back home again

Jimbo spent most of the week on the road and I just sat around and did nothing yesterday. Our main office is in a small town with no airport so one needs to fly to Chicago and rent a car and drive four hours, or fly to Indianapolis, rent a car and drive for three. The quickest way to get there is to drive. Well, the quickest way is to fly a shuttle flight into Champaign-Urbana, rent a car and drive for an hour, but that is an expensive way to go, and not much faster. So, I drove up and back. It is a seven- to eight-hour drive each way.

In the words of John Denver:

"Hey it’s good to be back home again
Sometimes this old farm feels like a long-lost friend
Yes ‘n hey, it’s good to be back home again."

It’s also good to hear that Bill Frist has come back to his senses. I’m not a smart man, but I know what progress is. Bill Frist appears for all the world to be very intelligent, and it looks like he knows progress, too. Hell, we’re all educated and we all can do and say dumb things from time to time, but to violate your Hippocratic oath just to be able to suck up to the President caused me to lose respect for the intellect of the senate majority leader. I guess the flavor of Bush’s ass on his lips became unpleasant or pretending to be ignorant finally left a bad enough taste in his mouth that his conscience made him fess up to the fact that he wasn’t stupid after all.

Primum non nocere.

That’s Latin for, first, do no harm. Of course, it’s not actually part of the Hippocratic oath, but it is a common code of physicians. Hippocrates, of course, was Greek (or as I say, Greek to me), so he didn’t write in Latin. For a physician to oppose stem cell research is tantamount to a minister preaching atheism. It also goes against the code of doing no harm. The Hippocratic oath says, “I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures which are required…” That is the part of the Hippocratic oath opposition to stem cell research violates.

History is littered with the corpses of victims of ignorance and religious persecution and this history lesson appears to have been lost on the current administration and its constituency of the religious right. When I saw the story about Frist’s conversion on Friday night’s news, they showed a group of guys, for balance, telling us how Frist was wrong. I was struck by their movie-villain eyes. But this is no movie in which their attrition will occur at the end at the hands of some hero, as the hero utters some catchy phrase. These are opponents of progress who may very well succeed.

But, as for now, I’m encouraged that someone on the other side has shown me that they are not all Neanderthals. To paraphrase what Paul Henreid, as Victor Laszlo, said to Rick Blaine, played by Humphrey Bogart, in the movie Casablanca:

“Welcome back to the fight. This time I know our side will win.”

Or, maybe not, but it is a step in the right direction. At least, that’s the way we feel here in Jimbo’s world.