Opportunistic Disease

Healthy organisms shrug them off; others don’t

By Bryan Zepp Jamieson

10/21/01

Any medical worker at a hospital can tell you about opportunistic bacteria and viruses. They are everywhere, and we are exposed to them hundreds, thousands, even millions of times a day. The best known of these is staph, which is everywhere, but not a threat to a healthy person whose resistance is intact. Every day, we are exposed to botulism, typhus, chickenpox and e coli. And yes, we inhale at least some anthrax spores on a regular basis.

The body can usually cope with such hostile incursions on a routine basis. They get into the body, and the body’s antibodies wipe them out. Most of these microorganisms we’ve adapted so well to that we just view them as boring answers on a biology test, with no disease associated with them. Others, like e coli, occur in us naturally. Some pathogens invade once, the body forms perfect antibodies, and they are never a threat again. Chickenpox is such – you get it as a child, and then you are never troubled by it in your life. You’re also less likely, following a bout of chickenpox, to get the closely-related bug, smallpox.

Staph is everywhere. Because they follow decontamination and sanitary procedures closely, staph is much less prevalent in hospitals than in the big, smelly, nasty, germ-laden world (well, stop reading me over breakfast, then), but it’s the leading cause of death in hospitals. Why? The patients in hospitals tend not to be healthy, and thus are vulnerable to this otherwise ineffectual threat.

AIDS doesn’t kill. It just robs the body of the ability to resist pathogens. That kills.

Random selection may produce a huge variety of lifeforms, but it doesn’t produce perfect, or even remarkably efficient ones. The same immune system that we depend upon to stay alive from one breath to the next can also turn on us, mistaking our own healthy tissues for alien pathogens, and eat at us from within. A whole class of diseases, including lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, and most cases of thyroiditis fall into this category.

Societies bear a striking resemblance to a human organism. And yes, it’s entirely possible that I’m not the first person to notice that. Perhaps you’ve noticed it, too, assuming you are brighter than George W Putsch and more socially engaged than a pet rock. And if you are reading this, then it’s obvious that you are, which renders this entire paragraph superfluous.

Ideas, memes, and beliefs are the social equivalent of pathogens (again, none of this is even remotely original or novel, but bear with me) A healthy society resists the more malignant ones, and incorporates the beneficial ones as part of an evolutionary process. Sometimes societies overdevelop their auto-immune system, and it destroys them. (One looks at the scruffy, skinny, religiously insane Osama bin Laden crouching in front of his cave and one can’t help but reflect upon the fact that his was the culture that once invented algebra and sparked the Renaissance).

This brings us to Governor Rick Perry of Texas. Rick Perry is a religiously insane reactionary who has decided that in this time of national concern, what we need to do is stuff Jesus down the throats of children, Christian or not.

Texas has a penchant of late of putting stupid and mean men in the governor’s chair. They really need to stop doing that. Perry justified his over-the-top strong-arm tactics of forcing children to mouth alien prayers by accusing those who complained of not being "tolerant".

That’s what he said to people who thought it was wrong of him to make kids pray to his Jesus. "Be tolerant." Exact words.

No, Perry, you psychotic religious fruitcake. That is not what tolerance means.

Tolerance means that one is free to attend any church, or no church at all. One is free to pray to Yahweh, Allah, Buddha, Shiva, Devas, Satan, Wily Coyote, Loki Liesmith, or not pray at all. No government can ever force prayer, and no government can ever tax to support any religious function. Ever. That’s the word the founders put in the Constitution when they promised no religious test for any public official anywhere in the United States, and that’s exactly what they meant. They never intended for petty, bigoted, stupid church groupies like Perry to take a captive audience of other people’s children and force them to pray to his tin Jesus. Ever. Never. Tolerance means that the government may never support any religion, not even the parody of Christianity practiced by football fundamentalists in Texas.

Perry, you are a disgrace to the governors’ office, a disgrace to Texas, a disgrace to America. You have no concept of what freedom means, and don’t recognize that far from upholding the values of America, you are pissing on them with your petty and pretentious pieties.

The sad thing, and indeed, the sickening thing here is that the actions of people like Perry are so inevitable whenever the country faces a crisis. Pseudo religious opportunists, frustrated that for some reason their omnipotent and omnipresent deity hasn’t just taken over the whole show and demonstrated his power to all the nonbelievers, jump on crises with loud cries of joy and immediately point out ethically bankrupt idiocies like "It takes five thousand deaths of innocents to make America believe" and "America sinned and this is God’s retribution".

Sick societies adopt self-destructive ideologies. Germany was ravished by depression and punitive conditions laid down by vengeful opponents, and fell into the arms of Adolf Hitler. Russia had horrific social inequity and a corrupt and ineffectual central government following civil war. Enter the Bolsheviks. The excesses of the Sun King led to the French Revolution. A cruel invader, poverty and famine led China to Mao.

The reason the American colonies didn’t self-destruct was because they weren’t particularly sick to begin with. The Crown wasn’t particularly despotic, even if the fellow wearing the crown was crazier than a nuthatch, but American colonists weren’t starved, subjugated, subjected to cruel taxes, worked to death or even treated with disrespect. Thus the revolutionary government didn’t have a panicked and angry populace to deal with. The society wasn’t sick, so they were able to beat off the pathogens of most really stupid and self-destructive social ideas, with the exception of slavery.

One of the very worst social pathogens the Founders managed to side step was the notion that the government should support any particular religion. Even the most devout of the Founders acknowledged that life in Europe over the previous fifteen hundred years would have been much more peaceful had governments and churches stayed separate.

And now Rick Perry, a small time religious bigot from Texas, thinks he’s got a better answer; an answer backed up by an invisible and silent deity.

One of the more bizarre things to come out of the WTC tragedy was reports from construction workers that they had found, in the ruins, a sign of what they considered God’s love: two girders, in the perfect form of a cross. Several Christians mentioned this to me, and I responded, "You mean your god let two planes fly into those buildings and kill 5,000, just so he could show some construction workers who were already believers a cross?" That didn’t go over.

A free and secular democracy requires people who can think and reason. Fundamentalist religious belief stops all thought and reason. Fundamentalism is an enemy to America, whether it’s Osama bin Laden or Governor Perry.

Perry, shut up and go pray on your own time, and quit wasting our tax dollars.