The American Spectator

Another Perspective

On my favorite Rolling Stones album, Aftermath, the LP, the song that comes just before the well-known "Under My Thumb" is "I Am Waiting."

p> em>I am waiting br> I am waiting br> Oh yeah, oh yeah br> I am waiting br> I am waiting br> Oh, yeah, oh yeah br> Waiting for someone to come out from somewhere /em> /p>

The song bears the unmistakable Elizabethan cast of the late Brian Jones, the Stones' rhythm guitarist and multi-instrumentalist of the sixties. Like many another song of the era, it doesn't seem to be about much of anything, while, at the same time, it evokes a great deal.

"Escalation fears," the lyric says at one point, employing a word freighted with meaning at the time -- of an increased military commitment in Vietnam. "Oh, yes, we will find out."

I GOT MY FIRST kidney transplant in 1981. I had been on dialysis by that time for six years. Thank heavens I was young and strong when I started that ordeal. I saw people wither and die under the slow torture of the kidney machine.

Every group of doctors has a culture. How those doctors behave, what treatments they pursue, all grow out of their culture, their belief system. The doctors I had fallen in with believed in dialysis, and did not push transplants.

topics:
Military