I’m OK. Thanks for asking.

It’s good to know that my two-week absence from blogging has elicited such caring inquiries from many of you, asking about my well-being. Now I need to be a bit more honest. I’m actually NOT OK.

Well, to be more precise, I’m just about as OK as anybody else who lives in the United States, or even more specifically, in the state of California, which at the moment, is not that great. For the first time since perhaps the 9/11 incident, I am questioning the security of our way of life. To put things in perspective, if you were to ask me any time in the past five years this question: “How sure are you that in the next year, you, your friends and your neighbors will continue to have adequate food, water, electricity, lines of communication and safety from people with criminal intent?”, I would have thought “Huh? What kind of silly question is that?” and then answered 99%+ sure. After all, we live in modern-day America, not some impoverished third-world country and not in medieval times. However, if you ask me that same question today, I would say that I am only maybe 70% sure. The significance of this difference to me is HUGE.

We have grown to take for granted that we will always have access to food, water and emergency medical care and that we will always be able to count on the police to protect us from criminals. But reality reminds us that we can’t always do that. The two most glaring examples that come to mind are New Orleans during Katrina and LA during the riots. I learned a lot about the reality of life during Katrina during my trip to New Orleans for the ASRM meeting a few years ago. I befriended a taxi driver and some other locals and learned their war stories firsthand. The tales were surreal, giving me a grim reminder of how quickly life as we know it can revert back to the barbaric conditions of the Middle Ages. I’m also reading a fictional book, “The Tin Roof Blowdown“, which contains some of the most gory graphic descriptions of the chaos that occurred during Katrina.

Just as I went into medicine partially out of a burning curiosity about how our bodies work, I love to regularly research psychology, sociology, history and politics to satiate my desire of knowing how the world works, and I am now of the opinion that there is uncertainty, enough uncertainty that I am officially “concerned”.

Bear in mind that I look with amusement upon the globing warning alarmists or the religious zealots who predict the Apocalypse is coming this week or that week. But I am not fanatically ranting that the world will end tomorrow, or even next year. However, let’s just say that based on my own research AND based on what my own eyes see happening in the real world all around me, I know in my heart that this country is headed in the wrong direction.

Prior to this recent revelation, the life for my staff and me consisted of working our hardest for our patients, which for me, meant willingly giving up around 60 hours per week (including many weekends and some late nights) seeing patients, talking to patients, reading up on new advances and blogging. Some friends would feel bad that I worked so hard, but I reminded them that this was my calling in life. The reward of helping people have babies makes it intrinsically fun for me. Also, as a very important added component, in return for my sacrifices, I was shown gratitude by patients, who paid fair financial compensation so that I was now empowered to accomplish my many other goals and leisurely pursuits. It was a very fair system and is basically the American way, or at least, the American way that was originally laid out by the writers of the Constitution. Equally fitting, my patients were out there productively working their hardest using whatever their own talents were to make life better for THEIR customers, patients and clients. And as a result, they were paid adequate compensation so that they could pursue their goals for happiness, which just so happened to include doing medical treatment to have babies. In this system, everybody had the freedom to choose how hard they worked, with the corresponding reward in return.

However, as I mentioned earlier, things are changing for the worse. Now, I, for one, was  glad to see George W. Bush leave office. I disagreed with his specific policies which led to a further shift in the balance from individual freedom to excessive government power. I was optimistically open-minded (but cautiously skeptical) that maybe Obama’s promises of a “change” were more than empty political promises. But, BAM! Out of the gate, like a slap in the face, the new president showed his true self. My friends tire of me reminding them time and time again that we should judge people by their actions and not by their words. Well, the president’s first major action, deceptively called a “stimulus” package, is what he should be judged by, not by his sweet words of promising to make the country a better place for the people. No, I have not read the entire word-by-word rendition of the package. But then again, neither have any of the politicians who voted for it. However, I have studied it enough to render my strong opinion that it has little to do with helping people and more to do with increasing the massively growing domination of political power.

I have an interest in discussing these details in future posts and I plan to do so, even at the risk of you readers eventually telling me “Enough politics already! Get back to writing about fertility!”, but for now, I just wanted to share with you why I have been absent from blogging these past few weeks. I compare my recent world view to that of a not-entirely-unsuspecting New Orleans resident in the few days before Katrina. Sure, the news keeps warning us something bad MIGHT happen. Sure, we can see the wind and skies outside ourselves. But we don’t really know if, when or how hard it will hit. Meanwhile, though, we’re getting ready stockpiling food, setting up emergency generators, boarding up our windows and making contingency plans to get out of New Orleans. So, in this instance, how am I getting ready for a future collapse of this country? By researching and learning so that I can share information with others. Because, unlike a hurricane descending upon us, the upcoming social and economic disaster IS potentially preventable. I am hopeful that we, as a people can wake up and reverse the ever-growing shift from government dominance to individual freedom. We’ll see.

But don’t worry, I’m still practicing medicine. In fact, things have been busy and pregnancies have been coming in bunches (little bunches, not 8-fold bunches) and I still have lots of good stories and insights to share in future posts. I just realize now that we all have to prepare for a potential disaster that I hope will never come.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 28th, 2009 at 10:03 am and is filed under Life and Happiness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.