Female mental hospital patients were at continual risk of pregnancy. There were no working contraceptive medicines prior to WWII. The Sanger program to help women decide when to have children or when not to have children was very progressive for the United States at the time Sanger developed her programs. Only Germany took the practice of eugenics as an invitation to rid itself of the mentally and physically infirm on a scale portending the Holocaust. The Nazis put their brand on eugenics so deeply that even today the word is disturbing to many.

However, with the advances in molecular biology and gene replacement therapy that exist today, eugenics may be practical as a means to eliminate genetically transferred diseases from the gene pool. The alleles that code for Sickle Cell disease, for hemophilia A & B, and for many developmental disorders can be identified and, perhaps, successfully removed from embryos prior to allowing implantation. It may be that the massive reproductive medicine machine that currently cranks out litters of fetuses for women, who insist on giving birth, could be better designed and better used to limit births that damage the gene pool. I’d much rather see tax dollars go to support removing coding for diabetes or myopia from an otherwise healthy embryo than to see those dollars used to provide NICU months for a litter of fertility drug induced preemies unable to live without long-term life-support.

In the matter of Tikun Olam, healing the world, far better to improve the species so that all who follow us are more likely to enjoy good health, than it is to simply add another group of children who may well be developmentally delayed by virtue of being born before they were capable of sustaining their own lives. If the ability to validate the lack of genetic diseases and disorders is available and accurate, I support the use of such techniques in weeding out genetically linked diseases and disorders. I do not support euthanasia of our current population of mentally and physically ill patients.

The Tea Party Convention is apparently going to be a circus in nature with parts of the mob upset about the organizers making a profit. Sarah Palin is gouging the mob for her speaker’s fee, $100,000. There aren’t enough words she can mangle or grammatical errors she can create to justify paying her that amount of money to spread her brand of racism, creationism, and anti-intellectualism. Perhaps she’ll get upset and launch into a tirade before the cameras. One can hope.

I don’t see any platform or policy statement surfacing from this convention. Other than racism, xenophobia, and religious fanaticism, they have very little in common. By the time they get done trying to re-write the Constitution they should be in need of a children’s ghost writer to translate their notes into pictographs so that the unschooled among them can figure out what the rest said.

History class today involved a Nazi propaganda film used to indoctrinate good Germans to support euthanasia of the infirm. CSI was a quick session on trace evidence, collection, handling, and documenting collection. The young woman in front of me in CSI class sat taking no notes, periodically pulling a cell phone from her purse and pounding the keys for several minutes. If I had been the instructor, I’d have asked her to leave the class until she was ready to pay attention. Looking about the room during pauses in the instructor’s lecture, I saw very few people taking any sort of notes. There were, however, lots of cell phones in use. It must be frustrating to try to teach today.