Two Friends Named David

I’ve been on the road a lot lately, for me. After a spate of memorial services and my 40th reunion, I decided to schedule nothing all summer except a cruise on Lake Winnipesaukee, and maybe a trip to the races in Saratoga.

I have a pile of books on the Underground Railroad in the Connecticut Valley that I can’t wait to get to, after a little vacation with Sue Grafton and Ellis Peters. Grafton and Peters both do lots and lots of research and then create engaging characters, which is something I aspire to do.

And I want to do more to help my friend Daoud Nassar and  the people of the Occupied Territories. It’s a cause I believe Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King and Harry Golden would support wholeheartedly, as it is so important for lasting peace in the world.

But don’t ask me, ask Ariel Sharon (well I guess you can’t ask him, but you can look at what he wrote and did) or Jimmy Carter or George Mitchell. Or Nelson Mandela. More later.

But I also want to take up the cause of my friend Dr. David Moskowitz, which I believe any right-minded American should be interested in because he could be saving hundreds of thousands of patients from dialysis and early death.

Dialysis patients live less than three years, on average.

“When I published my paper in 2002, I expected it to be front-page news in the New York Times,” he says. “It’s not every day that you eliminate a $35 billion a year industry (in the US alone). But the media refused to take my word for it, asking me to get an endorsement from an authority in the renal community.”

That shouldn’t be too tough. It only costs 600  million dollars. Compared with the evidence for the effectiveness of Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine. which was based on fewer than a dozen patients.

“The net effect [of the cost of these studies] is for medicine to remain frozen in the 1980s… This turns out to be exactly what the healthcare system wants, since all its money is made in the ICU. As long as diseases remain poorly treated, the system thrives.” [emphasis mine]

I do believe I can get some traction for this guy.

I told David I was working on him and on the Palestinians, and we had a good laugh. He understands the issue better than I do. This guy was summa cum laude at Groton and Harvard. And our classmate Walter Russell Meade has described the Palestinian cause as a beautifully equipped sailing vessel with no wind to take it anywhere.

When I talk about the rights of Palestinians, the only people I’ve found who are willing to listen are Israelis and American Jews.

There’s an Israeli peace group that walks with children to school in the West Bank. This keeps the settlers above them from throwing rocks at the children.

I know something about that. I was a sub in the Boston Schools during court-ordered desegregation. I saw the champions of freedom throwing rocks at school buses.

Ask your local teabaggers (and your local lame-brain libertarians)about court-ordered school desegregation and they’ll say they’re agin it.

I think that’s great. It means they’re up against the deeply-held values of Dwight D. Eisenhower and the 101st Airborne, which Ike deployed, on one last mission, to desegregate schools in Arkansas by order of the US Supreme Court against the wishes of Governor Orval Faubus, who had threatened to call out the national guard.

We never got to see the Bloody Bastards of Bastogne vs. the Arkansas National Guard (it might have been an interesting,  short battle) because Ike nationalized the guard, putting them under his command, leaving Faubus with no choice but to abide by the Supreme Court decision.

It’s just one more reason why we need a national government. You wonder why one has to argue this in this day and age. George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, FDR, Ike, JFK all believed in it deeply.

To them destroying the government of America would be treason; now it seems it’s become our national pastime.