Syndicate and Hague

One of the great luxuries of having Wednesdays off for these few weeks in which I do not have to do homework for 3 classes is that I can sit and really listen to podcasts of shows I enjoy. Today was the most recent episode of Radiolab, “Diagnosis.”

I dig Radiolab. Actually, I just dig science shows in which they look at things from a variety of angles. Radiolab in particular, however, often leaves me in a state of rehashing and thinking about at least one element of the show.

This week, it was the part of the show on SIDS and how the doctors initially discovered a problem and diagnosed it with terrible consequences.

So this is the knowledge I came away from the show with: back in the early part of the 20th century, they started realizing that SIDS was a thing. A few thousand babies, otherwise healthy, would just die while sleeping and no one could figure it out. Stymied, the doctors decided to do what they do, and research (autopsy) the babies who died to see if there was some part of the anatomy that was different. What they discovered was that all these babies had enlarged thymuses, which they thought may be pressing on the trachea and suffocating them at night.

Score, right? Well. Their solution was to irradiate the throats of babies if parents were concerned about SIDS, which resulted in tens of thousands of deaths of people who got thyroid cancer. Oops. Sidenote: I guess radiation was all the rage back then. People could get x-rays of their feet at shoe stores and Marie Curie was plunging her own arms into radioactive things. That didn’t go so well for her, you know, though we gained a lot of knowledge from it.

That stuff is interesting in and of itself, but the show goes on to talk about why all these babies had enlarged thymuses. (You’re totally trying to guess right now, I know. I was too.)

They didn’t.

Going back to the old days of grave-robbing, you know that’s how our early doctors got bodies to study anatomy, the well-off folks started finding ways of warding off the grave-robbers. Complicated caskets, vaults, etc. The grave-robbers were stuck digging up poor people buried in sacks a few inches under the ground in paupers’ graves. Eventually, in a number of countries, any unclaimed poor person who died was automatically donated to science–essentially codifying the existing practice.

So take that knowledge (our doctors way back then were only looking at the anatomies of the poor) and combine it with the knowledge that nutritional deprivation and stress physically messes you up, and combine that with the knowledge that constant stress shrinks the thymus…and voila! Those babies didn’t have enlarged thymuses, they were the first healthy thymuses the doctors had ever seen.

Huh.

It’s no secret (or maybe it is for you, I don’t know) that a lot of our medical knowledge was built on the backs of the poor. A lot of it was also built on the back of slaves — horrible, unspeakable things were done to slaves in the name of medicine. If you want to hear about it (and I’m telling you, listening to this made me cry), SPH had Harriet A. Washington speaking on Medical Apartheid this past year and it was intense.

The irony of this for me was that because science so abused the poor, middle/upper-income children died. Because the burden of discovery was not shared across class lines (some lives and deaths are more sacred), doctors couldn’t diagnose problems that affected children regardless of class.

I’ve had a hard time writing lately. I’d say that it’s due to writing fatigue from school or politics fatigue post-election, but neither really seems correct. It’s more like I’m in a thought-induced writing hibernation.

It’s been a fed up kind of winter. And I’ve been struggling with answers for why things are, in actuality, so different from my perception of them. Much of this is about the fault lines a truly serious relationship has exposed.

When you’re gay, in between the time you first come out and decide someone is going to last long enough/is important enough that you want them to know your family (for better or worse) there are months or years in which people can pretend you’re not gay. They get kind of used to this.

As we know, a lot of us move away from our original homes during those years. We, as Dan Savage said in his podcast today, “find a better family” and create the world that “home” doesn’t necessarily provide. This doesn’t mean we don’t like our families or have relationships with them, but almost every gay person experiences some level of lasting isolation after they come out.

Straight people don’t get it. Even the lefty ones don’t get it completely, and I’m not criticizing you for it. It’s really impossible for someone who is not a part of a marginalized group to know every aspect of what kinds of daily abuses, large and small, we endure. This is true of white people and race, rich people and class, etc. It’s not your fault you can’t know everything, but it’s your responsibility to listen.

And I think it’s our responsibility to speak. Even though it sucks.

I don’t have the kind of relationship with my family to have shared much of my personal life. I forged my own life, with its accompanying confidantes and emotional support structures, so if a girl broke my heart it wasn’t something my family knew…just like they didn’t know about friendships gained and lost, the nitty gritty of emotional struggles. It wasn’t their role. It was the role of my family of choice.

Is, then, my impatience with them fair? Over a decade of being out but the strain of education is upon me yet again. Instead of suggesting I wasn’t finding a job right away out of grad school because people saw some glbt involvement on my resume, it’s that I should also edit my girlfriend out of her role around my grandma. It’s really the same thing - no matter how accepting things look on the surface (and I can’t complain about that, because it is), there’s this lingering concept that this is shameful, this is something that should be hidden at times.

Being who I am, I have no tolerance for that. If a straight person doesn’t have to edit themselves, I sure as hell don’t.

However, it’s not really this simple. Not in practice. Because we can steamroll things, we can say we won’t cooperate, but the fact of the request remains.

It’s not just me, of course. My experience is hardly traumatic compared to others I know. But all the abuses share the same traits. We are embarrassments to our parents. They interpret our status as gay as a testament to their failure. It’s in all the trite comments people hear: why do you have to flaunt it? why are you doing this to me? don’t tell your grandparents. is this because I had a bad relationship with my mother/father? — It’s all about them.

I’m honestly rather excited by the renewed energy the glbt community is showing. I think this could be a good year, though a hard year. I like the fact that we’re collectively losing our patience with the crap that has been foisted on us all these years.

So, what’s in a new year? Endurance, I hope. The willingness to be hurt by people we thought were on our sides and endure, endure, endure without becoming doormats. Enduring means pressing the issue, pushing it, forcing people to confront the homophobia they thought they didn’t have or to question the homophobia they feel justified in. Enduring doesn’t mean infinite patience, it means patience through struggle, and necessitates a core of positivity. We have to feel that we will change the world. Be positive and endure.

Other than that, I end yet another year grateful for my family of choice and the ever-growing constellation of people I’m lucky to call friends. And I am lucky, so ridiculously lucky, to have the love of the most perfect-for-me girl on this planet. Sigh.

And that duty is to tell us this. That NY Times story today about the obscene inflation of college tuition is not exactly news to me. But in the context of our economy and personal debt loads–was there some event that precipitated this ballooning? Did student loans get suddenly (or more progressively) easy to get? Have colleges and universities - like their bloated Wall Street brethren - been rapidly increasing costs on the bubble of consumer debt with the expectation that we could just keep going up, up, up? Have state governments been chipping away at public university funding under the same impression (no need to fund, just take out more loans)?

I would like to know these things. Please now go make magic statistics things happen for me. Okay?