Seen On Jan 19th – The Day Of Service

Prez and first lady painting a bookcase?  Service day may be a good idea, but this is a little bit much the “photo opp” for my taste. I think the idea of helping others is wonderful, and the idea of putting group survival ahead of self-survival even better. I always thought this was good for any species.  I remember quite a while ago how touched I was when I saw crows get food for an injured crow.  Good for us folks, too, although we have a tendency to build hospitals and charge for services.

What is good for our species as well as for others is putting the group ahead of the individual for both us and others. The use of mathematical modeling to do this, although the subject is wonderful, is open to debate still, although there is to me a certain romance in pure intellect predicting actions around us.

A couple of years they cancelled a television series called “Numbers“ after six seasons that dealt with this kind of mathematical model used to predict and/or solve crime.  The perception of altruism ought to be venerated in our society.  I had a male doctor once shock me off my gourd by telling me that the precious thing about being a doctor is the perception of altruism, while you get paid at the same time.  He said that was what put us above species such as lawyers, who were perceived as sharks. Whaa?  Perception?  I gave up years of beauty sleep in order to take call.  That was altruism more than desire to fulfill requirements for a degree.  I would feel horrible when the beeper went off, but I actually felt good and satisfied when I had done something, ranging from hospitalization to writing a prescription that had actually improved the status of somebody’s life. And accepted my hug.  Sometimes I get hugged and kissed a bit much, even now, so I must be doing something consistent with the altruism that is helpful for my species. Oh, I cannot count the number of times I have been told to never touch a patient, because of liabilitiy and being sued for inappropriateness.  They seem to touch me first, though, and my patients are a pretty damned huggy crowd.

The research and the explanation for hugs is really too subjective and non-quantitative to show up in very much medical literature.  Virginia Satir, the most often quoted “hug therapist,” was a marriage and family therapist.  You don’t have to have a lot of hugs to figure out it feels good and right, and for my part, that is evolution. 

Anybody feels “protected” when hugged.  Whether someone is shooting real physical arrows at you or whether we are dealing figuratively with the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” from Shakespeare’s famous “to be or not to be“ speech in Hamlet. Hugging is Good. It figures into our behaviors, I think, as some physical level of evolutionary altruism. So the best dear Prez and wife can do right now is be seen this day painting a bookcase.