The Year with No Pudding Cups The Wizards of Fear
I am celebrating a milestone this month. I have gone 12 months without being put in the hospital due to my Crohn's or anything else. Not a single tray was served to me with a pudding cup or Italian ice treat. It's a backhanded success, I know. However, going a year doing anything positive is a significant accomplishment for someone who plans his days by the hour. Most days, I don't know if I will have the energy to do my next scheduled task or need to lie down. It feels like I am getting a jump start on being eighty.
I want to remind myself I pulled off some other successes as well. First, last summer, I was in Keck getting stabilized chiefly for lack of fluids. I can't drink enough, nor hold onto what I drink. I followed up with the surgery that put me in my current situation, a full-time ostomy. It was an improvement, but I felt like the stuffing had been pulled out of me again. That was September's milestone. I won't share details here. I have other blog posts with a headline that includes "TMI," should you want to know the gruesome details. Let me say it nicely. Over the last seven years until now, my organs have formed a fraternity. They partied, taking turns holding each other's beer to show how badly they could act out. The offending members have been expelled. After treatment in September 2022, we set up a trip to Hawaii for January 2023. I did so well napping on the beach that we planned more car trips that I slept through. I have high hopes I will get more functionality as time goes on. Already, I sleep through fewer movies.
Today my husband pointed out how busy I am as I slumped in my chair, complaining that I am entirely out of mojo. Compared to last year, I have more good reasons to feel worn out other than the effort to sit up straight. There is progress for sure.
What am I reading?
I read American Prometheus | by Kai Bird (Author), Martin J. Sherwin (Author)
It's the basis for the Oppenheimer movie out this summer. I knew quite a bit about what happened with the birth of the atomic bomb. Scientists fleeing the Nazis in Europe came to America and England. They raised the alarm about the bomb to the American government. With fear as a powerful motivator, The allies threw money at science, and two years later, we had a working "Gadget." They didn't want to call the project a bomb, so they called it a gadget.
I got some first-hand insights while in grade school, Sour memories from our elderly neighbor down the street who was imprisoned, as she put it, in Los Alamos. Her husband worked on the bomb project. She thought it was like being in an internment camp. It did not sound like it was not any fun at all.
So much of American Prometheus has to do with the politics and strategies of what to do with the technology they rushed to create. I was disappointed with the power struggle attacks on Oppenheimer and anyone else who voiced a different opinion about what to do from the government. The people in power used the Red Scare to paint opponents as enemies to silence disagreement. When the policy issues about how to use the bomb came up. I wish Oppenheimer had taken his peers' advice and walked away.
It reminded me of another book, Wizards of Armageddon | by Fred Kaplan and Martin J. Sherwin Link. The Wizards were the people who applied game theory to how to use the Gadgets. It was all so new. It was not like a sword or a gun. The policy people had the right idea to question the value of the bomb. Do you say you won't use them, or do you use them first? What are the best options? Some of the policy people worked with Oppenheimer. Our current world system is the result of what these people did, and from the very beginning, it was all based on fear.
There was a Police song in the 1980s with the refrain, "I Hope the Russians love their children too." It also stuck with me the idea that the only wizards in my reading were wizards of fear. With great power comes great fear. Oppenheimer chose to stick his neck out as a scientist and thoughtful man to calm the fear.