"Days of Future Passed"

I was in the second grade at Brayton Elementary School in Summit New Jersey in 1955 when the day came to get our polio shots. Our class was summoned to the auditorium and stood frozen with fear in a line that wound into the nurses office. I recall a conversation with a friend in which I said I'd rather risk polio than get the shot (I hated shots.)

Foolish?

Completely.

Polio was the scourge of the 20th century. It was one of the most feared of many childhood diseases that, to a great degree, no longer exist. Polio epidemics crippled thousands of people, mostly young children. All related to polio was horrific. In April, 1955, Dr. Jonas Salk announced the development of a vaccine and, within a year, nearly every American child had been vaccinated. Within a decade, the disease was largely eradicated from the United States.

Those were the days.

We were the first wave of the baby boom. Our fathers had defeated the Japanese and saved Europe. Anything was possible. We would have men on the moon and bring them safely home prior to my college graduation. To us, the power of American scientific achievement and (occasionally blind) hope for the future wasn't really amazing, it was assumed.

Five years after my first polio shot, while having a Coke at a diner across from the Strand movie theatre in Summit, I made the idiotic decision to have my first cigarette. Not long into my tenure as a smoker, the Surgeon General of the United States announced that there was a direct link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. I remember saying to a friend at the time that, by the time I got lung cancer, science would have found the cure. It was not a preposterous assumption, given the times. It was my own blind hope for the future. It also allowed me to continue smoking cigarettes in full denial of the personal repercussions (and, as we've come to find out, the significant second hand smoke repercussions of those that were around me.)

Unlike polio, however, lung cancer was not cured. Our school headmaster, who announced the Surgeon Generals report to us at an assembly in 1963, died of lung cancer nine years later. He never quit. My father died of lung cancer twenty years later. He quit only near the end. These were two intelligent and accomplished men. Several years later, I finally quit. Science was not going to win this one.

Smoking = death. It still does.

So much for blind faith in the future.

I was in denial about polio (I'll take my chances rather than the shot) and cigarette smoking (science will figure it out.)

Man defeated polio, cigarettes defeated man.

So now I am thinking of Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson is one of history's great individuals - on a par with Da Vinci, Gandhi, or Shakespeare. He was an accomplished diplomat, farmer, scientist, architect, inventor, and author. We all know Jefferson as the drafter of the Declaration of Independence.

"All men are created equal."

Jefferson was also a slave owner and fathered children by at least one slave (Sally Hemming.) He was not a wealthy man. He felt that he needed slaves to live a life that permitted him to be all of the things that he was and aspired to be. Many historians agree that Jefferson, although tormented by the institution of slavery, felt that, over time, it would die a natural death in the United States. This hope was based on my aforementioned cigarette argument. Somebody would think of something.

The ideals which Jefferson espoused were incompatible with his personal behavior. And, as far as his prognostication about slavery, he could not possibly have been more wrong. Slavery did not did a natural death. Its hideous end cost hundreds of thousand of lives and very nearly destroyed all that Jefferson envisioned.

Because the cure for polio came at my young age, I had reason to believe that lung cancer too would be defeated. Jefferson had drafted the Declaration, defeated the British, and achieved almost unimaginable personal accomplishments during his young lifetime and yet died alone as the owner of slaves.

So what?

Days when I drive the 25 miles from Knotts Island to Virginia Beach to do errands, I pass several enormous sand quarries with holes in the earth that are nearly unimaginable in scale. Sand is used for everything in road and housing construction. This is where it comes from. Sometimes I pretend that those holes contain granite, or oil, or coal, or all of the other natural resources that we consume to an unfathomable degree. The end products are in the skin of my car, my tires, the gas, the book on CD to which I listen, and the very the road upon which I drive.

Dr. Jonas Salk is nowhere to be found to cleanly solve that which we are bringing upon ourselves.

Like Jefferson, we will all be dead prior to the time of reckoning.

Thank you for visiting.

Jack