Season of Gratitude

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In the past week, I've had two occasions to be very grateful for the disposition of providence in my regard. Now, this may strike people who know me as odd, because I'm often critical and sour about certain events in my life that I believe ought to have resolved themselves with a greater degree of grace. However bleak my situation may seem to me and how I may not come into my own as I like, I realized this week that I ought be more grateful for things as yet not forced upon me. Back in 1991 when my father went to war in Iraq, I remember Secretary of Defense Richard "Dick" Cheney saying "It is easy to take your liberty for granted when it has never been taken from you". From time to time, I need these reminders of how blessed I really am.

Earlier this week, my best friend from high school notified me that his father, 54 years old, had passed away suddenly. Now, I didn't know them as well as many others, being that I grew up military and quickly ended up somewhere else, but my father is 53, and I considered the ramifications of losing my own father, now or at any other time in my life. During the war in 1991, I remember being terrified at the prospect. My current best friend lost his father when he was nine years old, and although Thom has overcome that eventuality with panash, he truly was robbed of some fundamentally useful eventualities with which providence found fit to grant me. Life would be profoundly different if I lost my father.

Last Friday I went to the Muetter Museum, located in the College of Surgeons in Philadelphia. This contains the most macabre and grotesque display of human deformity and malady I've ever seen, and I was glad I abstained from breakfast. I came away from the experience with three observations:

1. I'm glad I didn't go to medical school
2. I'm glad I've never had any of those problems
3. I'm glad we live now with "advanced" medical techniques.

Had I chosen to attend medical school, the course curriculum would have required a lengthly expenditure of time studying these types of images to properly discern. Even now as I write, my stomach turns in remembrance. Modern sanitation and medical preventative treatment largely mitigate the marginal propensity of anyone catching any of these diseases, and while the examples on display are grossly exaggerated at times, I cannot imagine suffering some things people used to. I've never been more grateful for the chance to shower regularly.

Much as I denigrate the medical profession and the ne'er-do-wells who aspired thereto when I taught them as a graduate student, I'm glad we've moved beyond the medievalisms that permeated the medical profession in days of yore. The words of Dr. McCoy from Star Trek IV reverberated in my head as I viewed the Muetter displays, and I couldn't believe the implements and practices saved lives. Even when doctors don't really have a clue what we have, our standard of care, even in the worst hospitals on the planet are better today than the best hospitals in 1700 or even 1800 AD. I am profoundly grateful for the advances in scientific medicine, diagnosis and treatment.

In conclusion, I have my health, and it's very good, and I have my family, which by comparison is also stellar. This frees me to focus my exertions on exigent matters without abrogating my ability to affect my own chances for excellence- forging my own relationships, managing my finances, and pursuing vocational/recreational goals. One hundred years ago, my ancestors spent 99% of their time vested in eking out a subsistence, in survival, and now I'm free to pursue other venues of effort. I live a life of ignoble ease. I live in America.