Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant.Robert Louis Stevenson

Inner Life Directions

Expanding Reality

February 2015

  • Rights For The Homeless

    A Berkeley School of Law study found that since 1990, 58 California cities have enacted numerous laws that discriminate against the homeless. The average city studied had 9 such laws. San Francisco and Los Angeles each led with 23 restrictions. Homeless people are arrested far more than the average, for vagrancy, for “drunkenness”. And if they are not arrested, the homeless are cited or harassed for sleeping in public, sometimes for sitting or lying down. In essence the study concludes that the laws are used to punish people’s status, not their behavior. Researchers found that often the homeless are harassed by police or security guards without reference to any law at all. Also noted is that the trend of laws against the homeless does not seem to abate. In 2013 in California, advocates tried to pass a Homeless Bill of Rights. While it passed the Assembly Judiciary Committee, it died in the Appropriation Committee. This year the same advocates are back with a “right to rest” bill meant to extend basic human and civil rights protection for the homeless. Oregon and Colorado are also introducing similar bills.

    The homeless are a neglected and vulnerable group deserving equal treatment too often denied them.   As researchers put it in an L.A. Times op-ed, “One day we will look back at these anti-homeless laws, as we do now at other antiquated vagrancy laws, and wonder how we could have been so inhumane.”

  • The Face of a Baby

    The first baby born in Hungary January 1, 2015, was news and had his picture in the paper. Because Rikardo Racz is Roma, also known as gypsy, the picture attracted the attention of Elod Novak, the deputy leader of a far-right party. He posted a picture of himself with his wife and three children on Facebook decrying the presence of the Romas, with statements such as the fact that to him they were multiplying and will soon make people like him a minority in their own country. The post triggered s torrent of both condemnation and approval and reflected the racism—and anti-racism—currently at work in the country.

    Not long before this incident a Roma baby in a village south of Paris was denied burial by the mayor. In this case the mayor of a neighborhood village shocked by the refusal offered a spot in the cemetery of his village.

    There’s something foul and pernicious about the use of a baby to vent one’s prejudices. It happened with Roma babies, since Roma are a shunned and unwanted minority and presence in several European countries. No doubt it happens in other countries about the babies of any of the many groups who are discriminated against. When racism shows its face through that of a baby, it’s time to ask ourselves how we would react to the babies of minorities or even to those we hold prejudices against.

  • More Organ Transplants

    On average, heart transplants, the most successful of all the transplanted organs have added 4.9 years to a patient’s life. Those who had a combined pancreas-kidney lived an average of 4.6 years longer. Kidney recipients lived 4,4 years longer, liver recipients 4.3 years, intestine recipients 2.8 years and pancreas recipients 2.6 years. All in all 2.2 million years have been added to the lives of organ recipients in the past 25 years. According to a study published in the medical journal JAMA Surgery, 533,329 patients have received organs between 1987 and 2012. More than half the extra years belong to people who had kidney transplants. Next are people who received new livers, then people who received hearts followed by people who received lungs, new pancreas, pancreas and kidneys together, then intestine. For a layperson such as myself there were surprises. I didn’t realize intestines were on the list of donated organs, nor did I realize the extent to which livers were transplanted.

    And yet 579,506 patients were put on the transplant network waiting list, but did not receive an organ. It’s easy to imagine the anguish of those patients and their families. Somehow the fact that only 48% of patients needing organs receive them is a striking statistic. At some point in the future, it is possible that those waiting for an organ without being able to receive one could be a friend or member of our own family. There is to my knowledge no study of what people do with the years gained from being an organ recipient. I venture to say that rare is the person who did not make use of being given another chance or a chance to make their life count or succeed in however small a way. The bottom line remains though that less than half of those who need transplants are able to receive them. We definitely need more awareness and more people willing to donate their organs

Subscribe and Be Notified of New Posts

* indicates required

Intuit Mailchimp

We will never sell or share your information, we promise.