A hero is an ordinary person doing things in an extra ordinary way. - Christopher Reeve

Sitting in a chair for more than 4 years now has given me plenty of time to think about many of the distorted and irrational values in our society. For example, all the researchers now agree that the damaged spinal cord can and will be repaired. But, they caution, recovery will only benefit the fittest. This means that the patient must exercise diligently to prevent muscle atrophy, and the loss of bone density and cardiovascular capacity. Special equipment ranging from electrodes that stimulate muscle groups, tilt tables that allow people to stand and bear weight, exercise bicycles, and treadmill therapy, which enables even a quadriplegic to walk while suspended in a harness, are all available. When the cure comes and signals from the brain once again reach the body, individuals who have kept in shape will be able to be rehabilitated relatively quickly and will no longer need payments from their insurance company. But no company will pay for this proactive therapy which would save them hundreds of thousands of dollars in the long run. So most spinal cord injury victims simply deteriorate while they continue to fight for basic quality of life coverage. Meanwhile, the CEOs of many insurance companies are making salaries in the neighborhood of 300 million dollars a year. How much profit is reasonable and justifiable? The same distortion of values is evident in entertainment, sports, and politics. Why do studios pay some of their biggest stars 20 million dollars a picture? Does even the most gifted athlete deserve 91 million dollars over 7 years to swing a bat and catch a baseball? Why is it that so many of our elected officials end up in office primarily because they have been able to outspend their opponents? At the other end of the spectrum, why has the NIH since its inception in 1940 had to plead incessantly for enough money to battle every disease in the encyclopedia?

[J]ust on a daily basis, the Government is saying to people that, yes, there is a threat of terror, but fly and go to the theater and live your life and take that risk, because every day, you hear about fighter escorts having to take some airplane back to the airport because there was another bomb threat. People are boarding airplanes, passing security checkpoints, and then found to be carrying dangerous material - but still we go on. So yes, you take a risk that somebody somewhere could get involved in creating a human out of reproductive cloning, but it is not at all likely, and to be afraid of pursuing therapeutic cloning is really going to be reprehensible, because you cannot use embryonic stem cells for therapy without being able to use therapeutic cloning — it will not work.

At first, dreams seem impossible, then improbable, and eventually inevitable.