Life is Precious

by Errington C. Thompson, MD –

OceanGate

OceanGate is a company that took paying tourists to see the wreckage of the Titanic. Yes, tourists would pay $250,000 for the privilege of seeing, up close, a ship that sank over 100 years ago.

By now, everyone knows that the submersible Titan imploded, and all five passengers died. Life is precious. These five souls understood the risks and decided that the risks were worth taking.

Okay. I have to respect their decision. That is not a decision that I would make. I’m not climbing Mount Everest. There are people who have flown with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to outer space. Nope, I’m not doing that, either. Even if I had $250,000 sitting around, I think that I could find something else to do with it that didn’t involve me defying death.

I guess the thing that I find most remarkable about OceanGate was the fly-by-night nature of the operation. If I’m going to go into a submersible to the bottom of the ocean where the pressure can be as much as 2 tons per square inch, I would want the most high-tech submersible on the planet. If you are using an Xbox controller to steer the sub, which they were, I’m sorry. I’m out.

Russia

We saw an extraordinary event last month. Putin’s close confidant Yevgeny Prigozhin suddenly turned against him. Prigozhin was once nobody. He was a prisoner. On release he opened a hot dog stand. That grew into a chain, and then he became Vladimir Putin’s chef—and got contracts to feed the entire Russian army. Somehow, using that Kremlin money and Kremlin cronies, he became the head of the Wagner group, a fighting force that is not officially part of the Kremlin or the Russian Army—in other words, a privately owned military force.

Yevgeny Prigozhin has been an outspoken critic of the Russian Army. Yet he was being pushed aside by the secretary of defense and ultimately by Vladimir Putin himself. All the Wagner soldiers were forced to sign onto the “regular” Army. This single move would leave Prigozhin with nothing.

So he decided to take his Army of over 20,000 men and march on Moscow, getting within 125 miles of the Kremlin. The president of Belarus negotiated a peace between Vladimir Putin and Yevgeny Prigozhin. As quickly as the display of force rose up, it was gone. Does this mean that Vladimir Putin is weaker than ever? I don’t think that we know. The whole thing is weird. Just weird. I guess what Winston Churchill said about the Soviet Union in 1939 is still true of Putin’s Russia: “A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

Gun Violence

Probably on the other spectrum of risk-taking is the random gun violence that we continue to see in the United States. So, far this year, there have been 20,808 Americans who have died secondary to gun violence. As a trauma surgeon, as a Christian, and as a human being, I just hate seeing gun violence.

There is a video that is going around on Instagram; it shows a woman getting out of her car and firing a gun at a car that was speeding away. At the same time, her boyfriend/husband was trying to wrestle the gun away from her. He finally gets the gun, and they jump back in their car and drive off.

The video was labeled as an act of road rage, but this was more. Come on. Let’s be serious. Unless the person in the first car tried to run you over and kill you, there is no reason to pull out a gun. If someone cuts you off or swerves into your lane, that should not ever escalate to pulling out a gun. If you think bad driving should be confronted with gunfire, you should probably see a specialist. You need help, and we need less guns. We must get control of gun violence.

Abortion

It would seem that my love of life and support for abortion is incongruous. It is not. I don’t believe that life begins at conception. I believe that life, human life, begins at birth. If you decide that life begins before birth, the mother becomes secondary to the fetus. This just does not seem right. There should be no time in a woman’s life that she is subservient to anyone or anything. If we truly believe in the freedom and liberty in our Constitution, then every woman, like all men, should be free to decide what is best for her.

It is past time to write a Constitutional amendment stating that Americans are free to make our own healthcare decisions. No state can limit an American’s ability to decide what healthcare he/she should get.

The Supremes

Well, it is time for us to roll up our sleeves and do the hard work of caring for our democracy. Our responsibility is to make sure that the Supreme Court must be above reproach.

Judges cannot take private planes to far-off lands. They must NOT take free fishing trips in Alaska.

Pro Publica just published a well-sourced story stating that Samuel Alito took a really nice trip paid for by a rich GOP donor. It does not matter if the donor has business in front of the Court or not. It just looks worse if Moneybags has business in front of the Court (which, in fact, he did!).

Meanwhile, Justice Neil Gorsuch netted up to $500,000 in profits by selling a property just days after his confirmation—a property that had been on the market, unsold, for two years before that. Who bought it? The head of a major law firm with extensive business before the Court.

Chief Justice Roberts’s wife earned over $10 million as a headhunter placing lawyers with DC law firms—many of which had cases before the Court. Justice Coney Barrett’s husband opened a Washington, DC, branch of his law firm, shortly after his wife joined the Court.

It is time for Congress to wake up from its slumber and do some work. We have three equal branches of government. Do not tell me that Congress cannot place ethical restrictions on the Supreme Court. The very language of the Constitution (Article III, Section 1), reads: “The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour.” “Good behavior” is not defined; since the Court won’t bother, Congress has every right to define it.

And Section 2 continues, “… the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction … with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.” Those exceptions and regulations are also not defined; Congress has every right, even an obligation, to define them, too.

Alito and Thomas, especially, need to be held accountable. Impeachment? I doubt that we can practically impeach either justice. Perhaps it is time for us to remove this lifetime appointment. A lifetime appointment may have made sense in 1776, but it does not now. Twenty years is plenty of time to be on the Supreme Court. Looks like we need to amend the Constitution again. Let’s do it!

Affirmative Action

We live in a racist society. I’m sorry, but we do. When the colonists got here, they treated the Native Americans like dogs. (Actually, dogs are treated better.) We have undergone more than 200 years of slavery and Jim Crow.

Heck, we treated the Irish immigrants, white Irish, like trash when they came over here in large numbers at the beginning of the last century. We were so racist that John F. Kennedy, Irish Catholic, had to give a speech stating that he would not take orders from the Pope if elected president. It has only been in the past 50 to 60 years that we have actively tried to reverse our racist tendencies.

Let’s be honest; the Supreme Court’s latest decision on affirmative action may be the worst decision since the Dred Scott case of 1857. Basically, Dred Scott stated that Blacks did not enjoy any of the rights and privileges that the Constitution bestowed on “normal” Americans. In a 7-2 decision, the Supreme Court handed down the worst piece of nonsense that we have ever seen in the United States.

Not to be outdone by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, Chief Justice Roberts, in a 6-3 decision, determined that colleges cannot use race as one of the criteria for college admissions. To say that this is an awful ruling would be an understatement. Without affirmative action, I would not be here as a trauma surgeon, writing this column for The Urban News. (This is not an exaggeration. And in fact, Obama would have never been president. Joy Reid would not be on MSNBC, and Clarence Thomas would not be on the Supreme Court.)

In third grade, my mother decided I was not learning anything in public school. Because of affirmative action, I was able to transfer to an exclusive private school in Dallas, Texas. Now, I was smart, but I was never the smartest. I had solid grades and solid SAT scores, and again affirmative action allowed me to get into Emory University.

Without affirmative action, I would have never gotten into Emory. But once I got in, I did well at Emory. And I did well on the MCATs. With those good test scores, affirmative action allowed me to get into medical school at the University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas. But without affirmative action, I would have been denied access to these elite schools even with solid grades.

This is a fact. This is the most important thing to understand. Affirmative action opened doors that were once closed.

In the 1930s, it did not matter if you had solid grades. If you were not a once-in-a-generation genius, you were not getting into Harvard, Yale—or Emory. Affirmative action gave people like me (Emory, UT Southwestern) and Barack Obama (Columbia University, Harvard Law), and Joy Reid (Harvard University) and Justice Sotomayor (Princeton, summa cum laude, and Yale Law), and countless others a chance at graduating from elite schools.

Diversity clearly makes our country better. It makes our schools better. It makes businesses better. Diversity can be thought of as our, the United States’, secret sauce.

I do not want to hear about unfair admission practices. Why? Because the Supreme Court has allowed legacy admissions—90-some percent of which are white people—to continue. If your daddy or granddaddy can pump millions into the school’s treasury, the school can admit you without a problem. If you graduated from the school, you’re an alumnus, so your kids can get in. As a matter of fact, they are on the fast track. This kind of discrimination—which almost exclusively benefits rich white people—is okay, according to the Supreme Court. So, this is NOT about fairness. It is about white privilege.

Interestingly, if you look at the effect of affirmative action on college graduation over the past 50 years, there was a clear increase in Black, Asian, and Latino graduation. But, by far, the greatest beneficiary of affirmative action has been white women. In the 1950s, white women made up a minuscule percentage of medical school graduates. Now, they make up over 50% of the class.

Sadly, this brings us full circle in the United States. The simple phrase—elections have consequences—is 100% true. Do you remember when Donald Trump was running for president in 2016? He was telling a predominantly Black audience to vote for him, “What have you got to lose?” In short, we had everything to lose. Decreased wages. Now, decreased access to elite schools. Increased mortality rate from Covid. In fact, a vote for Trump would literally stifle and kill the Black community. This is what we had to lose, and this is what we have seen.

The task of turning this country around is going to be harder than ever. We face gerrymandered voting districts, so we are going to have to show up in overwhelming numbers. We need to find Democratic leaders for local, statewide, and national elections. In order to move this country forward and help the middle class, we have to elect Democrats. It is that simple. As Barack Obama has said, “Don’t get mad, vote!”

NOTE: The views and opinions expressed here, as well as assertions of facts, are those of the author. They do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of The Urban News.