Someday Doctor

Any time I leave the house knowing that I will be away for more than a couple of hours, I feel like I need to be prepared for every eventuality; and it is in this spirit that I now have two bags loaded with textbooks, study guides, and my laptop. At first, it seemed like a good idea to be prepared, to have all of my books ready to go in case the opportunity presents itself for a little study time, but when I lugged both bags up the basement stairs this evening, carrying more weight on my shoulders than the FAA would allow on an airplane, I suddenly realized how foolish I must look.

The problem is that I have all three of my classes–Biology, Chemistry, and Physics–scheduled on the same day. And the problem is compounded by the fact that my wife and I are now down to one vehicle, so my wife will be dropping me off at school every day, and I won’t be able to leave any of my luggage in the car to swap out between classes.

So, as soon as I finish this post, I plan on logging onto the university website to see if I can’t get at least one of these classes shifted to Tuesday/Thursday. Maybe that will lighten my load enough so that I’ll only have to take one bag with me.

Either way, I cannot put into words how excited I am to finally be on the first leg of this journey. I’ve been wanting to take this step for over five years now, and thanks to the tremendous support of an amazing wife, I’m finally doing it!

If I have the wherewithal tomorrow, I’ll let everybody know how my first day went.

Today’s lunch break marks a significant point in my journey to become a physician. This morning, I received an email that my financial aid refund was in my account. So this afternoon, after lunch, I bought my first textbooks as a biology major. And now I’m $640 closer to being a doctor.

When I first started this blog, I was not honestly expecting to make it even this far. If you go back to my first post, you’ll see that all I had to hold onto was a faint hope that someday everything would just fall into place. As it turns out, it wasn’t hope that I needed. It was determination. And that determination didn’t really take hold until the day when my dear wife said, “Let’s do this!”

And now I’m on my way!

The nature of political debate in our country has completely polarized us, making it nearly impossible to carry on a healthy debate. Our two-party political system (which George Washington warned us about) has turned us all into a bunch of sarcastic, recalcitrant children who are more concerned with being right than finding the truth.

We have all been in arguments, political or otherwise, when we realized at some point that the other person was at least partially right. Unfortunately, however, our pride often gets the best of us and won’t let us admit that we might need to rethink things. In fact, we defy all semblance of logic and start fighting even harder to prove our point, and everything devolves into an unfortunate shouting match. If we could just get over ourselves and spend more time listening and less time talking, we might actually make some progress.

For example, why must liberals assume that anyone who opposes Obama’s brand of health care reform is greedy or intellectually inferior? And why must conservatives assume that liberals are all a bunch of amoral, socialist hippies who hate liberty? Is it possible, fellow Americans, that each side might actually have something constructive to say? Is it possible to put an end to the destructive bickering and pointless name-calling in an effort to discover what is best for the country?

Where there are people, disagreement is inevitable. And disagreement can be a healthy thing if we can all just learn to practice a little patience and humility. And who knows? We might even make some friends in the process.

Is it possible to escape the fatal consequences of a good principle? For myself I consider them inevitable.

~Alexis de Tocqueville, Memoir on Pauperism