Today is the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination. You can find a partial archive of his speeches and video and audio clips, here and here. Link to The King Center, here.
For the transcript and audio of Robert F. Kennedy’s speech in Indianapolis about Dr. King’s death, click here.
For Nelson Mandela’s Acceptance Speech of the Nobel Peace Prize, click here.
If you haven’t yet read or watched Barack Obama’s recent speech on race, you can do so here.
May you have some time today to reconcile in your heart something you previously found too uncomfortable to contemplate, and may you find the hope, the energy, the courage to strengthen your resolve to add a drop to the bucket of change.
Lucky elitist member of the educated middle class that I am, I can’t imagine joining the military to pay for college. I know that I will earn enough, later on, to pay it off. I can’t imagine joining the military at all, peacenik beneficiary of prior solidiers’ deaths that I am. I’m lucky– I’m smart, I’m self-conscious, I have parents and had teachers who were capable of imparting to me the values and drive that opened up other career options than the military. Not that the military can’t be a good choice. It’s just not mine. And I don’t want to sound like I think every soldier is a dolt– they’re not, but there is a range of intelligence, imagination, and sensitivity in the military like everywhere else. The smart folks (or those smart enough to keep out of trouble, do what they’re told, and suck up to the right people, thanks Cricket for the reminder) tend to rise. The rank and file can and does contain folks who won’t be promoted far.
What I now comprehend, however, is something I couldn’t before imagine, yet somehow knew was happening, as discussed in a recent New Yorker– the military’s wholesale failure to train and command its ground level forces at Abu Graihb, abandoning soldiers who were essentially kids, who didn’t know any better, to torture prisoners, and then to have the audacity to frame them for it. To condone it, in fact– to take advantage of these kids’ lack of training (they were not prison M.P.s) to have them wantonly violate the Geneva Conventions– because they didn’t know any better, and in some cases, probably weren’t smart enough to challenge the situation themselves. The phrase “failure of command” could hardly have more meaning. The position brings the responsibility toward one’s subordinates with it, no matter the individual morality/intelligence/capacity of those sitting in the chairs labeled colonels, generals, Commanders in Chief. To fail to comprehend or carry out the responsibility? Shocks me, though perhaps it shouldn’t.
The us versus them thing has long existed, so the Geneva Conventions exist–because at an extreme, we think it’s tolerable to torture them, if our “principles” are to survive. But to suborn our own soldiers’ principles, or the principles they’re supposed to be protecting, against their will, however late their consciousness of betrayal emerges? It’s almost as shameful as the torture of the prisoners themselves.
The NYT published an article about drug trials and the underreporting of negative and equivocal study results to the FDA and peer-approved journals, data which factors significantly into the FDA’s assessment of where a proposed drug falls along the risk/benefit spectrum. To me, it’s no surprise. Despite cladding their studies in impenetrable jargon and cloaking their data in statistical regressions so complicated that you need a new eyeglass prescription to parse the numbers, scientists are human. They need funding. Announcing some big positive find or advance is likely to be more reputation-making than another criticism without a solution. And drug companies have an obvious incentive to bury the data– if not out of conscious greed and malicious disregard for the health of drug consumers, than out of wishful thinking and the manipulation of study results and monday-morning quarterbacking of the factors underlying the negative study and its results. Drugs are big money. I just wish I didn’t need mine so much.
Finally, the sad facts are this: the FDA, like any other government agency, is underfunded and understaffed, relative to the importance of its regulatory mission. They rely on the drug companies to be honest and to disclose good and bad information. That alone, not accounting for a revolving door of researchers, study project managers and administrators between drug companies, the FDA, private and university labs, and medical practice, is enough to warrant my vigilance about the drugs that I take. I don’t necessarily think all drug companies are evil, or that every FDA researcher is negligent or corrupt. But I do think some of them are, and the rest are only human. So I’ll continue to be the geek who reads the entire set of warnings with each new prescription, and who re-reads them every time she gets a new pill to add to the older ones. And I’ll continue to be the geek who scans the Health and Science sections of the paper every Tuesday, even though I’d rather not worry about it. But rather doesn’t enter into it.
