I Read the News Today, Oh Boy...

...to quote the Beatles' opus "A Day in the Life".

And you know something? I really wish I hadn't read the news today. Oh boy...

I had gone a while without reading or watching any news. I did this on purpose. I took a hiatus from the news after being a 24x7 news junkie (well, practically, anyway) for the entire Presidential campaign.

For the record, and because I feel like pontificating about it, I voted for Obama, not out of any sense that he was some great savior who was going to solve all of our many ills, domestic and foreign, but rather because I felt that the Republican party had withered on the vine. I found the Republican politicians to be out of touch with what everyday Americans were going through in this horrid economy, and it seemed that they didn't give a shit anyway. Plus it was my studied opinion that John McCain, whom I'd previously liked and respected as a moderate candidate, had whored himself out to the base of his party in order to win the Presidency...a bit contrary to "The Straight Talk" of which he claimed to be a champion. Plus I lost all respect for McCain when he chose Sarah Palin as his running mate. Friends of mine tried to say, well, she was chosen for him, he didn't choose her himself. My response was, well, then what the hell kind of candidate is he if he doesn't control his own campaign? That doesn't bode well for him as a President, now does it?

But I digress. So as I was saying, I voted for Obama and then went into a cocoon, studiedly determined to wean myself off my news addiction. You might ask, who gives a damn anyway, why are you telling us this? Why didn't you want to read or watch the news anymore? Well, because my constant news watching/reading was making me damned cranky. If you read or watch the news, you'll know pretty much immediately that most of it is bad. And that makes the news damned depressing. For me, it's depressing because it always seems to highlight how bad things happen to good people, or to people not powerful enough to change their fate, etc. Then I start getting pissy and questioning the fairness of the cosmos and the existence of God.

But the freakin' news kept pulling me back...I find that the news is a hard habit to break. It's sort of like a car accident at the roadside. You don't want to look, you don't want to look...but then you do anyway. Such is my relationship with the news.

So today I pulled myself out of my self-imposed exile from the news and read The New York Times online, for the first time in months. And I came across an article that immediately got me depressed, because it highlights how bad things happen to good people, and I started getting pissy and questioning the fairness of the cosmos and the existence of God.

The article is titled "Months to Live: Fighting for a Last Chance at Life". The basic point, without getting into tons of nauseating (and I mean truly nauseating) detail, is this. A man was diagnosed with ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a.k.a. Lou Gehrig's Disease) at age 34. His family had to claw and fight, along with other families whose loved ones had the same dreadful malady, to get approval to obtain a drug as yet not FDA-approved, but whose use in experiments had shown promise for those stricken with ALS. At issue was whether or not an experimental drug should be allowed to be administered to terminally ill patients on compassionate grounds. And amazingly, for a long while, the FDA said NO, this should NOT be allowed. The FDA finally relented, after it was too late for some people but at least, not too late for the 34-year-old man who was the focus of the article.

As I read, my blood began boiling.

For those of you unfamiliar with ALS, it's basically a disease of the motor neurons. Eventually your muscles give out and you cannot walk, talk, speak, swallow, breathe...the list goes on. You basically become a prisoner in your own body, with a mind fully aware of what is happening to you but physically unable to do anything about it, until you eventually die. I put this into the category of a fate worse than death.

So what bothered me about this article? First of all was the incredible length of time it took for the FDA to reverse its original decision and decide to allow these ALS patients to have the drug. While human beings were becoming prisoners of sick bodies and dying of a disease whose progress this drug could possibly arrest, the FDA had to take its time, go through its bureaucratic paces, etc. I guess the lesson here is that if it's compassion you want, a government agency is not the place to look for it.

Second of all, I began wondering where ALS fits into God's supposed "plan" for us, His children. Having been raised a Catholic, I had been taught that God is perfect, merciful and good, as well as all-powerful and loving. So I wonder where ALS comes into the equation. Why should a 34-year-old married father of two, a vibrant athletic person (an avid surfer, among other things) with his life ahead of him, be stricken with ALS and within a year of that diagnosis be confined to a wheelchair, unable to walk, talk or feed himself? Why? I don't understand this. I have an Ivy League Ph.D., so dammit, I am well-read and a critical and analytical thinker. And I don't fucking understand this. If you do, then you've obviously figured out something that I haven't. If God is everything He is claimed to be, then why is ALS even in the world?

And when I go down this road of questioning, it usually leads me to the same place: God either does not exist, or He is a twisted sadist who takes some wicked pleasure out of seeing humans suffer, or he's an impersonal God, a God of physics maybe, who is a mover and shaker of the universe, but really doesn't have compassion the way organized religion claims He does. If you buy the standard line about God's attributes, then those can be the only possibilities, in my opinion. Because if He does indeed exist, and if he is in fact not a twisted sadist, then how freakin' all-powerful can He really be? He can't do anything but sit by and watch His children suffer from something like ALS, then? I don't buy it. So maybe, if He is there, He just doesn't have the human qualities that we've been taught to believe He has. Or maybe He's just not there at all. I could go off on this for pages and pages, but I'll stop here, as I plan to have many more posts on this subject, rest assured. Questioning God is something I do a lot. A lot happens to make me question.

So after reading this article I just had to vent my spleen. The news often gives me lots of spleen, because very little makes sense. I probably shouldn't have read it today.