Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Patch Adams

Started on June 6, 2010

Until this morning I had shyed away from news of the Gulf Oil Spill. It seemed a tragedy too enormous to comprehend, much less do anything about. And my fears were not unreasonable. If anything, after reading an article my sister-in-law wrote and following that up with some Democracy Now! coverage, it is worse than I imagined—worse, probably, than most of us could imagine, in no small part because we really have no idea how bad it is. Even BP officicials quietly acknowledge that the amount of oil could be 10 times what we think it is. Already it is turning the entire Gulf of Mexico into one giant dead zone. By next summer, the Gulf Stream could carry that up the Atlantic coastline.

In the face of such overwhelming news, it might seem an odd or even inappropriate time to dedicate one of only two posting in two months to Patch Adams.

And yet I think to Patch Adams I owe in some small way the fact that I am writing at all. In the midst of everything happening in the outside world, LL and I have begun to prepare for our move this fall to remote Omak. As part of that preparation I've been sorting through old paperwork with the not-always-successful goal of throwing most of it away. In such manner I came across a paper I'd long given up for gone: my introductory words welcoming Patch to speak at Johns Hopkins.

Below are two excerpts from the beginning and the end of that introduction; the beginning was mostly logistics and a discussion of how it was that I'd met some resistance to bringing Patch to campus. Apparently he'd come a few years earlier and there was a small but vocal minority who didn't want him to return. So Patch called me up and offered to come for free, and the funds that we raised to thank him were matched by a sympathetic undergraduate dean to give to a local women's shelter.
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When Patch came to speak at Wesleyan in my junior year there, it was as if someone put into words all the things that I already knew were important in life. I've had a similar reaction when reading the work of Daniel Quinn, and one of the things that struck me was that neither Adams nor Quinn encourages anyone to emulate them blindly. They share a strong belief—based on observation of trends in population, the environment, culture, and politics—that the world society we've created is unsustainable. They also feel that change would, rather than the conventional wisdom of "having to give things up," make us immeasurably richer. But we must find this for ourselves. Patch also said, "If you need a friend, write to me, and I will write back." So I wrote, and he not only responded to that first letter, he remembered who I was and always built on our friendship in correspondence over the years to come.

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In pondering [my own experience], I couldn't honestly fathom [that some people had responded unfavorably to Patch] until I asked myself: what might I myself find dangerous about this doctor, this clown, this person who had written to me as a friend?

I believe Patch Adams is dangerous to those parts of myself that say, "That's just the way it is."

I believe Patch Adams is dangerous to those parts of myself that say, "Just get through today, and tomorrow you can be revolutionary." Those parts that say, "I'm too busy with school and stressed out to have fun, much less help anyone." Those parts that say, "These four years of college and four years of medical school and 3 or 4 or 14 years of residency and 50 years of paying off debts will be really tough, but then, (if I'm still alive) I'll take a break." And you might laugh, but there are times when it feels like this is the mentality I need just to survive medical school!

Patch Adams is dangerous because he's saying, "Make revolutionary work itself the break." I think Patch is dangerous not because hes's crying out against injustice and the direction our planet is taking—there are numerous folks out there telling us how bad things are—but because he's actually trying to make an alternative work, and he's having the time of his life doing it. If Patch Adams were advocating an alternative program, I don't think he would get such a strong reaction. If he were saying, I want you to recycle more of your Coke cans, and take public transit instead of your car, and water your houseplants on Wednesdays, we could write him off. Because all of these things—while they're good programs—aren't really going to transform our society. Patch is dangerous because he has a different vision. Patch is saying that we can make helping our planet and its people the most fun thing ever imaginable. And that we have within ourselves the power to make that change—that I do, and that you do.

Thus I challenge you tonight to ask yourself not just what you can do to help, but how you can do it so that nothing else could be more fun. In conjunction with Physicians for Social Responsibility and several student groups, we will be arranging a follow-up forum of the ideas of Dr. Adams in the context of medicine and social justice, and I invite any of you who are interested to join us. Regardless, I ask you tonight to listen to the words of Patch Adams, and to think about what they mean for you and your community.

I was going to close my introduction with a quote oft attributed to Nelson Mandela but actually from Marianne Williamson which talks about how our greatest fear is not being inadequate but rather being powerful beyond measure, because I think this quote applies to Dr. Adams. He is letting his own light shine, and giving all of us permission to do the same. But rather than recite that quote, I think it would be an injustice for me to not share with you what is for me Patch's most important message. Once this spring when Patch left a message for me, I called him back and said, "My room-mate told me there was a message on our answering machine, but I thought it was just my friend!" Patch said, "I want you to erase that word 'just' from your vocabulary. If anything, I'm a 'just.' To have a friend is gold; that is the gold of life!" And so forgive me for taking this opportunity to say,

"Thank you, my friends, for all your incredible work in making tonight possible. I would like you to meet Patch Adams."

Thursday, June 17, 2010

Thousand-dollar diarrhea

56 hours ago I awoke with terrible stomach pains and over the remaining hours of the night vomited three times. In-between vomiting I was kept from sleep by cramps which progressed to diarrhea with accompanying exhaustion, and with each passing minute I saw my hopes of going to work fade. When day broke I finally slept. For the next 24 hours I would be intermittently awoken by the dire urge to go to the bathroom, after which I would sip on gatorade before drifting back to an uneasy slumber.

During this time I missed my most productive workday of the week, wherein, because I start at 7:30AM and often work until midnight plus or minus a few hours more for a delivery, I might earn up to $1000.

Which leads me, 56 hours later and with stomach cramps slowly subsiding, to reflect on where I stand in the global scale of wealth.

Let's say that I worked 100 of these 24-hour clinic+call shifts for $100,000 a year. According to Global Rich List, such an income puts me in the top 0.66% of earners worldwide. If I earned a tenth of that—$10,000 a year—I would still be in the top 13%, with 87% of the world's population earning less. Even at $1000 a year—the amount I missed in a day's work because of a GI bug—I would be in the top 44%, meaning that greater than half of the world survives on less, which is less than $3 a day.

One limitation of this website is that it doesn't delineate the breakdown of salaries greater than $200,000. This might not seem to matter, except that in this tiny fraction of people most of the wealth is concentrated, and the further to the right of the wealth-vs.-number-of-people graph one goes, the steeper the curve.

A site which gives a better idea of this graph, which looks like a reverse letter "L", is called just that: The L-Curve. The L-curve site focuses on America alone. Since America has a median income of $40,000, it's like taking the final three person icons on the Global Richlist site (the top 3% of all earners) and expanding them in detail. The results are shocking.

If income is stacks of $100 bills, America's median of $40,000 is a stack 1.6 inches high. For an income of $100,000, the stack is 4 inches high; for $1 million it is 40 inches high. $1M is reached at "one foot from the goal line"; population is plotted along a football field with the median income at the 50-yard line. One has to zoom out to appreciate the full scale. At $1 billion worth of income, the stack is 1km high. Using what it says was an estimate of Bill Gates's greatest increase in net worth in 1 year of $50 billion, the final stack of bills is 50 kilometers high.

I went to Forbes.com to confirm this. While wealth is not equal to income, the spread is the same. As of 2010:

-There are 1,011 billionaires

-The richest 51 billionaires control over $1 trillion dollars

-The world's 3 richest men control assets greater than the combined GDP of the world's 71 poorest countries (using CIA - The World Factbook, 2009)

-If one of these men lost money because of diarrhea in commensurate fashion to my 2-day loss, that bathroom break would cost him...one billion dollars.

Unsettling, to say the least.

So. Clearly we non-billionaires don't at this time have the power that money commands. On the other hand, there are 1000 of them, and more than 6 billion of us. I cannot help but think of the Jimi Hendrix quote, “When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.”

Such are the reflections of an unquiet stomach, which as I write is quieter already.