MAKERS AND TAKERS DESCRIBE WHO WE ARE

       I am a maker and a taker.  In high school I benefited from reading aloud the classics to my teacher, Morris Cohen, who was going blind.  He did this as a voluntary act because he liked my habit of reading widely. I was a maker in high school because I volunteered to help teachers, painting posters, mimeographing, and helping keep tally of the number of students in classes as they registered for their elective courses.  I became a taker when I was an undergraduate because I accepted a full tuition scholarship to NYU.  I became a tax paying maker by being an elevator operator in the summers and delivered people to their floors in Manhattan’s office buildings.  I also served (unpaid) as managing Editor of the NYU Literary magazine.

      At Indiana University I was a taker again as a Teaching Assistant which gave me free tuition. I was a maker by helping undergraduates in their laboratory courses in comparative anatomy and introductory zoology. I was a taker in accepting fellowships from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.  I was a maker by working on several of Muller’s experiments and publishing smaller articles as I prepared my PhD dissertation.

      At Queen’s University I was a maker earning my first full time salary and paying taxes (to Canada) and became a taker when Christina was born and Canada gave a monthly subsidy for each child born because it was promoting population growth.  I was also a maker (for Canada’s economy) by securing grants from the National Research Council of Canada and from the US National Science Foundation and employed my first full time laboratory helper.  AT UCLA I was a maker as I eventually supervised six students who received PhDs in my laboratory and published my first book. I also had a full time laboratory helper paid from my grants.  I was a taker as I received generous grants from the National Science Foundation to support my research. I was also a maker because I paid for my mother’s stay at an assisted living facility for the psychotic and I was a maker because I paid for both my parents’ funerals neither of whom had any insurance.  I was a taker, by forcing my father to apply for his Social Security.  He did not want to receive any money he did not make by his own labor. I convinced him he paid for that Social Security since Roosevelt started it in the mid 1930s.  He had no health insurance so I paid his medical expenses.

     At Stony Brook University I became a maker as a professor doing research, teaching, writing books and articles, and serving as the founding Master of the Honor’s College.  I was a taker as I applied for sabbatical leaves and learned new fields and wrote new books. I was a taker as I asked for a leave of absence to spend a semester teaching on the SS Universe for Semester at Sea.  But I was a maker in teaching three courses and providing shipboard entertainment by writing a play my students put on.

I am now retired since 2001.  I am a maker in writing five books since retirement and serving as the historian for the local Unitarian-Universalist Church of Bloomington.  I am a taker as my Social Security supplements my retirement fund from TIAA-CREF. 

     Anyone who says he or she is a maker and not a taker, is a liar. You cannot survive as a human without being both. You were once a baby, weren't you? Tell me that is not a taker. 

ACTS OF VIOLENCE STILL DEFY A USEFUL EXPLANATION

              We don’t have problems interpreting the behavior of a seven year old child who sets fire to an apartment or house.  It is usually attributed to “playing with matches.” We don’t seek a deeper cause or wonder why some children don’t play with matches.  We also don’t usually think of the child as evil. Children are curious and like to play with things.  I stuck a hairpin in a light socket when I was a child and quickly learned that was a dumb act. Sometimes those trial and error learning experiences end in tragedy.  Think of the children who lost a finger or damaged an eye playing with firecrackers.

              Guns are a different story.  While a match or firecracker or hairpin in a light socket can be deadly, most children do not seriously hurt themselves or others.  But a loaded gun in a house is asking for trouble if a child finds it.  Children are curious and they explore.  I found my father’s “eight-page bibles” (a sort of comic strip pornography) hidden behind the top row of his books and had to stand on a chair to reach it.  Pity the parent who would be dumb enough to hide a weapon that way (some people are dumb that way).  Guns are dangerous because they have a stunning lethality when they are accidentally or deliberately used by a child or by a person possessed with rage. I saw a neighbor’s child chase his brother with a metal chain and if he had caught up with him, I do not doubt he would have swung it with all his might.   We can understand rage, and barroom brawls and spats between spouses and betrayed lovers.

              What is still hard to figure out is what goes on in the mind of psychotic individual who plots mayhem, buying guns, lots of ammunition, occasionally making homemade bombs, and then goes out to a school, church, mall, or movie theater and tries to kill as many people as possible. Is the person driven by ideology (sometimes), by a desire for execution by police instead of “simple” self-inflicted suicide (sometimes), or by something we may never know (sometimes)?  My mother was a paranoid schizophrenic and had frequent fights with our neighbors. She once tore the doorknob off a neighbor’s door. At home she sometimes took dishes and smashed them on the floor.  My brother and I would run to our bedroom and dive under it until her rages passed.   I’ve known other psychotic individuals who do not express physical rage when they are in an emotional stew.  Some are suicidal.  Some withdraw into a shell and cut themselves off from other human contact. Some run away.  I don’t think there is anyone who could predict what type of specific behavior a psychotic mind will produce.  At the same time there are stressed individuals who take that tension and sublimate it into creative work, art, science, scholarship, or invention.  We do not know if there is a switch in our minds that allows some of us to handle disappointment and insecurity with creative acts and others to brood their way to plotting mass murder. Anyone who has a gun in the house and has a troubled relative is taking terrific risks.  

THE CURSE OF VOTING IN A DEMOCRACY -- THE GERRYMANDERED DISTRICTS

Whenever there is a scandal, a preventable disaster, or a gross violation of our Constitutional rights, I find the comments on blog sites and on Facebook using a strange argument.  They blame the voters for electing inept or immoral candidates to state or national office.  This is usually followed by the tag line “they deserve the people they elect.”  I find it strange that few of these commentators on the dreary events presented on the news blame something more fundamental.  The most potent way to get ideologues represented, making a minority into a majority, is by gerrymandering electoral districts.  Both Democrats and Republicans do this every ten years when a new census requires new boundaries for election districts.  Usually it is the party in power that makes that redistricting.  This gives that party the potential to influence political outcomes from legislation, budgets, ideologically-driven legislation, and many life time appointments of judges.  This is how it is done.  For Republicans to have a majority of seats in a state legislation, the Democrats are packed into a few districts that are redrawn to exclude most Republicans.  The districts that are usually Republican are left alone.  The swing districts are redrawn to favor Republican majorities by getting the outlying democratic neighborhoods drawn into one of the few Democratic strongholds.  In many of the States the popular vote can be a majority Democratic but the districts (for state house or senate) will by gerrymandered so the Republicans have a majority of seats.  I have seen virtually no pundits discuss this problem or ways to make redistricting fair to both parties.  There are lots of possible ways around this.  Here are a few—make the districts “virtual” rather than geographic and use date of birth as one’s district or one’s name in an alphabetical listing  from  A** to Z**.  Use a computer to generate random boundaries for a district so each district has the same number of voters with the computer programmed to not recognizing Party affiliation of the voters. There are probably many other ways to make it fair. One would be to have each party submit a gerrymandered design and the non overlapping regions would be randomly assigned, half to Republicans and half to Democrats.  We spend too much time tearing down each other’s ideologies and not focusing on methods that would make the districts more fairly representative of the people in the state.  

COPING WITH COLD WEATHER SHOWS HOW HUMAN INGENUITY WORKS

January 2014 began with  severe cold weather that plunged Bloomington, Indiana,  temperature to 14 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (and a wind-chill of minus 30).  Nedra and I were house bound for about four days before we could drive to replenish our food supply.  The last time we experienced such cold weather was in Minneapolis in 1986 when I was on sabbatical leave studying medical genetics at the Dight Institute.  We lived in the student “ghetto” known as Dinkytown.  The temperature for several days was below minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit and I had to removed the battery from the car when I got back from the University and carry it into the apartment where we lived so I could get it started in the morning.  I learned from our neighbors that multiple layers of clothing is the most important way to survive, including “long john” underwear that extended to my toes.  Even with all the scarves and layers of clothing I would still have ice caking around the fabrics surrounding my face.  Fortunately I did not have to go out in this Bloomington freeze.  I had my computer at home to use,  an advantage of internet technology not present when I was at Minnesota.   Nedra and I prevented “cabin fever” by keeping busy with our projects.  Nedra had quilting projects to do and I wrote a flurry of Life Lines articles for the North Shore of Long island newspapers. I got caught up reading Science and Nature articles.  We also tried out new bean soups, ideal for cold weather, especially with the left over ham bones from the Christmas treat  our son John and his wife Dawn sent us.

It also made me reflect on what makes humans such a successful species.  We can create micro-environments that allow us to live and function in hot or cold weather or in arid or wet surroundings.  There are limits to this.  We depend on others and cannot do this all by ourselves.  Living in an industrialized civilization requires a surrendering of individual autonomy to some degree.  We can’t make our own computers, telephones, cable news television channels, or even build our comfortable homes with all their utilities.  We often take these things for granted but when a sudden change in weather or a natural disaster occurs, we quickly realize how interdependent we humans are. There are hundreds of skills we depend on to make a civilization possible.   

WHAT WILL LIFE BE LIKE FOR YOU IF YOU REACH 82?

 

Younger people do not think much beyond a few years ahead.  Yet we all see people who are much older when we are in the prime of our careers or lives.  I remember the first time I visited a nursing home for the elderly to visit one of Nedra’s relatives.  This was about 1970.  I was young (at least I think being 39 is young to me now).  The first response was the odor of urine that permeated the place.  The thought of incontinent old people horrified me and I can see why younger people blot out the thought of that future.  The second was the feeling of helplessness as I watched some people scooting about in wheel chairs, many leaning on canes, and lots walking corridors holding onto railing along the walls.  The thought crossed my mind that I would rather die a quick death from a heart attack than melt away cell by cell as I aged into oblivion. Today I am in the early phase of my 82^rd year.  I use a cane occasionally to avoid falling if the weather is bad or if it is dark or I feel I will tire from walking too much.  I take tai chi classes with Nedra so we can exercise our arthritic joints. My brain feels like it is 30 years old and I can do lots of mental skills.  I can do Sudukos (even the hard ones and sometimes I use a pen instead of a pencil).  I still write books and have had five books published in the past ten years, the latest this year (2013).  These are not vanity press books.  They are scholarly books that must pass critical review by internal and outside referees of the publisher. I also have at least five books I wrote during the same time that have not been published.  I am a realist.  If I don’t get a book published, I try writing another book.  To me that is easier than to market myself.  That’s the same attitude I have for Sudukos.  Solve it and get an endorphin rush.  Goof it up and abandon it by trying another.  If I run out of puzzles to do, then I will erase and try again (and often succeed). So far I have not tried that with my rejected manuscripts. But unlike puzzles, writing books and articles is more fun.  I learn something every time I do the research for a book.  I still have the curiosity of a child and want to learn something new every day I waken.  I understand why many elderly people are depressed.  They have lost the capacity to do the physical things they loved. They may never have had an opportunity to develop their mental skills.  If they do not have dementia, they will see their lives fading away and lack the knowledge of how to cultivate their skills. For me retirement was never going to be shuffleboard, playing cards, and watching vintage movies.  It is the last phase of my life cycle, and as a biologist, I want to extract every moment of creativity I can summon and savor what I have wrought.

WHY AN INTERNATIONAL BAN ON THE USE OF POISON GAS SHOULD BE ENFORCED

 

The very likely use of Sarin gas by the Syrian military in an attack on rebel-held territory killed some 1400 people, many of them children and women who had no active role in the civil war.  The targeting of civilian populations, whether by conventional bombs, atomic bombs, or gas warfare is a crime against humanity, justified by the user with utilitarian ethics claiming it prevents an even greater loss of life if such a show of force is not used.  The one thing Churchill, Stalin, Hitler, and Roosevelt agreed on in WWII was the use of utilitarian ethics to justify their bombings of civilians in cities and rationalizing the losses as collateral damage. 

Why was chemical warfare singled out after WWI as a banned weapon system?  Gas attacks are difficult to target and wind shifts can cause them to shift to civilian sites They are relatively cheap to manufacture and they do not provide effective defense systems for civilians. This is particularly true for the nerve gases that have been stockpiled in violation of international law. Sarin gas is particularly gruesome in its convulsive effects on the neuromuscular system and many of the victims stop breathing or slowly strangle to death. 

A leading critic of gas warfare, Matthew Meselson, told me several years ago that chemical weapons would be used by smaller nations if their use was not made a war crime with surety of arrest and punishment.  His prediction has come true. They are easy to manufacture and their costs are miniscule compared to a nuclear weapons program. Ironically many of the people, who believe that an iron fist policy is the only one that their country’s enemy respects, also believe that their own civilians and soldiers are toughened in their spines if an enemy resorts to the use of such weapons.  This double standard ["we  will make them cry, Uncle" versus "we will fight to the last man"] exists for users of all weapons systems and goes back to antiquity but few people point out this contradiction in human belief.   

If neither the United States nor the United nations responds to Syria’s use of gas warfare by military response, what other options are there?  One policy is labeling such a nation as a pariah nation and imposing a blockade to its receiving military weapons by air, land, or sea.  A second policy would be a diplomatic offensive with sanctions on that nation’s overall economy, transfer of money in international trade, and freezing of assets around the world. It would include cutting off landing rights to its commercial aircraft. It would block travel by their civilians.  War may not be the answer to those who use chemical weapons, but doing nothing is a terrible response.

HUMANS ARE NOT INNATELY AGGRESSIVE NOR IS WAR INEVITABLE BECAUSE OF OUR GENES

 

I never felt comfortable with the claim that humans are innately aggressive and wars are inevitable because of our genes (or if we are male warriors, because of our testosterone). The evidence for genes for war or that testosterone is what makes us fight wars is a “pull out of the air” belief, not something backed with mappable genes. It is certainly not something a molecular biologist could presently identify through gene products and target cells in the brain with innate circuits activated.  Without that type of evidence why put other people’s lives at risk because it is a comfortable belief?  I believe we learn to hate just as we learn to be bigots based on religion, nationality, race or sex. Is there a gene for being a slave master?  Is there a gene for making us homophobic?  Is there a gene for exploiting others?  Is there a gene for greed?  I doubt these cop-outs that avoid thinking about the causes of our discontents and passing them off to biology.  My field does not need that type of endorsement.  It’s just as damaging as the 1930s when genes were used by bigots to justify compulsory sterilization of so-called unfit people in the United States or to justify racial hygiene, especially as Nazi ideologists identified their racial hygiene movement.

There are times in our history when we had alternative thoughts about our values.  I think of the GI Bill that put hundreds of thousands of veterans to college free and as a result gave us the greatest rise in middle class in the twentieth century.  I think of the efforts to establish a Peace Corps whose job was to help needy people around the world build their homes, develop irrigation, create efficient cooking facilities, educate children, and establish public health efforts so they could have more food, a cleaner life with less infectious diseases, newspapers they could read, and roads they could travel.  The same was true for Vista which attempted to remedy many of the problems of those living in poverty or slums in the United States.  I think of the national effort to build the interstate highways which have linked our cities from coast to coast.  I think of the WPA during the Great Depression that provided great public works – bridges, airports, buildings, and provided murals, theatre groups, and parks for communities that lacked a tax base to raise money for them. 

We have largely replaced those values with a gospel of greed, indifference to others, self-interest, a belief that social failure is personal failure, a belief that helping others subsidizes laziness and stupidity, that a government’s role should be limited almost entirely to building a huge military, fighting wars that protect economic interests, regulating the bedroom and defeating efforts to organize labor, eliminating minimum wages or cost of living programs, eliminating health insurance by government, and breaking up public school systems to foster religious based or privileged based schooling.  At the same time the wealthiest are allowed unlimited influence on their legislatures, including opportunities to support candidates with huge sums of cash, gerrymander districts to limit the democratic process, and provide generous subsidies for the rich and a look the other way policy if the rich stash their money in foreign banks and shift their factories to developing nations where labor costs are far below US poverty levels. 

I call such efforts a trend to establishing a plutocracy of the wealthy for the wealthy. It is not an America at its idealistic best.  Why have we abandoned the Monroe Doctrine which tried to keep us from involving ourselves in foreign wars?  Why have we engaged in virtually perpetual war since the end of WWII?  Are the only two forms of government we can imagine being that of a choice of  a plutocracy of uncaring wealthy rulers or a communist type state that stifles individual freedom to criticize one’s government?  Is there no place for a representative government where the middle class and the poor have a voice and can favor peace over war?