Out of My Mind (13 page)

At what point a fetus becomes a human being is impossible to decide. Anyone who has enjoyed life would hate to have been thought of as too young to matter any time after being conceived . . . even if it was only ten minutes.

We're all proud of being American, which is good if we don't make fools of ourselves and irritate the rest of the world by forcing it on them. A little pride goes a long way. Having the biggest flag doesn't mean you're the most patriotic.

We like being proud of a lot of different things that don't justify it. It's strange sometimes. For example, people often display pride in ignorance. You hear people say, “I'm not good with numbers.” I always think they mean to leave the impression that they're good with everything else. Or they say they can't remember names. That's trying to make something good out of being rude or not paying attention. It's nothing to be proud of.

I hear bright kids whose favorite phrase these days is, “I have no idea,” or “I don't have a clue.” They delight in not knowing.

It makes sense to be proud of some things. We take pride in ownership. A lot of car sales are based on the pride people take in being successful enough to own a new one. The old car is still serviceable but it has
84,000 miles on it and a 2007 model looks better in the driveway. You don't put a Hummer in the garage where people passing by can't see it.

There's a kind of reverse car-pride, too . . . people who are proud of keeping a car past its prime. I have an old friend from high school who visited us last summer. He and his wife drove up in a battered 1974 Chevy. It was so rusted out from years driving on salted roads in the winter that the floor under the brake and clutch pedals was rusted out. You could look down from the driver's seat and see the road. My friend is a successful surgeon who was proud of driving this old heap instead of spending a small fraction of what he makes on a new one.

Sometimes, people are even proud of their infirmities. They'll tell you, “I have flat feet,” “I can't hear high notes,” or, “I'm colorblind.” They are extraordinarily proud of being colorblind. Walter Cronkite is normally a modest man but he never misses an opportunity to say, proudly, that he can't tell one color from another.

Strangers often come up to me to say they don't watch television. Somehow they seem to think that not watching television makes them smarter than the rest of us who do. When someone tells me they don't watch television, I always say, “You must be very intellectual.”

I confess to occasionally displaying false pride myself. Recently, the Dave Matthews Band attracted 80,000 people to Central Park in New York. I found myself being proud of telling people I'd never heard of Dave Matthews—or his band. I should think Dave Matthews probably would be proud to tell people he never heard of Andy Rooney, either.

I'm always telling people I don't go to the movies. There are lots of good movies. Why in the world would I think not going was something to brag about?

There are food snobs. They're proud of things they won't eat, or think they can't because of some rare allergy. “I can't eat broccoli.” “Chocolate makes my nose red.” “I only eat white meat chicken.”

My friend Ralph Martin told me he'd canceled his subscription and wasn't reading the morning newspaper anymore because it took too long. He was proud of it.

As with cars, a lot of people are proud of the new clothes they wear but there are others just as pleased with themselves for wearing years-old shoes or tattered clothing. A torn shirt is worn like a medal of honor. Some are proud of how much they spend on clothes, others proud of how little.

Most of us take pride in our signature. An illegible scribble suggests others ought to know who we are even if they can't read the letters in our handwritten name.

It's surprising more of us don't fall if that's what pride goeth before.

No amount of high-minded argument to the contrary could convince me that we're all born equal. There simply is no question in my mind that some of us are more equal than others. Just as surely as some are born with genes that make them six feet tall, some are born with brains that enable them to think better than others. I'm aware of being smarter than some people but not so nearly aware of that as I am aware of being dumber than a lot of others.

This differential is a problem teachers have that I'm glad I don't have to face. Our system of education has to assume, as an institution, that we are all equally educable, and we are not. In school and college, I tried to assimilate Latin, chemistry, physics and some mathematics higher than algebra and simply could not. They'd say I wasn't applying myself. They'd say I wasn't doing my homework. They'd say I was more interested in football than studying. But they wouldn't face the fact that my brain was different and in some ways not as good as many of my classmates.

I'm able to live with my mental insufficiency based on my belief that my brain has other facets that make up for its shortcomings. It's capable of some tricks of thought that might escape the Latin scholar, the scientist, the mathematician or the chemist—I like to think.

Our educational system, from grade school through graduate school, operates on the false assumption that every student has the same ability to learn. If we're going to get the best out of the brightest, schools have to be allowed to ignore that idea and give the best students as much as they can take without giving poor students less than they can take.

Whatever the solution is to this problem—or there may not be a solution—it seems obvious that we aren't spending enough on education. Both the smartest and the dumbest among us should be getting all the education they can take, and that isn't happening. We aren't maximizing this country's potential to accomplish things with its economic wealth because too many young people are being left behind or left out when it comes to education.

Is there any doubt we're shortchanging education? We're spending something like $455 billion on weapons, vehicles and pay to soldiers and sailors. At the same time, President Bush is asking for a record $53 billion for education. Some record compared with $455 billion. Does it seem right to spend more than eight times as much on war as on education?

You can't necessarily judge efforts to improve education by the amount we spend but that's the only measuring stick we have.

We all believe—I think we all believe it, anyway—that education promotes progress and happiness. People who have maximized their ability to take in and store information—educated people—are happier because they get things done.

There's no written guarantee that life on earth will never end. As Americans, we have more of the good things than we have wisdom about how to assure our survival. We need a better educational system, not more nuclear weapons or infantry divisions. President Bush's promise to “leave no child behind” had a nice ring to it, but children are being left behind.

It was a shock to read that there are now 2,100,000 Americans in prison. That means one out of every seventy men is behind bars. The worst thought I have about it is that there are probably twice as many criminals who ought to be in prison and are not. A few who are prisoners ought not to be because they didn't do it.

The statistic was a shock because I think of people as being honest. Most of us hedge a little in speaking the whole and absolute truth at all times but that's usually in the interest of civility; we tell people who don't look good how good they look. This doesn't call for a prison term. We wouldn't dream of taking something that wasn't ours.

Prison is a relatively new institution in the history of the world. Before the 1800s, accused criminals were flogged, stoned, put in stocks in public places or hung without trial.

Now we put people in prison for two reasons. We lock them up to keep them from hurting the rest of us and we put them away to punish them for having committed a crime. We make it unpleasant for them while they're in there so that when they get out, they'll think twice before doing anything that might put them back in.

I think of the burglar, the embezzler, the murderer, the rapist as the rare exception in our society. Am I kidding myself when I think 9,999 Americans out of 10,000 are honest? I'm unaware of ever having known anyone who would steal even if it was easy and he was sure he (or she) wouldn't be caught. That number of Americans in prison makes me wonder if I'm right. I'm questioning a lot of things since we learned what happened in the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. I didn't think Americans did that sort of thing, either.

“To be virtuous is to take pleasure in noble actions,” Aristotle said. I thought that's what Americans liked to do—act nobly.

Another interesting aspect of the prison figure is the disparity in the proportion of incarcerated men to women. Of the 2,100,000 inmates, only a hundred thousand are women. Are men really 20 times more dishonest or inclined to commit crimes than women? Are women better
people? If they want equality, women should demand that they be equally represented in our prisons.

While I believe most of us are honest on a personal level, I do think there's a lot of dishonesty in business. It's impersonal theft. Most white-collar crime is the work of people who wouldn't think of stealing from a neighbor who left the door open. In business, though, they don't call it stealing. They call it free enterprise.

After reading the prison story, I was driving near a grade school. When I stopped for a light, I watched more than seventy kids cross the street. They looked so good, so innocent, but I couldn't help wondering which of those seventy kids would be the one who ended up in prison. Not one of the girls, probably.

We don't know where mankind is going or where the inevitable process of change will take us, but the biological evolution of man brought about by change in our culture, differences in our environment and differences in the food we'll be eating will certainly make us different humans in 3004 from what we are in 2004.

If scientists are allowed to tinker with human nature—and in spite of all the opposition they're going to do it whether we like it or not—they will certainly try to improve it by eliminating whatever genes some of us have that make us dishonest. Imagine what an honest world would be like. We'd have no locks on our doors, no keys to our cars, no bank vaults or hiding places.

We wouldn't have to pay for millions of convicts in prison because we wouldn't need prisons.

During his acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention in 2004, John Kerry said, “I don't wear my religion on my sleeve.”

The suggestion was, of course, that the sleeve is where President Bush wears his religion.

At almost every vote-raiser, Kerry wore an American flag in his lapel. My question was this, John: If you don't wear your religion on your sleeve, why did you wear your patriotism in your lapel?

President Bush and Dick Cheney wear American flag pins in their lapels. Condoleezza Rice doesn't wear one and I have wondered whether it's because she's not patriotic or because she's always well-dressed and doesn't think the flag looks good on the expensive clothes she wears.

It's my opinion, and probably not a popular one—I'm not running for office—that no one should push their religion, their politics or their patriotism on the rest of us by displaying some indication of it. They may wear symbols on their clothing or put signs on their cars or their kitchen windows. A devout Roman Catholic woman often wears a crucifix as jewelry around her neck. It seems wrong to me to turn this cruel symbol of one of the most barbaric acts in history into a decorative bauble. The cross often hangs deep into the cleavage of a low-cut dress.

I saw a diamond-encrusted cross in a jewelry store on Madison Avenue in New York with a $7,500 price tag. Will that make a favorable impression, for the woman who wears it, in the eyes of God? Religion is a private matter and we ought not be propagandized in favor of one over another by public displays of an individual's affiliation. It's interesting that no male candidate I've ever seen wears a crucifix around his neck or in his lapel to pronounce himself Catholic. That may be because being Catholic is not so widely approved as being a patriotic American.

When someone hangs an American flag out in front of their house, there's something about it that suggests to me that these people are saying they are more American than I am. A common practice among New York cab drivers who are recent immigrants, not yet citizens and a little uneasy that someone might accuse them of being less than 100 percent patriotic, is to display American flags somewhere on their taxis. The American flag on a New York cab is an almost certain indication that the driver is new to this country and seeking approval.

I don't like flags used as bumper stickers any better than I like them as lapel pins. The American flag is one of the best, most meaningful patriotic
symbols the world has ever known. It not only looks great fluttering in the breeze from the top of a flagpole but its stars standing for the fifty states and the stripes representing the thirteen original states, have real meaning.

It should not be used as decoration or as just another vote-getting gimmick by candidates for office.

Few people have the good sense and resolve to retire while they're still doing their job as well or better than they ever did, and as well or better than anyone else is doing the same job. Even fewer retire while they're still physically able to pursue other pleasures denied them because of the time it took them to do their work. Of course, I'm not one to talk.