Thoughts Before The Alarm Sounds

According to the morning paper, sixteen members of an Amish sect in Ohio have rejected plea bargains which would have reduced their potential jail time from 20+ years to two or three years. Some may even have been eligible for parole. Their crime? Cutting the beards and hair of fellow church members in order to send a message that they should be ashamed of themselves for the way they were treating fellow Amish! Because short hair and beards are considered to be deeply offensive in the Amish culture, U.S. prosecutors have decided this was a hate crime! So what is a hate crime? According to Wikipedia, current statutes permit federal prosecution of hate crimes committed on the basis of a person's protected characteristics of  race ,  religion , ethnicity ,  nationality ,  gender ,  sexual orientation ,  gender identity , and  disability . I suppose an argument could be made that the current crime is an attack on the religion of the victims, but ...

 While waiting for the doctor yesterday, I got to thinking about the ways in which visits to the doctor have changed over the years. I had plenty of time to think - I arrived ten minutes early to a crowded waiting room, and figured I would be there for quite a while. Thirty-five minutes after my appointed time my name was called, and I was taken to an examination room. “Not too bad,” I thought. Thirty-five minutes after that the doctor showed up! “Not too good,” I thought, “but not unusual today, particularly for a specialist.” Now to be honest, during the 1940s and 1950s there was a local surgeon with a similar arrangement. You almost always arrived to a waiting room with 20 people ahead of you. When your name finally was called you were ushered into another waiting room filled with the same 20 people! It was usually about a 30 minute wait after you finally arrived in the examining room. But this was very unusual for the time. Until the 1960s, when one needed to see o...