Mountain Views News, Combined Edition Saturday, March 20, 2021

OPINIONMountain View News Saturday, March 20, 2021 14 OPINIONMountain View News Saturday, March 20, 2021 14 
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Stuart Tolchin 
Audrey SwansonMary Lou CaldwellKevin McGuire 
Chris Leclerc 
Bob Eklund 
Howard HaysPaul CarpenterKim Clymer-KelleyChristopher NyergesPeter Dills 
Rich Johnson 
Lori Ann Harris 
Rev. James SnyderKatie HopkinsDeanne Davis 
Despina ArouzmanJeff Brown 
Marc Garlett 
Keely TotenDan Golden 
Rebecca WrightHail Hamilton 
Joan Schmidt 
LaQuetta Shamblee 

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COMFORT VERSUS CHANGE

STUART TOLCHIN 



An old new friend of mine has replied to my article 

reflecting on the need for individual change to conform to the 

changing expectations in male female relations by emailing “This 

cancel culture is going to destroy the very culture that I was raised 

in and loved for all these years. I am just grateful that my wife still 

lets me open the door for her and lets me give her a kiss without 

reporting to the press. Oh well I will not be here much longer 

to watch the conclusion of this society.” My initial emotional 

response to this reply was one of sadness and bewilderment. 

Certainly, there is more to this culture than deference to the 

expectations surrounding customary interpersonal relations. 

How could my friend be so wedded to a particular way of life, or 

set of values that he now seemed gleeful at the thought of his soon 
approaching demise? (Fortunately, or unfortunately, he is now being treated for multiple 
cancers and a heart condition.)

I thought about my friend’s ardent devotion to seemingly archaic practices (like 
opening the door for your wife, I guess) in relation to an interview I saw yesterday with 
Walter Isaacson focusing on his new book, The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene 
Editing, and the Future of the Human Race. The aim of my article is to focus on future 
cultural, educational, and ethical changes that will be considered in the coming decades. 
Considering the career of Walter Isaacson, himself, is a great place to begin. He is a very 
versatile successful man and is a graduate of a two year program of unique higher learning 
named Deep Springs College. This remarkable place is a model of what I would like to see 
future educational programs to be.

The College is an accredited two year full scholarship programs located on an isolated 
cattle ranch and alfalfa farm in high desert eastern California. The School, which is now 
coeducational, offers a full scholarship including room and board to all accepted applicants. 
It has been ranked the #1 liberal arts college in the nation as of March 23, 2020. The school 
founded in 1917 is based on the three pillars of labor, self-governance and academics and 
each student is required to spend twenty hours per week laboring in the fields and ranch. 
An integral part of the Pedagogy at Deep Springs is learning how to learn, learning how to 
succeed in situations unfamiliar and intimidating. My discovery of this model is a perfect 
reflection of what I believe all educational programs could and should become.

This model educational program fits right into the considerations appropriate to an 
understanding of the changes that those of us living in the future time must be prepared 
to make. Much as the MAGA supporters may scream that they want their America back, 
those previous decades that provided privileges based upon race, place of birth, and a 
continuing sexist and racist culture are now being erased.

I am going to proceed to discuss the changes that may well be required to coincide 
with CRISPR genetic engineering as discussed in Walter Issacson’s the Code Breaker, 
which, if you must know, I have yet to read but have considered deeply in contact with my 
friend the virologist and colleague of Jennifer Douda. First he reminds me that genetic 
intrusion and attempted correction is in no way a perfected predictable process. He warns 
that if scientists want to design super athletes or super soldiers the result of this attempt at 
alteration may result in a weaker genome and become cancerous which depending on the 
kind of intrusion, may be a weakness inheritable for generations. This information resulted 
in my sympathizing with my door opening, wife kissing friend. It does not sound like a 
world in which I would like to live even if the scientifically designed kids were able to attend 
Deep Springs College.

For the moment let us consider the possibilities. What are the traits we would like 
to see guaranteed in our offspring. Is high intelligence important even if it is linked to an 
incapacity for empathy? Is overall high energy a benefit more than a mellow disposition. 
What about perseverance linked to stubbornness or attractiveness linked to vanity and 
emotional instability. Who even would want to make these decisions? Frankly I agree with 

my friend and am glad that I probably won’t be around to make them. 
Please let me know if you have any reaction to this article by emailing :

stuarttolchin@gmail.com 


LEFT, RIGHT OR CENTER! 
DICK POLMAN 
LONG LIVE OBAMACARE. 


NOW IT’S NOMALARKEYCARE 

Once upon a time, in a dystopia far far away, Trump decreed 
that Obamacare shall die. In his memorable words, “What we 
want to do is terminate it.” 

How’d that work out? 

Not only did Obamacare survive the Mar-a-Lago loser – 

and 10 years of attempted Republican sabotage – but today 
it’s more alive than ever. Because one of the most under-reported aspects of the 
American Rescue Plan are its provisions to bolster and expand the Affordable Care 
Act. 

We need to take notice before the news cycle inevitably moves on, because this is 
historic news for 20 million Americans whose coverage had long been targeted 
by GOP saboteurs – and for potentially millions more who can sign up with new 
federal help. 

Thanks to Joe Biden, who campaigned on a promise to “protect and build on the 
ACA,” we should rename it NoMalarkeyCare. 

We’d been so conditioned for so long to endure bad news that we now often need 
an attitude adjustment in order to process something good. But it’s all there, tucked 
away in the rescue plan: Higher subsidies for people who buy health coverage 
through the ACA exchanges, brand new subsidies for people who weren’t eligible 
before, and hefty financial aid to red states that have not yet expanded Medicaid 
under the ACA. 

As medical experts point out, “Medicaid expansion is critical to vulnerable populations 
disproportionately impacted by COVID-19.” 

It’s hilarious to think back to 2017, when Trump held a victory party in the Rose 
Garden after House Republicans, then in the majority, passed a bill that was designed 
to cripple what he called the “ravages” of Obamacare. (That quest later died 
in the Senate.) 

Lest we forget, this was the party that tried and failed umpteen times to kill the 
coverage of 20 million Americans, the party that refused to accept that Obamacare 
was the law of the land even after the Supreme Court upheld it twice. (A third 
Republican challenge to overturn the entire ACA was argued in the high court last 
fall, but the betting is that it too will fail.) 

Yes, it’s fun in retrospect to highlight the GOP’s greatest rhetorical hits. Like when 
they warned about Obamacare’s “death panels.” (There were no death panels). And 
when House Speaker John Boehner warned that Obamacare would usher in “Armageddon.” 
And when they predicted that few Americans would bother to sign 
up. And when Mitch McConnell said, “I don’t think Albert Einstein could make 
this thing work.” And when fellow Senator John Thune said the law was “destined 
to fail.” And when virtually all of them consulted the GOP talking-point cheat 
sheet and chanted the phrase “train wreck.” 

It’s brain-dead politics to think you can win by vowing to take away something that 
Americans have, a lesson Republicans should’ve learned in 2018, when Democrats 
captured the House after campaigning to protect Obamacare. And you certainly 
can’t win by replacing something with nothing. Republicans had a full decade to 
come up with something better than Obamacare, but let’s face it, health reform 
featuring a robust federal role is not something that Republicans do. 

I’m reminded of what happened in 1935, when the New Deal Democrats introduced 
the concept of Social Security. Republicans predictably dissed that law 
too. New Jersey Republican Senator A. Harry Moore warned that Social Security 
“would take all the romance out of life. We might as well take a child from the 
nursery, give him a nurse, and protect him from every experience that life affords.” 
That law was rickety at the outset, but once it got traction, it was improved and 
expanded in subsequent legislation. Today, I doubt you’ll find a single grassroots 
Republican, senior or disabled, who refuses a Social Security check. 

So put your hands together for a Biden-buttressed Obamacare. When the original 
was signed into law in 2010, the vice president was overheard ballyhooing the 
event as “a big f-ing deal.” This one is even bigger. 

Once again, Republicans have been reduced to history’s roadkill. 

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia 

CHRISTINE FLOWERS 


EVIL COMES IN ALL COLORS 

The hashtag #White Supremacy is trending this 
week in the Twitterverse. That is due to the horrific 
murders of eight Asian Americans in Georgia. They 
were likely hate crimes, with ample evidence that 
the shooter of those innocent women was motivated 
by hostility against Asians. 

Asian Americans have often been among the most 


vulnerable populations in the United States. Until recently, they didn’t have 
the lobbying groups and voices that spoke out on behalf of other minorities, 
and suffered from the perception that they were so successful they didn’t 
need protection. 

Asians were basically out there, on their own, and anyone who pointed out 
that they were endangered by the same sort of hatred that targeted Blacks 
or Hispanics or members of the LGBT community were dismissed. I was 
dismissed many times when I made the same claim. I remember one particular 
instance when a Korean grocer was gunned down in his store in 
West Philadelphia by an African American, and when I mentioned the fact 
that there was a lot of hostility between the Asian and Black communities 
in the city, I was called a racist. 

But now, it’s not racist to suggest that Asians are being targeted by “White 
Supremacy.” Now that everyone has a new hashtag to use, a new philosophy 
to exploit, a new narrative to push, we don’t have to worry about pointing 
fingers. The blood that was spilled in Georgia this week was apparently 
spilled by a man whose skin color identified the content of his character. 

And we slip further back into the muck of civilization, the gravitational pull 
downward toward blaming hatred on skin color as opposed to ideology. 

Evil comes in all sorts of packages, including the obvious ones that you can 
see from a mile away. The Nazi swastikas, the Stalinistic purges, the Cultural 
Revolution of Mao, the killing fields of Pol Pot and the jails of Fidel Castro 
are all forms of evil. They are clear and blatant instances where some men 
felt that they were better than others, and so decided to eliminate the “lesser 
humans” from existence and circulation. They chose domination and annihilation 
over reconciliation and acceptance. And the men at the head of 
those movements represent all the colors of the rainbow, a somewhat perverted 
Rainbow Coalition. 

Is this an attempt to deflect attention from the fact that the murderer of 
these Asian victims was a white man? Absolutely not. If he targeted the 
ethnicity of his victims, he committed a hate crime. And if he was one of 
those people calling COVID the “China virus” and blaming foreigners for 
ruining the country and spouting off about how the people at the border are 
bringing leprosy and other diseases along with them, his is, in fact, a bigot. 

But his skin color and race do not define him, just as the skin color of the 
Black robber in West Philadelphia does not set him apart from any other 
killer on the streets. This idea that we have to use labels to distinguish “hate 
crimes” from other garden-variety offenses is, in and of itself, offensive. 
And it gives a very easy out to the people who have “Hate Has No Home 
Here” signs on their lawns in eight different languages, but who are quite 
willing to swallow the idea that “white hatred” is unique. 

It’s not. Any time you have someone targeting someone else because of their 
identity, that is a form of supremacy. I see it all the time in my immigration 
practice, and I’m really tired of hearing folks whine about how only a 
certain sort of human, white and conservative and religious and poorly-
educated with only a few dollars in his bank account, is capable of rage. 

You can disagree with me, and you can say that white supremacy is a thing, 
and that our country is being destroyed from within by people who wear 
red hats and cling to their guns and religion and you can measure the value 
of a human by his level of melanin, and you can perhaps feel virtuous while 
doing it. 

But while you are doing it, you are doing a grave injustice to the people who 
were gunned down in Georgia, because you are using them to advance your 
own political and philosophical agendas. 

And you are too blind to see it. Color blinded. 

Mountain Views News 80 W Sierra Madre Blvd. No. 327 Sierra Madre, Ca. 91024 Office: 626.355.2737 Fax: 626.609.3285 
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