By Victor Davis Hanson in PJ
Meidia
Life is turned upside down in a nanosecond.
This weekend I missed my first posting at PJ Media since beginning
in 2006.
Why? Let me briefly explain the lapse — if I can be forgiven for
comparing a bike accident with what I have seen on the farm the last 50 years
(sliced off fingers, crushed legs, herbicide poisonings, manifold burns, etc.).
I was going on a usual morning bike ride — safe stuff with
like-minded older folks. I’m 60; so is my biking partner and fellow Hoover
Institution associate Bruce Thornton. We are hardly reckless. (Not
like sulfuring at midnight recklessly in one’s 20s in the old days without
goggles or mask.)
We usually go deliberately during off-traffic hours when cars are
rare, on little-traveled roads and bike paths. We always follow the same
direction over the same 32-mile route. After nine years we have memorized every
bump, cracked bit of pavement, bad stop light, etc. We bike slowly, about 14-15
mph, always in single file. We are, after all, 60 and hear daily horrific
stories of injured and dead bikers.
In nearly ten years of rides, I have had some scrapes but only two
bad spills (a homeless person once jumped out from the bushes on a Santa Rosa
bike path; I swerved to miss him and ended up going over the handlebars: slight
concussion; broken shoulder, three ribs, and collar bone. I was also attacked
and knocked flat once by a pack of dogs with no licenses, shots, or
English-speaking owners). So we must be doing something carefully, for
our sixtyish group of three or four to usually avoid problems.
I lead a yearly tour on May 17th, so usually quit riding one week
ahead, just in case. Friday morning was to be last ride until I came back on
May 30.
About four-fifths of the way home, suddenly the front wheel locked
and I woke up about 15 seconds later with my face on the pavement. Four hours
later at the emergency room I discovered that I had four ruined teeth (three
shaved off, one split down the middle into the root), a concussion, a broken
nose, 65 stitches for facial and gum lacerations, and a sliced-apart lower lip
(with broken teeth shards sticking into my upper lip).
What happened? Apparently a hairline fissure around the carbon
bike fork failed, and the fork bent and locked up the front wheel without
warning. (Yes, I know I should inspect the bike thoroughly each time I get on,
but the crack was invisible.)
Seven days after falling, I am leaving for Europe and the tour
this week, a bit dizzy, fearful that my ogre-like appearance will turn off
audiences. I’ve been getting out of bed to rush off to various doctors to
extract a split abscessing tooth, do a bone graft, grind off jagged teeth
points that have lacerated my tongue, have stitches removed, etc. — and feel
both foolish and very lucky. I had a jammed neck and was a bit
disorientated, suggesting to the ER staff a fracture and perhaps serious neck
problems. But the CT scan came back normal. After sitting under bags of ice and
gobs of Neosporin ointment the last five days, I have reflected on the
unforgiving moment that changes everything.
Again, I feel very fortunate. The ER personnel offered tales of
lesser bike falls where the victims ended up paralyzed, or with cranial
bleeding — or dead.
But when you are lying flat and cannot read or talk or eat, your
mind wanders into retrospection and memoriae temporis acti — dreaming of
the sort that one must be careful about, lest it devolves into the depression
of should have, could have, would have done this or that.
I offer a general thought from the ER and subsequent last five
days: we live in a weird postmodern/premodern world. Never have Americans been
so blessed and never so ungracious.
The ER trauma center was postmodern: even a plastic surgeon was on
duty, who did wonders with my hanging lip and crushed nose. The triage team was
top-notch. The equipment, nursing staff, and regimen were stellar. Without them
I would be infected, disfigured, and bedridden. (Though I may hold off entirely
on that optimism until May 30th, when I am back and the gambit of not
canceling has been proven wise. How do you tell your guests that you were
stupid enough to endanger their entire trip?)
For five hours, I watched the worst imaginable cases wheeled in —
the wages of burns, wrecks, shootings, stabbings, falls, drug overdoses, heart
attacks, shock, etc. — all met with an upbeat, can-do staff professionalism.
The clientele, however — metal detector required for entrance —
was premodern. Many were foreign nationals. Some appeared to be gang-bangers.
Police were ubiquitous (not all the injured were virtuous or harmed by
accident). English was rarely spoken by the patients. It was a world away from
the ER crowd of rural California circa 1960.
Gurneys were parked in hallways that were almost blocked with sick
patients, most of them texting in boredom. Relatives were arguing with other
outpatients’ relatives. It reminded me of the bottom floor of the Evangelismos Hospital
at Athens about 1973, where I once had a sliced finger tendon; on another
occasion a shock reaction to a bad Greek plague/ typhus/yellow fever/small
pox/typhoid all in one vaccination. Or Luxor circa 1974 (a case of malaria) or
Libya 2006 (ruptured appendix). What was different in the American hospital
circa 2014 was not the chaos, or the swarms of violently injured, but the
superb quality of the care.
In a word, some of the most violent gang-bangers on the planet are
accorded some of the most sophisticated trauma care in the world, and for free.
I say that not so that it should not be that way, but note it only in hopes
that there is some gratitude offered to our health care providers. Do any of
our leaders in their various grievances against the society ever express thanks
that a man can cross the border, get into a knife fight, even while committing
a crime, and in extremis receive free health care of the sort comparable to
that accorded to our president?
Only in America? And as it should be.
Spending five hours with those who clean up the mess of one too
many beers or a drug OD gave me a strange sense of tragedy. The more
spectacular the efforts of 21st century America to ensure equality, the more
the effort is expected and critiqued than appreciated as an object of wonder.
Other reflections from five days on my back: Almost half of the
patients around me in the ER seemed to be suffering from moribund obesity.
Diabetes is a California epidemic. Latest reports suggest that well over 40% of
Hispanics, to take one especially at-risk group, admitted to the hospital for
all causes are diagnosed with it, higher than the general rate in other
populations. Given huge influxes across a porous border, health care in
California in the next 10 years will largely center on diabetes. It will have
far more social effect than even the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. It will kill
more people, more adversely tax the health care system and require a Marshall
Plan-like effort to enlighten the population about diet and exercise.
More likely, however, the system will instead be seen as the
culprit and be faulted for not offering enough medical services for diabetes
patients that may well total a quarter of California’s population in the next
decade. We will not hear that the individual has a responsibility not to drink
sugar-filled Cokes each day. Too much of the wrong food, not existential
hunger, is the epidemic of the poor.
Some readers will respond by asking, “If you are so smart about
health decisions, why did you end up in the ER?” A fair question, given that
road biking is not always safe and perhaps analogous to drinking sugared colas.
I am trying, as I stare up at the ceiling, to weigh the odds of crashes versus
the health benefits of riding, versus the enjoyment versus alternative workout
regimens, versus just sticking to yard and farm work, versus trying everything
from a fat-tire slow bike to stationary biking. Two bits of advice I hear from
friends: “You have to get right back at it and conquer your anxieties.” Versus:
“Wake up — is road biking necessary? Try walking more.”
A farmer 10 miles away, who was a father of four children, was
shot and killed this week after investigating intruders on his farm. (The
gang-banger suspects are now in custody.) He interrupted a stolen car being
stripped, and “they” killed him for being so rude as to drive on his own land.
I note that fact because a few weeks ago the dogs barked at 3 a.m. For once I
decided to ignore them. And the next morning I found a stripped auto in my
vineyard. I had gone back to sleep on the theory that in America today walking
out to investigate would have been a politically incorrect sin.
Here is what I mean. America does not like the enforcement of
property rights unless one is rich, hip and cool, like those who assume the
sanctity of their Google or Apple parking lots. I would de facto have no right
to have ordered people off my property. And without arms, no means of
enforcing any order I had issued. Instead, I assume California would argue that
there must have been extenuating circumstances that forced the gang-bangers
into a life of crime, from callous indifference about their impoverishment to
illegal-alien bashing (to…, well, fill in the blanks).
For all practical purposes, one has no right to arm oneself to
protect property. If I were unarmed and shot, I would be assumed to have been
foolish by venturing out on my own property. If I were armed, and yet got shot
confronting thieves, the media would say that I was more foolish and
trigger-happy and prompted the violence. If I had shot them in self-defense, I
would appear a paranoid old white male who privileged property over human life
— and be sued by their families who had access to free legal help. If I were to
call 9/11, I would expect that the response would be slow, given that in the
hierarchy of a night’s epidemic of central California felonies, a stripped auto
would rank low.
So I went back to sleep, and called the sheriff the next day when
I discovered the stripped auto. Someone else who was more courageous was
murdered this week. We lost a brave citizen, and now deal with his murderers,
on behalf of whom the resources of a bankrupt society will be amply invested.
If only Nancy Pelosi or Jeb Bush would come down to a Central
Valley ER in these parts, or try farming when a vineyard become a veritable
chop shop, they would not so easily lecture others on their supposed
illiberality. Otherwise, the liberal view is a make-believe land of elites who
are exempt from the wages of their ideology, as others deemed less
sophisticated and liberal bear their consequences.
Meanwhile, back to healing…
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