The Culture of We

From Jim Gilliam's blog archives

Read the latest from Jim's Make the Future blog, or continue exploring the archives.

The Culture of We

August 12, 2004 1:38 PM

Thanks to everyone who has linked to my Krugman vs. O'Reilly clips the last couple days. I really liked this one from Jason at Q Daily News:

If anyone wants to see one place where web publishing has a huge, influential future, you cant go wrong by taking a look at Jim Gilliams video analysis of the appearance of Bill OReilly and Paul Krugman on Tim Russerts CNBC show. Gilliam, the producer of Outfoxed, took CNBCs video clips and superimposed meaningful facts over top of OReillys outrageous claims, transforming what OReilly must have hoped would be a (boisterous, obnoxious) one-man message into an effective exposure of genuine doublespeak and deceit on the part of the Fox anchor. Over and over, OReilly tried to manipulate the conversation with volume, bombast, and lies, and Gilliams ability to publish an on-point rebuttal which (in part) uses OReillys own words as rebuttals is amazing. And as this latest generation of journalists and documentarians has grown up right alongside the web, this kind of thing is going to occur more and more.

And then I stumbled on one of Jason's posts from earlier this week, where he talked about an eleven year-old boy with acute lymphoblastic leukemia:

Given the dismal prognosis without transplant, though, we were happy to have found the one donor, and when we found out that my patient was finally in remission two weeks ago, we made the official request to the National Marrow Donor Program to have the donor come in for the medical part of the pretransplant workup.

Today, we learned that the donor deferred, meaning that he or she decided not to participate in the donation process. That means that at this point, we are left with no suitable match for my patient. And therein lies the very reason that the marrow donation process is done with complete blinding between the institution caring for the potential recipient and the NMDP -- it would be too easy for me to go completely nuts on the poor potential donor, screaming and yelling about how he or she is dooming my patient to a near certain fate, without having any clue about the potential donors reasons for not wanting to go through with the process. As disappointed as I am right now, thats the mindset that Im trying to maintain; for all I know, the person carries a lethal virus or condition but was pressured into participating in a marrow donor drive at work, or has some other such reasonable cause for deferring.

The one thread of hope that remains is a person who, at least crudely, has the potential to be a match, but who isnt going to be worked up more precisely for another two weeks. In the mean time, we have to continue my patient on maintenance chemo with the hope that he remains in his fragile remission, hold tight to the chance that the new person will be a suitable molecular match, and pray that if thats the case, he or she will be willing to go through with the donation posthaste.

I survived acute lymphoblastic leukemia when I was 20 with a bone marrow transplant from an anonymous donor. I hope Jason's patient will be as lucky as I was. Receiving a gift like that will not only save his life, it'll change it too.

Looking back, that was how my world view changed. It took me awhile to figure it out, but I went from a very conservative, self-reliant, individualist mentality into one that acknowledged we're all connected in so many ways.

As Wes Boyd from MoveOn says, it's not a culture of me, it's a culture of we.