The end of suffering?

Sunday, June 26, 2011 13:44:11

Covell Commons, UCLA…finally…my wife graduates from Chinese Medicine School in about an hour. This has been a six-year ordeal, and I do mean ordeal. I am so proud, and impressed, and I’ve learned a lot watching how a world-class mind approaches a completely new field. Now I know how she got to Stanford, to Johns Hopkins, to UCLA. And why it took eleven years and (at least) three state schools for me to get a bachelor’s with a high B.

Acupuncture, chinese medicine, chinese herbology, pinyin Chinese, have all been the primary focus of the house for five of the six years. It took a while for the scope of the workload to bend the rest of our lives to its gravity. Our last real vacation was in 2006, planned and paid for before the grant for this educational refocus came through. And indeed, this is your tax dollars, and ours, at work. This is the result of a K award from the NIH, to refocus a well-regarded professional’s primary subject area. A marvelous idea, and one that more industries than the educational one ought to look into. Most people only change their professional focus through incredible financial good fortune (‘…after making $8B on the IPO of his social networking firm, he followed his true love, cheese-making’) or abject poverty (‘after recovering from a brain tumor, bankrupt from the bills, she found her calling helping others fight the insurance companies, eventually earning a law degree from…’). Me, I’ve had to learn two new development environments, both after riding the old one literally into the ground. Fortunately, I had a wife with a steady income. Fortunately, she had her professional standing and body of work to build upon.

How much talent is wasted in the American economy due to having to cover the mortgage, especially now that to sell is to sell at a loss? How many great ideas die in infancy because incomes have stayed flat for thirty years while the cost of investing, whether in your education, your health, or your home, has skyrocketed in the same period. How many great talents are shackled to ill-fitting jobs by the medical insurance needed to keep a spouse, a child, the employee even, not healthy but not getting worse from a chronic condition? And the bankruptcy laws have been re-written to forbid the discharge of credit card debt, often the only way to get the capital to try something new anyway.

I am lucky. And so is my wife. We have been able to build on the foundation created by the forward-thinking, dare I say progressive-thinking, of the generations that came before us, that provided free public schools for all comers, whether from GI Bill-educated families like mine or working-class single-mom homes like my wife’s. That created the NIH and the UC and California State University systems, that built the freeways we drive to work, and produces the foods and water that we eat every day without a thought to whether they’re safe.

And we continue to build.

(Much later...) I have to stop now. First, because I’m exhausted. With all the cleaning as prep, then the graduation ceremony, which took 4+ hours out of the afternoon, (and a great time was had by all,) and then Dawn’s friends coming over, ostensibly for cake a wine, but ending up with a full-on bar-b-que, and then my wandering off with a friend to see the new X-men movie, cause I haven’t seen it at all, or him for some time, and it was painfully obvious that I would have little to contribute to the post-event discussions of the politics and other issues surrounding the administration of a small but earnest educational institution, well…I’m bushed.

So this may not be 750, but it’s all I’ve got left.

I leave you with a note on the passage, at long last, of the same-sex marriage law in New York state. I wrote on a web site back in 2002, arguing with someone who was apparently famous for gay activism, (and for his extreme curmudgeonliness,) that the inroads that had already been made at that time, DADT as opposed to immediate expulsion, some civil union breakthroughs and case law advances, that the issue was already moot, it would just take a few years for it to be realized, that the genie, out of the bottle, closet, whatever you want, was never going back in. I couldn’t find that conversation again if I had to, so take my word for it, it happened, and I, little lefty chaser of women, was right. Neener neener neener.

Which is why, a couple of years later, I cut out (and passed around tonight when the subject came up) a cartoon from the March 1, 2004 edition of the New Yorker. A barely-drawn middle-aged couple sit in their living room, watching tv. From his end of the sofa, reading a magazine, the man remarks, ”Gays and lesbians getting married --- haven’t they suffered enough?”

831 ~ Sunday, June 26, 2011 23:42:59