Arguing with My Wife

Lake Manyara Tanzania - photo by JoAnn Sturman

Scott Sturman
fliesinyoureyes.com


I hardly ever win an argument with my wife. On the rare occasion when I think I have won, I really didn’t or it was a Pyrrhic victory. Even though I convince myself that my reasoning is logical, supported by fact, and well articulated, I never seem to get my way. Early on I typically feel I am making headway and will carry the day, but then she abruptly changes course and equates the disagreement with a totally unrelated subject. I object and attempt to steer the conversation back to the original topic, but it’s a lost cause. No amount of oratory or vocabulary can persuade her. I pull some indisputable facts out of my bag of tricks, but she ignores them and makes up her own. Defeated and frustrated, like Dagwood Bumstead after a tiff with Blondie, I retire to the backyard wondering what went wrong.

Barrack Obama is used to getting his way and fortunate to have a groveling media which portrays him as omniscient. This lack of scrutiny has allowed him to ignore America’s historical perspective and his own personal history. The press has granted him a free pass and not held him accountable. It is not surprising his handling of the debt crisis is consistent with this trend.

In fairness Obama inherited a difficult economic position, but the manner in which his administration attempted to rectify the problem made matters much worse than necessary. Profligate spending and amassing of crushing debt in a span of two years took a serious problem and transformed it into one which jeopardizes the future of the country.

If the situation was not so serious, Obama’s conduct would be laughable. When facts are inconvenient, he simply ignores them or invents new ones to suit his purpose. In order to avoid answering specific questions he resorts to theatrics and plays the class warfare card time and time again without heed to context. He vilifies those who pay the vast majority of taxes but acts as if squandering trillions of dollars has nothing to do with the crisis.

Most husbands will agree in the domestic setting their wives are formidable debating foes, and no argumentative technique is off limits. I wish Barrack would save his histrionics, hyperbole, and excuses when he quarrels with Michelle in the Lincoln bedroom of the White House. The resolution of the national debt will not be solved by stamping his feet and threatening to take his football home so no one else can play. Hopefully, the Republicans will remember why the voters sent them to Washington in 2010 and not succumb to his antics.

The Argument from Intimidation is a confession of intellectual impotence.

Ayn Rand (1905 - 1982), The Virtue of Selfishness, 1964

King for a Day

Scott Sturman
fliesinyoureyes.com

Aw, to be king for a day! This was Senator Ben Nelson's day to be king. Swooned by the President and cajoled by fellow democrats, he cast the deciding vote in support of health care reform legislation. What was so utterly appalling was his vote was purchased with tax payers' money, so Nebraskans could receive additional funds for Medicaid. The democratic leadership used my children's, my friends', my wife's, my relatives' and my tax money, so Senator Nelson's state could have better health care than the rest of the country. Perhaps this is business as usual for the United States Congress, but if someone bought my vote it would be a crime.

“Just last month the Association of Medical Colleges released findings indicating that 15 years from now the United States will have 159,000 fewer doctors than we need.” - Senator Max Baucus - Democrat Montana

The proposed legislation which Senators Baucus and Nelson support will cover an additional 30,000,000 patients. With the projected shortage of physicians patients will experience indirect rationing where services are not denied, but with too few clinicians long waiting periods will ensue.

Senator Nelson, I could respect you if you made your choice based on principle and reason, but you accepted other people's money for your vote. This is the way you will be remembered!

I read Atlas Shrugged for the first time in 1972 five years before I went to medical school, and when my oldest child was born in 1982, we gave her the middle name Ayn. In the book Dr. Hendricks, the neurosurgeon who opted out of an increasingly corrupt system, gives a powerful speech which still is underlined in my book. The message was delivered by Ayn Rand in 1957. Read it to see if one can find any similarities between what is occurring now and what she prophesied fifty years ago.



Dr. Hendricks from Atlas Shrugged - 1957

“ I quit when medicine was placed under State control, some years ago,” said Dr. Hendricks. “Do you know what it takes to perform a brain operation? Do you know the kind of skill it demands, and the years of passionate, merciless, excruciating devotion that go to acquire that skill? That was what I would not place at the disposal of men whose sole qualification to rule me was their capacity to spout the fraudulent generalities that got them elected to the privilege of enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun. I would not let them dictate the purpose for which my years of study had been spent, or the conditions of my work, or my choice of patients, or the amount of my reward. I observed that in all the discussions that preceded the enslavement of medicine, men discussed everything – except the desires of the doctors. Men considered only the 'welfare' of the patients, with no thought for those who were to provide it. That a doctor should have any right, desire or choice in the matter, was regarded as irrelevant selfishness; his is not to choose, they said, only 'to serve.' That a man who's willing to work under compulsion is too dangerous a brute to entrust with a job in the stockyards - never occurred to those who proposed to help the sick by making life impossible for the healthy. I have often wondered at the smugness with which people assert their right to enslave me, to control my work, to force my will, to violate my conscience, to stifle my mind – yet what is it that they expect to depend on, when they lie on an operating table under my hands? Their moral code has taught them to believe that it is safe to rely on the virtue of their victims. Well, that is the virtue I have withdrawn. Let them discover the kind of doctors that their system will now produce. Let them discover, in their operating rooms and hospital wards, that it is not safe to place their lives in the hands of a man whose life they have throttled. It is not safe, if he is the sort of man who resents it – and still less safe, if he is the sort who doesn't.”