Freedom

Freedom has become an object of worship in America. If you invoke the word, you can sell almost anything—a political viewpoint, religion, war, selling automatic weapons to Mexican drug lords, pornography, lower taxes, lies, almost anything, good or bad. Ask an American his/her idea of what heaven might be, and you often hear the word again.
Instead of labeling freedom "good" or "bad" we can avoid a lot of name-calling and yelling by asking "freedom from"? or "freedom to"? Neither kind is always good or always bad. We talk about freedom from pain, freedom from hunger, freedom from oppression or bullying, freedom from fear. Most us want such freedoms, both for ourselves and, in theory at least, for others too.
"Freedom to" is also good, but often ambiguous. Freedom to work is hard to dispute; if someone can earn a living, he can provide for himself and his family. Freedom to speak is good, unless it is used to slander or destroy someone else.
Freedom to drive a car on public roads depends on registration with the state after passing a brief examination, but that freedom can be forfeited if one is repeatedly convicted of DUI.
Freedom to own a gun is guaranteed by the Constitution, but may be forfeited if one is convicted of a felony, and in any case the gun owner must register the gun.
Freedom from being shot and/or killed is protected by law provided one is not seriously threatening the life of someone else; yet death from gun violence is more and more common among citizens in USA - arguably more so than in any other first-world nation not at war. It appears that many of those who gun people down are found later to have many guns in their possession. One license to carry covers all. No need to explain to anyone.
The US Constitution states: “A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” This is reasonable; people may defend themselves against unwarranted assault. It does not imply, however, that anyone is free to shoot other people simply to make a statement, nor does it deal with those who amass unlimited quantities of weapons.
In this week's slaughter (December 4th, 2015) in San Bernardino, California, two people wearing body armor and using military assault rifles, killed 14 people at a holiday party and wounded many more. After police killed the two, they were found to have a total of more than 4,500 rounds of ammunition and twelve pipe bombs in their possession.
Last week, an apparently mentally ill lone man shot and killed 3 people in Colorado Springs. When such tragedies occur frequently, something is wrong.
It should be pointed out that certain weapons are forbidden. Bombs. Mortars. Anti-aircraft weapons. There are limits to which one may personally defend his rights. Should there not be limits to how many weapons an individual may own? The question of these gunslingers belonging to “a well-regulated militia” does not seem to arise. For those few gun collectors whose ego depends on a hundred varieties of guns to exhibit, let the extra ones he does not carry to protect himself in church or post office be disabled. That's what the cannon in our local town park required before the army donated it.
The NRA is fond of saying, “Guns don't kill people, people do.” But gun registration can be better regulated, to decrease opportunities.

Achieving Large Goals coming soon

I haven'tmade many posts recently, while getting my 7th book ready for publication with CreateSpace. It is now in its final (I hope) proofing, and should be published and available in November.

Achieving Large Goals; True Stories of accomplishment. Inspirational non-fiction.

21 chapters, each describing an individual the author has met. Achievers, from a plumber to a pediatric neuropathologist, illustrate paths to success by which seemingly ordinary people affect those around them in a positive manner, whether in a single community or worldwide. 

 

Success does not always depend on blind chance, intense effort, money, or whom you know. The factor shared in common seems to be a certain attitude. Not an opportunity to seize, but one to be guided by, if one is open-minded and perceptive.

Dahlberg Books Announces its new website!

Readers will have noticed that the website www.dahlbergbooks.com has malfunctined for about the past five years, ever since its webhost,  SiteStudio  went out of business. You can access it from this blog site but there has been no way to change the content. The company who took over SiteStudio seemed unable to solve the problem.

We are now building a new website from scratch: www.dahlbergbooks.net. Eventually it will absorb the old site's essays, memoirs, and perhaps the links that are still relevant.  For now, we are updating the main pages. 

There have been no new posts here for the past month, while I have been finishing my seventh book, Achieving Large Goals, which I hope to have in print and online this fall. Excerpts may appear on  Old Doc's Blog from time to time.

I thank readers for their patience these past weeks, and hope to have more activity, and space for comments soon.

Vaccine Nonsense

Recently, on the street of a nearby town, my wife encountered a man who was passing out postcard-sized “Vaccine Fact Sheets” on which are gathered statements about the alleged dangers and uselessness of giving vaccines to prevent various childhood and adult diseases. After surveying one his cards, she quietly asked him, “Have you ever seen a child with diphtheria, or a man with lockjaw?

To her alarm, the man exploded with rage. “You don't need those vaccines!”, he shouted. She quickly moved on, but his shouts followed her down the street. She brought the card home; it bears the name of VacLib.com/AvatarProducts.com. It cites articles by a number of people, some with MD, DO, DC, JD, or PhD after the name, and “facts you should know.” It quotes half-truths and some statements that are just plain false, which I would sum up as dangerous rubbish.

The reason I say that is, my wife and I have seen children die with the diseases those vaccines prevent. We worked fifteen years in the hinterlands of South East Asia. We are among the last people in the world to see smallpox in the wild, when an epidemic broke out in a village which the Burmese government vaccinator had not yet reached, back in 1961. We have seen diphtheria close the throat of a child, who survived only because of an emergency operation to open her windpipe. I watched a ten-year-old girl die of whooping cough (pertussis). I have watched one adult and several infants die of lockjaw (tetanus) when they reached the hospital too late for antitoxin to take effect. Before polio vaccine was developed, the city of Syracuse NY (where I went to med school) had a hospital for polio patients, some of them destined for life in an “iron lung” machine. A measles epidemic wiped out forty children in a group of villages in the mountains in Thailand. It's small comfort for their parents to know that at least their children didn't get a vaccine reaction. Too bad they didn't get the vaccine either.

Diptheria, pertussis, tetanus, measles still happen still happen to children and adults in the United States. Get yourself and your children immunized. If you don't like the doctor's fee, get it done at Public Health. Only the ignorant or the misinformed refuse.

A Week on an Indian reservation

In the year 2015, several American Indian relief groups have zeroed in on my mailing address and phone in hopes of my donating to their cause. An especially insistent phone caller yesterday, trying to shame me into feeding the starving children in South Dakota, prompted me to review my own experience on a South Dakota reservation, which is recorded below. It does not qualify me as an expert, but offers a different perspective:

In 2001, when I worked as a locum "rent-a-doc", a medical staffing agency assigned me to fill in for a week as the night-shift emergency room doctor in Eagle Butte, South Dakota. Although I have lived and worked in Asia among tribal groups, this was my first time with a minority culture in my own nation. My work schedule was fifteen hours on call each night, with the day time for sleep and everything else. This would leave little time for sightseeing, so I came a day early to look around.

A town of about a thousand people at that time, Eagle Butte was the center of the Cheyenne River Reservation, an area of some 4,000 square miles, comparable in size to the entire state of Connecticut. Except for all the government offices, the town looked about like any other high-plains community, amid hay fields and cattle, with rolling prairie stretching out to a far horizon in the July sunshine.

Next to the motel was a building decorated in Native American motif, labeled Cultural Center. A monument outside honors the "Sioux Chiefs who gave their lives in World War I." But the word "Sioux" isn't heard often; the people prefer the name "Lakota." Sioux comes from the Chippewa language, meaning snake or enemy. I soon found that using the word "Sioux" could shut down a conversation.

The Center's door stood open. The lobby held a guest book and four glass cases of artifacts. The high-domed hall beyond stood empty except for pictures on some of the wall panels, and stacked chairs against one wall. Aside from a small gift shop, that was it.

I spent some time with the pictures, most of them tribal leaders of by-gone times. One panel held a six-page account of the massacre at Wounded Knee Creek, by a survivor who was an eleven-year-old girl at the time. She told a vivid account of what she saw and heard, but it was mostly the "what" with little of the "why". Perhaps from her standpoint there was no why; the white soldiers killed for no reason.

But there is always a why. Someone digging superficially might give a ready answer: for example, "greed―the white men wanted our land." This is probably true, but I suspect that digging more deeply might shed light on the interplay of fears and goals and of character strengths and weaknesses on both sides. That, in turn, might provide clues to some of today's issues, in particular the division that even a new-comer can sense between the haves and the have-nots within the tribe itself.

For there is such a division. I include among the haves the apparently prosperous Lakota farmers in the region, the competent and caring Lakota nurses and medical technicians I worked with in the town's hospital, and some of the young families who came as patients with the usual night-time emergencies―earache, abdominal pain, childbirth, etc.

The have-nots included a nightly procession of very obese, diabetic, hypertensive, and acutely alcoholic patients, and both victims and abusers in domestic fights. They were cooperative within their ability to function at the moment, had a passive acceptance of their situation, and glib agreement: "Yes, Doc, I know I drink too much; yes, I'll try to lose some weight," etc., but no expressed intent to carry through. The Native American nurses and doctors were appalled at the nightly number. People lined up in the waiting area each day from five pm (when the day-clinic closed) until well past midnight. I have worked in much bigger hospitals with half the number.

A well-built youth in his early teens with a high blood alcohol had been beaten unconscious by unknown assailants. Soon after the ambulance came in, his mother arrived wearing a look of quiet despair.

A middle-aged man had a blood alcohol five times the legal limit, and the ambulance crew found him lying in the street downtown. As we waited for the X-rays, one of the Lakota staff remarked that the man's abdominal scar was from the time he swallowed a sharp object to qualify for permanent disability.

And there was an elderly woman, beaten up by her drunken son, and so obese that the x-ray tech was unable to show me her neck spine. I had to send her 175 miles by ambulance to Rapid City where there is better x-ray equipment. Her diabetes was was poorly controlled; her son had been harassing her that day to the point where she had neglected to take her insulin.

I saw a poster on a hallway bulletin board showing an elderly farm couple standing in their barn doorway: the message read "When Jim hurt his back, his neighbors helped him get his hay crop in. They helped him with his chores. They even helped him beat his wife to within an inch of her life. Because they knew. And they did nothing to HELP HER. Sometimes it's hard for a neighbor to know what to do. You can call us, at . . ."

Up until this trip, I had encountered the aggressive, politically active side of the Lakota occasionally in the news media. But here "on the Rez," in the emergency room, I saw the other side: quietly non-confrontational, but quietly non-cooperative with the majority white culture. A five-day visit does not give an outsider the authority to analyze behavior, especially that which is not unique to that group, but I can speculate. Alcoholism is often associated with chronic depression and a perception of "no way out." There is a tendency to look back at former days. Military victory against the invader is no longer a viable option, but Wounded Knee is still fresh in the collective memory, more than a century later.

Few raise their voice or argue unless really stressed. Few in this under-layer of Lakota society comply with suggested treatment. The patient may take the pills, but advice on lifestyle change meets passive resistance.

But apparently the tribal leaders, social activists, or others are trying to teach the younger people better self-help skills. I saw two such groups in session in the motel conference room as I passed by. (The local Super 8 Motel itself is a Lakota enterprise.) And there is a satellite college campus on the far edge of town, though no one at the hospital could tell me much about it. The future is not yet set in stone. The Lakota may one day overcome the alcohol and metabolic diseases that devastate their people, though maybe not in this decade.

When that day comes, it probably won't happen through the U.S. Indian Health Service bureaucracy, nor the well-intentioned efforts of outside organizations, but from the initiative of the Lakota themselves. These people were, after all, the prime warriors of the plains, who with their allied tribes beat the hell out of the United States army at the battle of Little Big Horn. Back then, they coped very well.

The depression following their loss of land and way of life, and some of the policies from Washington, have led many of them to focus on the past. But when forward-looking tribal members increase in number, this is going to change. The Cheyenne River Reservation potential is good. The land is fertile and green even in July, unlike some other Native American lands.

And ironically, many tribes lately have discovered a way to "rob the white race back," raising capital funds by operating gambling casinos. Whatever it takes (within reason anyway), more power to them!

How Fund-raisers Waste Your Money

Fund raisers waste thousands of dollars trying to make you give more.

For the last three months, I have been keeping detailed track of all the uninvited requests for money that come into my house. These are not advertisements or catalogs – I get some of them too, but these are only the ones that tell you how much you should give.

In the 91 calendar days (including postal holidays and Sundays) from April 20 through July 20, I recorded 209 letters, 24 phone calls and 1 e-mail; 234 in ¼ of a year. Over 800 envelopes annually into this one home, each containing a return envelope to send money in. (800 more.)

Many contain gifts – a sheet of return address labels, membership cards for organizations I have not joined, note pads, calendars, certificates of appreciation, “surveys”with no-brainer questions to fill out, petitions to sign.

Most go directly into the waste basket, but never mind: the promotional agency hired to raise their funds will send another request in a month, sometimes with a protest that they haven't yet heard from me.

I do support some them, but never more than once a year for any of them regardless of how many times they ask. And I choose which ones I support, not the other way around. Mostly I support a few medical, refugee, educational groups that I consider are doing a good job but do not have mass appeal – Doctors without Borders, MADD, an orphanage in Myanmar, several missionaries I know personally, a couple of famine/disaster relief organizations. Probably 1 or 2 groups in most of the categories listed below. I tend to avoid those sending unsolicited gifts; why should my donation pay for junk?

Out of curiosity, I have tried to categorize them and found among these 234:

50 political

43 medical diseases

20 religious groups

12 poverty or hunger

6 refugee support

13 protecting the environment

6 protecting animals (but a tiger farm in Colorado? C'mon!)

9 American Indian groups, all using the same Minnesota address

12 Veterans groups

10 Gun Control

8 Planned parenthood

Most of the rest had miscellaneous objectives; about 9 appeared to be scams.

It's not that most of these groups are unworthy. If I could support them all, I would. But a dollar to each, less 49 cents postage, would accomplish little. I sometimes explain that to a phone caller. But sending a form letter in the enclosed envelope is pointless. Nobody from the organization is at that address, that's just the group hired to collect the money, in most cases. They would handle my letter the same way I handle theirs.

How about you? How many do you average per week? And how do you handle them?

SMALL TOWN PARADE 1995

A parade is always better if the drums can be heard even before the marchers come in sight. Even better if it's the home town all-class alumni marching band.

The all-class high school reunion is in full swing in the little mining town of Kellogg, Idaho. The main street is crowded with alumni from out of town, peering at each others' name tags and screaming in recognition, while twenty-somethings rescue toddlers from the middle of the street as the marchers advance.

The all-class band sounds good after only one night of practice together. The drums give an introductory roll, the band members lift their instruments and erupt into the Wildcat Fight song. A dozen lithe and long-haired cheerleaders form a human pyramid and then tumble into a series of cartwheels, while a gray-haired drum majorette from the class of about 1963 struts her stuff ahead of the musicians, faultlessly twirling her baton. The first verse ends and the cheer leaders face the crowd, pom-poms held high. KAY! EE! DOUBLE-ELL O! GEE GEE KELLOGG! GO! GO! GO!! and the band crashes into the second verse, turning the corner to march down the hill. The drill team of a decade ago marches proudly by, followed by truckload of four and five-year-olds wearing Wildcat sweaters with the logo "Cheerleading Clinic 1995."

Each class has been told to get a car of its own vintage, and they have outdone themselves. The Class of 1924 has an old red roadster with two elderly, barrel-chested men holding a banner, "State Football Champions, 1924!" A muddy jeep bears the announcement "No cars made in 1943." 1941 alums ride in a gleaming black hearse with the slogan "Always Prepared!" And as always in any parade, the Fire Department has an entry: old Engine Number One, its 70-year-old motor puttering softly and smoothly.

A police car brings up the rear of the thirty-class procession, its driver announcing over his loudspeaker, "This is the last parade vehicle. Please return to the sidewalks to make way for following traffic!" But this is a small town and we all overflow back into the street, greeting people we haven't seen in years as we make our way up the block to get coffee and pie at the P.E.O. booth, to hold us over until the barbecue tonight at the football field.

Keith Dahlberg