Resource Conundrum

I’m beginning to think that medical science has gone too far, that we live too long.

This has to do with two things: the state of the economy and my knees.

I was diagnosed with osteoarthritis in my knees, which makes it painful to walk, to run (hah! I haven’t run in years), even to sit quietly in a confined space like a car or my seat at the opera. But this is NOT an organ recital, nor is it going to be.

Too often, it seems to me, our culture uses our finite resources as if they were infinite. We save people who should not necessarily be saved, and who, in past generations, would have died. We fund those who have been flooded out to rebuild on flood plains. The definition of insanity that I have come to love is the act of doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome. That is where we waste our resources, doing the same thing and expecting different outcomes.

My father, who grew up with asthma from the thick air of coal mines and coal furnaces near Pittsburgh, started smoking young and smoked until he was retired when he quit, miraculously, cold turkey. (What the hell does ‘cold turkey’ mean, anyway?) That didn’t preclude him from getting emphysema, and in his eighties he talked wistfully about getting a heart-lung transplant.

I loved him dearly, and I still miss him, but that would have been a terrible and selfish use of our resources.

My mother, on the other hand, gave up smoking but always resumed it when she could. Even when she developed emphysema and was housebound - at least in that she no longer drove and sources of cigarettes were too far for her to walk - continued to smoke. While she sat at the dining room table with her oxygen on. I still don’t know who bought her cigarettes although I assume it was the cleaning lady. (Is housekeeper the acceptable term now? I can’t keep up with politically correct B.S. these days.)

My mother lived in Tennessee a few blocks from my sister, while I lived - and continue to live - near Chicago. I told my sister that if she ever figured out who bought the cigarettes for my mom to tell them they could sit with her in the burn unit and listen to her agony. It never came to that, thank God. That behavior, combined with her increasing vagueness impelled us to move her to assisted living. But that’s off the point.

My very unpopular view is that we throw much too much money towards the unsolvable. Perhaps the octomom (I never thought I’d comment on her) is a prime example of the extravagance of our resources. She already had six kids, two of whom apparently, are disabled. We spend far more of our education resources (probably two to three times as much) on some of the the disabled than we do for gifted or “average” kids. It would be more wasteful only if we rebuilt her house on a wetland that floods consistently and requires constant rebuilding. And now that she has these children, we cannot punish them for her judgment.

[I’m not even sure what words we can use these days for those who are mentally challenged without being politically incorrect (I was astounded to be chastised for using the word Oriental, which I grew up with, instead of Asian. Have we gotten so pseudo-compassionate that we can no longer think? Of course, a lot of us don’t bother to think in any event.)]

Those of us with physical disabilities require more of our resources too. However, the mentally gifted and those of average intelligence are the ones who are productive citizens, the ones who make scientific and medical breakthroughs, the ones who keep our economy going so we can continue to live at the standard to which we have become accustomed.

I am not advocating that we ignore the disabled. . Especially since my knees have begun to bother me. All human beings require love and whatever resources we can afford to give them. We need to become fully human by extending our compassion to people who need it. But I am suggesting that we need to be more discriminating about whom we shower with our resources.

As always, feel free to comment below.