raphaelgersowsky

[raphaelgersowsky]

Breaking bread in a time of the new Pox.

[raphaelgersowsky]

This poster (from around 1938) reads: "60,000 Reichsmark is what this person suffering from a hereditary defect costs the People's community during his lifetime. Fellow citizen, that is your money too. (Source: Wikimedia)

[raphaelgersowsky]

Genetics Research in the USA: are elite universities the vanguard of a rugged capitalism+science=perfect humans NOW project? (also called...dirty word, not of the 4-letter variety...Eugenics)

My wife has 3 kids with autism. I have 1. We love them all and wouldn’t want to change a thing about them. We’ve reflected on what makes them tick and on what’s truly important. We’ve reflected on what makes us tick and there’s talk of getting ourselves screened to see if one or both of us are on the spectrum ourselves. Knowing will help answer some of the 5 W’s and engender, what we hope will be, above all, a boost to self-care, self-love and self-esteem. Mindfulness on the part of the greater community would be icing on the cake, but we haven’t asked for much until now and won’t ask for much in the future. If a phalanx of self-appointed/anointed saviors in white coats have their way, we may never have to say another word about it. And future Autism spectrum kiddies won’t be a thing, so there dies that topic. Relegated to buried tomes of digital vellum and parchment, buried as deep in the strata as can be bored, so the ugliness of “disorder” humans (we prefer to call our family “neuro diverse”) doesn’t have to be a future thing. Where would it all end? 

Diving into what’s going on in the exciting world of Genetics (read Eugenics) research, Scientists at the Geschwind institute (https://www.semel.ucla.edu/autism/team/daniel-geschwind-md-phd and https://geschwindlab.dgsom.ucla.edu/pages/) are among a growing concern with big names of investors, and others with money to burn and the kind of sympathy for parents and autistic people akin to pity, in as much as wanting to give them all a choice (for now) to participate in research that could do away with the pain they think we feel, burdened with the interminable joy of parenting disabled kids. Once they’ve done away with the pestilence that is ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorders), like modern day, sanitized Mengele’s, what group of unfortunates will they come for next? Will the genetic expressions leading to sexual identity be aligned as per parental wishes, so that Evangelicals don’t have to worry about having LQBTQ offspring? Will “deviant” sexual behavior be screened for in the DNA and stripped away at the source? What’s on the chopping block next, when the autistics are washed out of the double helix? 

[raphaelgersowsky]

Soaring eagle or enterprising big crow? The USA after Covid-19.

As I sit on the balcony I’m blessed enough to have, yet sparingly enjoy, I ponder the vexing question of what the USA might look like when the wind-borne dust of many fires and the misty particulate of a great many more Covid-19 coughs finally settle.

Fortuitously, I spot a big bird soaring in the middle distance and think, “it couldn’t be! An eagle!? A few loops later and as she cleared landing permission from the transformer-shaped control tower and touched down on her high-voltage pylon runway, I nodded in half-earnestness as she turned out to be none other than a very large crow. There’s probably a pun in all this about my sight being far from eagle-eyed, but I’ll leave that to you to work out. And as with all things fortuitous when pondering life’s great (and good) questions, the buckets, whittled twigs and dominoes all lined up in my cranial playscape in Rube Goldberg fashion as the words came tumbling out of my mouth, albeit to myself in a whisper, “this is the USA. Divided we stand. Reaction is swift, but change? That comes slow.” Satisfied with my lapse into momentary and profound clarity, I decided to memorialize my neural bon mot and whatever might flow forth thence.

In 1996, the USA took on a pack of refugees in my family and me. Just another troop of white folks, we went about life mostly unnoticed and maybe because we were unnoticed, we also were mostly unnoticing. The first few years weren’t without their obstacles, but relative to the “others” who escaped our gaze, we stayed in our lane, kept up with traffic, noses down and plowed on quietly. The American eagle of our expectations soared. Then, 9/11. Reaction was swift. America went into lockdown. America went to war. Jingoes ate the brown babies. The news filled the laypeople’s’ feed troughs with terror and dread and US Americans gorged to the point of collective PTSD. The Bible of Nationalism was dusted off anew and services resumed to boisterous pulpits and mesmerized pews. Shock and awe took out our spiritual bird. Our intrepid eagle was sniped out of the heavens that day and crashed down in the dirt where it still lies. The eagle is dead. Long live the big crow! 

Nigh on two decades since, the USA is as divided as it ever was. The struggles for sovereignty, for dignity and respect fought and died for by Indigenous people who’ve been here for 12,000 years, relegated to a passing thought save for a day a year. For Black African Americans brought here as slaves who’ve built-- bricks and mortar-- so much of civilizing institutions this country is blessed with, having turned out brilliant orators, sports people, diplomats, scientists and artists, leaders in every nook and facet, African Americans long ago proved white supremacy to be utter garbage. Yet here we are—it’s 2020 and once again Black Americans have to come out in droves to justify their co-existence with the “moral” majority. There’s sympathy and empathy—some real, some tokenized and co-opted by corporations and other enterprising types hoping to cash in on a movement inherently good. The big crow soars. And then, it wanes.

How will the US look after Covid-19? If the past is anything to go by, we’ll react by putting on our masks and social distancing, by working and schooling from home and using enlightened common sense, if we’ve learned anything from history and experts who know more than we do. The rest of us will be reactionary and refuse to wear masks, they’ll throw Covid parties and spread the love (and death) around, and want the kids back in school and the blue collared back in the salt mines and cubicles, if we’ve learned nothing at all. The USA post Covid, therefore, I’m resigned to forecast will look much as it did pre-Covid. Some will move forward with care and concern for being better. Others won’t. But to be American is ever to live in hope. Somewhere up high, there’s a nest with an egg in it, incubating a embryonic eagle, slowly and mysteriously taking formidable shape.

For us, as the crow flies, change is slow.