One Step Forward, One Step Back

Today, President Obama took a significant step towards rectifying the sins of the Bush administration's science policy, by reversing a blanket ban on embryonic stem cell research.  Stem cell research has long been at the forefront of the battle between faith and science, and the Bush presidency's stance on the subject was perfectly emblematic of it's response to scientific progress in general: 'not on our watch'.  Any aspect of scientific research that either cut against policy or offended the fundamentalist christian right was denounced or denied.  Climate data was suppressed, environmental mandates were ignored, and across the spectrum, information was massaged and mangled until it supported political decisions which had no true basis in scientific fact.  It was a very bleak eight years, a veritable dark age of the American scientific spirit.  And now, supposedly, a new day has dawned.

The importance of the stem cell reversal should not be underplayed; it is an enormous move in the right direction, at least in one particular field, and possibly for the scientific community overall.  The argument against embryonic stem cell research is reactionary and  superstitious at best, and because of our government's willingness to cave into fundamentalism, the true and daily suffering of individuals was prolonged unnecessarily.  We're effectively eight years behind where we should be as a logical and rational nation, and we must not forget that this course of action has been physically and mentally detrimental to many of our citizens.  Stem cell science isn't a magical fix of course, but the regenerative potential of the cells is also difficult to overestimate.  Who can say what we'd be capable of today, had Bush not chosen the cowardly and illogical route?   

By officially reversing course today, Obama is beginning to fulfill what, to me at least, was the most interesting and important promise of his inaugural speech, the returning of science to its proper stature within the American government.  That single line spoke directly to those of us dissatisfied, outraged really, by years of willful ignorance by both a government and its people.  It let us know that a veritable renaissance was at hand, not just for those who practice the sciences, but also for those, such as my self, who simply appreciate the continual cause of human enlightenment.  Today's executive order goes some distance towards reassuring me that Obama was serious in his commitment.  And yet, at the same time, I'm given pause by other actions of the administration.

In almost the same breath as the stem cell decision, Obama's Secretary of the Interior struck a blow against the environment by upholding a Bush-era policy of de-listing the gray wolf from the ESA in the norther Rockies.  The secretary in question is Ken Salazar, former senator from Colorado, and the de-listing of the wolf places 'management' of the animals in the hands of state agencies rather than under federal oversight.  Such management will amount to little more than controlled extirpation, as cattlemen and ranchers are given free reign to scour the predators off the land.  It's a markedly non-scientific approach, one dictated by fear, hatred, and greed, and has no basis in good environmental policy.  The success of the Endangered Species Act for the gray wolf, years of protection and repatriation, has been undone with a pen stroke.  If what has occurred in Wyoming is and indication, what is to come is wholesale slaughter.  

Ken Salazar's choice to enact left-over Bush policy is indicative of his entire environmental outlook.  Though a democrat, Salazar comes from a frontier-minded, ranching background, and has long been a proponent of extraction based industries in the American west.  His cabinet appointment by President Obama gave many ecologists and environmentalists cause to doubt Obama's true commitment to reform, and the recent wolf decision shows that such fears were justified.  The disappointment of the Obama administration is its moderation.  It's not a surprise, exactly; politics dirties the cleanest of intentions.  But it is discouraging.  It's a sign that even in the most open and rational of recent times, every step in the right direction comes at a cost.   

Out of Africa (and into the White House)

Today marks the first full day of command for our new President, Barack Obama: Hail to the Chief! Mr. Obama's election has been lauded by many the world over as a triumph of intellectualism over ignorance, of decency over dogma, and of multiculturalism over the antiquated face of homogenized America.  For, you see, Barack Obama happens to be America's first black President.  He just also happens to be our 44th African-American President.  Let me explain...

6 million years ago Orrorin tugenensis roamed the tropical woodlands of eastern Africa.  Tugenensis was a bipedal ape, and, putatively, the first hominid: your ancestor, mine, and Mr. Obama's.  From the humble origins of this chimp-like, quasi-arboreal primate, a whole line of world conquering apes descended.  Austrolopithicus afarensis, Homo habilis, Homo ergaster, Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo sapien; though the progression was not a linear one, the lineage is undeniable.  Homo sapien, the world-spanning super-adapter, has strong roots on the dark continent, a fact reinforced not only by fossil records, but by genealogical analysis as well.  From Africa, our ancestors (possibly ergastor, possibly later species) began their great diaspora, first to the Middle East and the Indian Subcontinent, then into Southeast Asia, and up into the Medditeranian.  From there, hominids spread into Northern Europe, China, Siberia, and the Russian interior, swaddled in skins, with the grease of mammoth, reindeer, and rhino ribs on their lips.  They launched primitive watercraft out into Oceana, and farther into the Pacific.  In the grip of global ice age, men crossed the Bering Sea into the Americas, following the coast south, trailing game into the wilderness of the virgin continents.  Finally, Europeans sailed west to North America (as well as across the rest of the globe) in what would amount to the last and most vicious phase of humanity's global dispersion.  So what does it all mean?

Well, ultimately it all comes down to semantics.  If I, as a citizen of the United States of America, believe the 'out of Africa' theory of human evolution, and I quite clearly do, then I can indirectly trace my own ancestry back to Africa.  Ergo, African-American.  My vintage may be somewhat more venerable than that of a Guinean or Nigerian immigrant, but what's a few hundred thousand years, more or less?  I may be as white as a sheet, pasty even (due to a multi -millennial over-stop in Ireland and Lithuania) but genetically, I am nearly identical to my Nubian brothers.  Sure, the melanin in my skin may have kicked it down a notch, and my stomach has adapted to process lactose a little better (thankyouthankyouthankyou), but really, I'm separated from my African forebears only by superficial differences.  At the end of the day, even the concept of race is being eroded by new research into our shared human genome.  Black, white, asian: we're all African under the skin, be it African-American, African-Irish-American, African-French-Hatian-American, or any one of the multitude of combinations that contribute to our national diversity.

I don't delve into this subject to be glib.  And I certainly don't seek to diminish President Obama's victory; the history of blacks in America is long and sordid, and Obama's success represents a very real triumph over years of inequality and segregation.  If anything, I bring up this topic because now is the perfect time to start addressing racial issues at their deepest and most basic level, now when the dialogue can be so immediate and open.  Obama may be our first black President, physically, culturally, but he's not our first African-American leader, just the first openly, obviously so.  In truth, he's African-American, I'm African-American, and if you're reading this as a US citizen, you're African-American.  We're all parts of the same chain of humanity, separated only by visible, largely arbitrary divisions, linked by so much more.  We're all genetic, anthropological brothers and sisters, and the pride of Obama's Presidency shouldn't be the pride of one race, one culture, or one creed, but the pride of all men and women for their fellow man.  So come on with me now: say it loud, say it proud, I'm African-American and I'm proud!

A Change is Gonna Come

We stand today on the brink of a long awaited and sorely needed new dawn for America.  It's difficult to be cynical on such a day; it's difficult even to revel in the schadenfreude of an outgoing presidency and a newly-irrelevant political party.  On a day like today, the scales fall from the eyes of even one as jaded as myself, and for a brief moment, the raw possibility of the moment is electric.  Never have we, as a nation, needed such a moment so badly.  Never have we been so fallen, and not since the Civil War have we been so divided, one from another.  Today sees us pulled up from the nadir of our course as a people, and to pass the word 'hope' about is neither hyperbole nor triteness.  Hope is a palpable thing today.  Hope for an end to our foreign wars.  Hope for the end of torture.  Hope for health care for every citizen.  Hope for a new era of equality.  Hope for a green future.  Hope for a change in trajectory and an escape from the last eight years, years of ignorance, fear, and the gradual slide towards tyranny.  Today, then, is a very important, a very hopeful, day indeed.

For the last few months, I've been less concerned with the inaugeration of Barack Obama than with the departure of G. W. Bush.  The man, and by extension his administration, has represented everything wrong with modern America: the willful ignorance, the arrogance, the divisiveness, the sheer, unfathomable greed.  Bush has been a specter and a bogeyman for anyone who cherishes the environment, personal freedoms, open discourse.  I hate him of course; truthfully I hate what he has meant for this country, and what his continued political survival has meant about this country.  Despite what Bush may think, history will in no way look favorably upon his terms, and I firmly believe that as the full scope of his actions are with time revealed, he will be recognized for the stain he truly is.  

It's a sign of the the moment then, that as I sit watching the inauguration, Bush is now so far from my thoughts.  It takes a remarkable magnitude of good will to overcome the bitterness in my heart, yet here I am.  I, like so many people the world over, am dazzled.  I am won over.  I am drifting on the current of hope which has sprung forth after so long being stifled.  The happiness, the very sense of well-being engendered by this moment is somewhat inebriating.  Even Rick Warren, a blight on an otherwise pristine ceremony, is hardly dimming the gleam.  This is the very thing we need to speed the forgetting, to speed the healing.  What but this moment could eclipse the mistakes of our recent past?

 I don't look to Obama as a messianic figure, and I don't step into this new era with my defenses lowered.  I firmly believe in the corrupting influence of politics, and I ardently believe that sacrifices are made in the name of the greater good; Washington grinds down square-pegs into round ones, inexorably.  Yet how can one not give themselves up to the gestalt spirit?  How can one not abandon, even momentarily, their skepticism, in the face of such overwhelming joy?  Today, we usher in a new President, but more than that, we usher in a new age for America.  It's a time when hope can flourish, when the better angels of man's character are not detriments, but strengths.  It's a time when the sins of the past are washed clean in the rising tide.  We wade today in that tide, in the waters of hope.  And for once, we wade together.