If You Don’t Feel Bad, You’re Not Paying Attention
By
Leonard Zwelling
Obviously, this blog is written from the perspective of a 77-year-old white Jewish man. That means I am a Boomer. I am a child of the Sixties. I have known times of plenty, peace, and prosperity in America and times of immense chaos. The Vietnam Era to Watergate years were chaotic and that was when I was in undergraduate and medical school. Chaos. One of my fraternity brothers was killed in Southeast Asia after flunking out of Duke. A medical school classmate was gunned down in a demonstration in Greensboro by Hell’s Angels. There were so many times I feared the center would not hold. But, it did.
Throughout this period, I always assumed that the United States would remain intact, that our government would function as delineated in the Constitution, and that medicine was a discipline in which the patient was the central focus. All of this is gone and with it, a sense of optimism that always characterized the United States in my lifetime. Hope may not be a strategy, but it can keep a people going through adversity. Is America losing hope?
I was born into post-WWII prosperity. My parents managed to raise themselves up to the middle class—two kids, two cars, a house, and a mortgage. They sent their kids to college. They retired to Florida. This is what I saw. This is what I believed in. No more.
What I see now is corporatization of all pursuits including medicine. The shareholder is at the center of medicine today. Even academic medicine has become corporatized. All the scientists want to have a company and all their bosses want a piece of the action.
The government is collapsing. The Supreme Court has become totally politicized, maybe. The Congress has become the indentured servants of the White House, and the President wishes to be king. He looks like he is well on his way.
As always, the country is its people and its people are at war with one another over everything. There is no American consensus about anything, except, maybe Taylor Swift. We can’t even agree on what we see on video recordings of shootings of our own citizens by our own federal law enforcement agents. I have endless debates with friends about what really happened and why, January 6 being the prime example. As I have written before, we do not have a centralized source of information on which we can depend so we all have to make it up or worse, select what we like from the internet or cable news.
Finally, the threat of AI is coming fast (see Peggy Noonan in WSJ, Feb 14: https://www.wsj.com/opinion/brace-yourself-for-the-ai-tsunami-95a625dc?mod=author_content_page_1_pos_1). No one knows what it can do or to whom it will do it.
So, if you are my age, and lived through a world of chaos in which American institutions like the federal government and medicine held their own despite the disorder around them, and you see what is happening now, you ought to be very concerned for your children and grandchildren. Put me in that group.
I am not petrified of AI, but I no longer have a job where I can be displaced. If I did have a job, no matter what it was, I would fear AI replacing me. Everyone likes to think that he or she is not replaceable by a machine. Tell that to the thousands of people who used to answer phones. Everyone is replaceable. Only the clever will survive. AI is reducing us to a post-Darwinian, pre-Blade Runner civilization of bots and those subjugated by them.
If you don’t feel bad, you really aren’t paying attention. And, yes, I am losing hope. When I see a great institution like MD Anderson turned into a patient care turnstile attached to an insurance company-fed ATM, where once it was really trying to eradicate cancer, I know there is a real problem. I can even tell when I go to Anderson at either the GU or Audiology clinic. This is not my MD Anderson. It’s Peter’s and before that Ron’s and in their hands greatness has become chaos.
As I so often end my blogs. So sad.
