Month: September 2018

When I was 18 and just returned from my trip around the world on the Semester at Sea, I got the idea to transfer from UC Riverside to UC San Diego. My roommate was making the switch, and Judy (who would also have transferred to UCSD) and I were from San Diego anyway.

I held a full-ride scholarship at UCR that would not transfer automatically to UCSD. I asked Dad if he would approve my transfer. He said no, emphatically. No doubt, the uncertainty about the scholarship was an important factor. He also saw that, while I had a year and one -half experience invested in becoming involved at UCR, I would be starting over at UCSD.

I did not receive his answer well. In hindsight, I am grateful to him, as my parent, making a decision for me even though I was 18.

After his simultaneous stroke and heart attack when he was 79, I was put in the position of advising Mom about decisions on his behalf. Another one of the ironies of life.

The subject of making decisions for a loved one came to mind as we watched the movie, “The Leisure Seeker.” Judy had ordered the DVD from Netflix, in part because of the premise of the movie and good reviews, but also because the stars were Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland. They play a couple married for more than 50 years and devoted to each other. He, though, is a victim of severe dementia, and she is succumbing to cancer.

They undertake a road trip in their RV that they had long ago named “The Leisure Seeker.” To the consternation of their son and daughter, the couple had not let them know they were leaving or their route and destination. It is hard not to root for the couple as they tap into memories while, at the same time, enjoying a freedom of action that had become constrained at home by their well-meaning children.

It is also possible to identify with the children. They worry that either parent, away from medical support, will come to some harm, or accidentally harm others. There is no doubt that they would say “we’re only thinking of you.”

Our family experienced a similar moment in Mom’s final years. One spring, after having fallen several times, she suddenly needed more and more help around the house, and benefitted from friends delivering meals from time to time. She sold her car, got rides from other friends to church, and had her tenant grocery-shop for her.

Her children suggested that the time might have come for her to move to a retirement community. My sister, Sandee, and Judy toured a few and suggested a visit to the one nearest to Mom’s church. To our surprise, Mom agreed to go.

She seemed to love it. The apartment she saw had ample room, a lovely lanai, and pine trees that Mom said reminded her of camping. Compounding our surprise, she deposited $2000 and took away the papers she would need to complete in order to rent the space.

When I telephoned her a few days later, she said, “I can’t do it. I can’t leave here. I want to die in this house.” Whether or not she was trying to please her kids by saying that she would move, we will never know. That house, though, was the only one she had ever owned.

The prudent choice for her was to move. We encouraged her to do so. We did not insist. It was good fortune that Mom had the financial resources to undertake the risks of staying put. In the last six months of her life, she needed the 24-hour care that would have been a feature of the retirement community.

People of a Certain Age, our certain age puts us in the middle of the time frame for yet one more crucial life decision, one that either we will have to make (or perhaps have already made), or, possibly, will be made by others in our behalf. When is it the right thing to do to insist on deciding something for someone else?

Answering the question might well pit head against heart. Tough decisions often do.

A Stanford Professor of Psychology, in a speech to independent school educators several years ago, described a continuum of decision-making for parents and children in the early years. Until a certain age, parents make nearly all of the decisions in behalf of a child. At some point, the child is independent. The professor argued that the longer the period of shared decision-making from birth to adulthood, the better the outcomes for all concerned.

That’s a hard point to prove and harder still to implement if the child develops confidence early in life in her capacity to make good decisions for herself, and she is right. (Dad’s intervention in 1966 seemed late in my life by the professor’s standard. But it turned out okay.)

I wonder if the model holds promise for situations in later years; shared decision-making. In discussions about “do not resuscitate” or exercising “the right to die” in states where that is legal, loved ones are encouraged to talk about these issues in advance, and perhaps even to write down what those discussions conclude.

Perhaps matters like treatment for illness or moving to another living situation, etc. might also become topics for conversations between loved ones before any need arises.

Or perhaps circumstances vary so widely from family to family that we need to acknowledge that there are few hard and fast rules to follow here, that we are all obliged, in the end, to do the best we can.

Daniel E. White

September 24, 2018

On January 13, 1920, The New York Times editorialized: “That Professor [Robert] Goddard with his ‘chair’ at Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution does not know of the relation of action to reaction, and the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react—to say that would be absurd. Of course, he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.”

“After the rocket quits our air and really starts on its long journey, its flight would be neither accelerated nor maintained by the explosion of the charges it then might have left. To claim that it would be is to deny a fundamental law of dynamics, and only Dr. Einstein and his chosen dozen, so few and fit, are licensed to do that.” (Here is Where, Andrew Carroll, p. 257)

New York Times editorial page July 21, 1969: Under the headline, CORRECTION, the Times ran a three-paragraph editorial that owned up to its January 1920 comments mocking Goddard’s intellect and belief that a rocket could reach the moon.” (Carroll, p. 263)

Carroll also noted: 1. That when Goddard went to Washington D.C. in 1942 to promote rocketry, all military branches rebuffed him; 2. In 1944, more than 3000 V-S rockets, built by German scientists led by Werner Von Braun, killed more than 7000 people in England and Belgium; 3. Werner Von Braun, once in America, observed that “in the history of rocketry, Dr. Robert Goddard has no peer.  He was first.” (Carroll, p. 254)

The fact that the Times had demeaned Goddard’s scientific assertions in the 1920s only to retract their criticism in 1969 holds its own intrinsic interest. It also raises other questions that seem pertinent these days when some in political life struggle with what the First Amendment authors meant by “freedom of the press.”

The first question:  what other geniuses have been pilloried, their ideas subjected to scorn by critics who have little professional backgrounds upon which to base their critiques? This phenomenon is not new. It took several hundred years for the Roman Catholic Church to acknowledge that Galileo was right.

Is it too much of a stretch to suggest that, in general, genius is counter-cultural?  After all, genius disturbs the prevailing norms.

The second question: why is it so hard for people in public life—and I include political and corporate leaders and professional news outlets—to say “I was wrong. I made a mistake?” To be fair, the answer might be that all are human, and a large number of humans have trouble saying “I was wrong. I made a mistake,” and meaning it.

Commenting on TV about recent elections, former Hawaii Governor Neil Abercrombie was expressing support for a state Constitutional Convention. The TV host noted, “but you have said you opposed a convention.”

“That’s right. I changed my mind. I was wrong,” responded Abercrombie. Note that he is retired, in his late 70s, and free from being concerned about what anyone has to say about him.

It reminded me of a change of mind that occurred in California in the 1970s that made some people mad. Governor Jerry Brown, in his first set of two terms in office, changed his mind about Proposition 13. For changing his mind, he was judged unprincipled. He replied that he had gotten more information, a better perspective, and therefore came to a different conclusion than before. I’m okay with leadership that responds to new information and re-thinks.

Question three: when did a segment of the population become more trusting of Facebook postings, tweets, and blogs, written by anyone, (freedom of speech), than the work of people educated into a set of ethics about reporting, supervised by people who hold their positions based upon their ability to exercise good judgment about what got printed or aired? (freedom of the press.)  As the Times story above shows, the professional standard for the press is to correct mistakes, even if they occurred 49 years before!

When teaching US History, I could always draw incredulity from the kids when I noted that Joseph Pulitzer (the prizes named after him are ironic) bragged about his ability to manipulate public sentiment into supporting a war against Spain in Cuba.  His example of “yellow” journalism colors how some think about all media. To be sure, there are publications and broadcasters whose starting point is a clear political point of view. That has been true since the US became a nation. Because some outlets are so tilted in their point of view does not mean that all are.

People of a Certain Age, could we not agree that the Framers separated freedom of the press from freedom of speech deliberately? And they understood, “press” to mean, in their day, print media? To be sure, the Sedition Act of 1798 tried to make publishing anything critical of the Adams administration illegal. But that law was allowed to expire in 1801.  The Framers, like Jefferson and Madison when they were President, defended freedom of the press even when the press opposed their point of view.

For me, a corps of professionals trained in a common set of ethical principles devoting themselves to holding all those who seek or hold power to regular scrutiny, always exercising loyal skepticism, constitutes the press the Framers sought to protect. When one of those outlets, even after 49 years, comes out and admits “we were wrong,” I think the Framers would be pleased.

Daniel E. White

September 10, 2018