Dangerous Devices
For Judges only, not for children
No consideration is more pondered than which came first, the chicken, or the
realization that there was a marvelous way to make new ones. Much of what spins the
world, after all, are new ideas and the folks they impregnate who love to play with
them.
There are wellsprings and there are irrigators. As for ideas,
my little daughter radiates them. Her latest: an imaginary pocket man she carries
with her who she sends out to scout a situation before she jumps into it. In
essence, he shows her the future. All but blues musicians and poets would throw away
their pencil holders for one of these.
Ideas are gifts. Some wake us at night. Many come from
seeing slantwise something we thought we knew. Others come when we tire of doing
something over and over that does not work. One such caused a pediatrician of thirty
years, Dr. Robert Mendelsohn, to write a book [whose title is] “How to Raise a Healthy
Child....In Spite of Your Doctor”.
Mendelsohn admitted to learning that years of vaccinating infants
had done more harm than good to the innocent babies he had stuck. Others followed
his lead and discovered that vaccinating can impair the myelination process, so central to
communicating signals from the brain such as ‘ it is wrong to aim a gun at your
classmates ‘.
Ideas like the doctor’s are seen to be both profound and
controversial to a world comfortable with its square edged horizon. Proof of that is
easy to find. Just survey any pediatrician’s waiting room parents. Ask
them whether the rash of their children’s physical problems started soon AFTER their
innoculations began. After the headscratching, don’t be surprised if more than
90% say ‘why, yes !’.
Another work-related idea came to Mike Ward, a funeral parlor
technician in Perth, Australia. Diligent Mike collected and transported the
deceased. Too, his kind words offered a balm to many loving families. They
opened his eyes to the undeniable.
Many of his cases were suicides. At first, years ago, he noted
the ratio of men to women was four to one. That gap increased over time to 6 : 1.
Now, says Mike, it’s even higher. What grieving mothers and fathers told him
was that their suicidal sons had suffered divorce and loss of their home and
children.
A kind and careful listener, Mike carried these stories with him as
he carted off dead fathers. Years of doing this keened his senses, opened him to
receive an idea that he marches with every Wednesday.
On that day, along the front of the building that houses the
courtroom where truckloads of now dead Dads lost their children, et. al., he protests the
loss of the left living children and parents as having been due to an unthinkable
process. Mike is stunned by the blindness of judges to the carnage his caring hands
have carted away.
Though Mike has no children, he sees shared parenting to be as rich
with lifesaving potential as the Heimlich maneuver. It is an old idea just waiting
to be seen. Mike is doing his part.
And the judges? I must wonder how many of them would accept a
gift of one of my daughter’s pocket men. Perhaps I should send a box full of
them to Mike as samples.
That’s just an idea, though it does come with a simply-worded warning that must
read:
Caution: These devices are for judges
only.
Do not put them into the hands of
children!
Spare them seeing that terrible day in the future when Mike must come to attend to
their fallen father. Spare us all!
B.Koplen 5/22/99
Barry Koplen can be reached by e-mail at poetscry@gamewood.net
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