The float's theme, "Giving From The Heart," was meant to inspire people to save lives as organ, tissue, and blood donors. The Donor Network of Arizona sponsored Nighthorse, a mother of eight, who gives educational presentations at area high schools on behalf of the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising.
P.S. I hope her float was less stereotypical than this one from 2001:
4 comments:
Writerfella here --
writerfella has some very definite ideas about organ donation, some good, some bad.
1. He most assuredly would donate a kidney or a lobe of liver, or a cornea, should any immediate relative or family member so require. But that is the extent of it. Period.
2. Mo$t individual$ $o $elfle$$ in $uch regard$ don't under$tand that donation$ make $ure the $urgeon drive$ a Lexu$ and take$ winter crui$e$ to $t. Martin or the Fiji I$land$.
3. In 1995, writerfella and his brother David watched the afternoon HOME AND FAMILY TV show, and saw a Black man and a Native woman telling how their 4-year-old boy had been saved by tissue match donors and subsequent transplants of bone marrow. The segment went on to discuss that the tissue match registry desperately needed volunteer donors, most expecially from all tribes of Native Americans. But when we saw that man and thought about him, it all rang wrong in several directions. And so writerfella and David contacted the show's producers. Why? Because just three years before, their adopted brother Tim had been accused of murder based on DNA evidence and DNA evidence alone. When FBI experts came to testify in the case, it looked like an easy conviction. However, writerfella found and obtained a defense DNA witness who, on the witness stand, educated the jury on what DNA really represents, revealed that DNA truly does not identify single individuals, then took the FBI's DNA protocols to task and finally discounted them. One of the items the expert pointed out was that the FBI's DNA database contained fewer than a dozen Native American examples of DNA for comparison and that all of those came from Northeastern tribes. Tim was Kiowa-Apache. Thus, their brother was acquitted and the future role of DNA in criminal trials was changed forever. What writerfella told HOME AND FAMILY's producers was that we had seen the male half of the interviewed couple before, and that was during our brother's trial. The man was one of the FBI agents who had come here for the trial. The earnest appeal made especially to Native Americans therefore was bogus, and all that was being sought was a surreptitious way of obtaining Native American DNA for the FBI database. They thanked us for the information and promised they would investigate. Two days later, the hosts of HOME AND FAMILY, Chuck Woolery and Christina Ferrarra, took out a few minutes at the start of the program to apologize to the TV audience. Once alerted by viewers, they said, the production staff had inquired about and otherwise checked out their guests from earlier in the week. And the man and woman were found not to be married at all. Nor did the four-year-old child belong to either of the two. In fact, the boy was a healthy child model who had been hired by the pair to appear with them. We were duped, the hosts said, and now we know the man who was here is an FBI agent. Then they apologized for being party to leading on the audience and to what really was a conspiracy, while counseling that not all tissue match donor services were bogus.
David and I laughed and laughed, thinking of all the slamming doors and high-pitched cursing and escaping steam generated in the Washington DC FBI Headquarters that afternoon!
4. By race, break down that figure of 94,675 patients waiting for a donor organ, and guess what you will find? I'll give you three guesses, and the first two don't count...
All Best
Russ Bates
'writerfella'
I think you missed the point.
If writerfella wants to digress, that's okay.
Re "By race, break down that figure of 94,675 patients waiting for a donor organ, and guess what you will find?" I'm sure you'll several things, so I'm not sure what you're getting at.
The article says 11.9% of the Arizona patients waiting for donors are Natives. I'd guess Natives are overrepresented on the national list because they tend to have poorer health.
Writerfella here --
The only way writerfella missed the point is that there was no point, and neither case is true. Organ donations are a Twilight Zone-type situation; one contributes organs for free and, unless designated by you for dispensation, they go to whomever can afford tranplantation. Thus, organ transplantion is a hugely-profitable growth industry, with stratospheric fees handed to the transplanters. The argument has been made that the costs are determined by the costs of the surgeon's training and skills. But at what point do such costs finally even out? You in the back who said, 'Never!', are very correct.
Now, do the math writerfella assigned concerning the 94,675 patients awaiting an organ for transplant, using the gigantic costs as the modifier. An overwhelming percentage of that number will be Caucasian, as will be the percentage of recipients if the same calculation is made.
In Larry Niven's story, "The Jigsaw Man", penalties for high crime shift from death or life imprisonment to being surgically disassembled into transplant parts. And as time passes, high crimes get lower and lower until one can be disassembled for public intoxication or even jaywalking, because who is going to vote against surviving longer if huge supplies of spare human parts are made available?
As writerfella has said many times in the past, Dr. Michael DeBakey is a man after my own heart...
All Best
Russ Bates
'writerfella'
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