David McElroy

I sometimes have mixed feelings about people in positions of authority who make serious mistakes and then apologize later. I admire them having the guts to admit they did the wrong things in the past, but I’m frequently still irritated by the arrogance of their original mistakes — and the consequences of those mistakes.

So I have mixed feelings about the news that a Connecticut Supreme Court justice has apologized to Susette Kelo for his role in taking her home away from her in the infamous case of Kelo v. City of New London. (I’m not going to outline the facts of the case since they’re so familiar to most people, but click the link for a summary if you need it.)

The case was the one that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and established the precedent that governments can basically take away private property from owners with pretty much any excuse they want to make up.

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For years, doctors have been looking for one gene to blame for problems such as depression and schizophrenia. A couple of new studies have dashed those hopes, because it seems that dozens or even hundreds of genes are involved. The doctors involved in the study were disappointed. I was relieved.

If you could take a pill — or get a shot or have an operation — to “fix” some way in which you’re different from other people, would you do it? With some things, the answer is clearly, “Yes.” If you were blind or deaf or had damaged vocal chords, most people would gladly make the change.

With other things, the answer is pretty clearly, “No.” If you’re left-handed, you don’t want to be made right-handed. If your eyes are blue or green, you don’t want to change your eyes to brown just because it’s the most common thing in the world. For other things, the answer is more gray? Do you remove a mole that you’ve been worried about all your life? Do you straighten your nose? For most of us, we conclude that we’d rather be what we were born with in most areas, simply because it’s who we are.

If the questions and answers are that complicated for your physical body, how much more complicated are they for the mind? We can sometimes see our bodies as physical shells we ride around in on Earth, but our thoughts and feelings are what make us entirely different from the other people around us, at least as far as our own internal thoughts are concerned. (I’m ignoring the issue of a soul, because this is about psychology and ethics, not about theology.)

If the doctors in one of the studies in the news Monday had come up with one gene to blame for depression or schizophrenia, would you want whatever “cure” they came up with? As long as my life were fairly functional, I know I wouldn’t want it. Whatever goes on inside my brain — and my heart and something on the inside — is what makes me “me,” and I don’t want someone else monkeying around what what I am.

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On the public radio show “This American Life” last week, there was a segment in which an American Muslim family discussed how the last 10 years have affected them. A year after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks happened, a girl in the family started being harassed at her suburban school. The mother first refused to believe the anti-Muslim sentiment she was seeing could be typical of Americans, but after years of experiencing it, she’s come to accept that America is just bigoted against Muslims.

I have a different view. I’d say it’s misguided to say that intolerance is an American thing or a Christian thing or an Arab thing or a Muslim thing. Instead, it’s really a human thing.

I’ve seen plenty of misguided bigotry against Muslims over the past 10 years, although we’ve been seeing it for decades (going back to the early days of the Arab-Israeli conflict). I’ve heard casual bigotry against Muslims from people I’ve known, but I’ve never seen anything that would rise to the level of violence or even direct confrontation. It would be wrong to deny it’s there, but’s it’s also wrong to pretend that it’s anything except an ugly part of human nature.

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