Opinion

Last week, I attended a forum in Topeka for candidates running for the Kansas House of Representatives from Shawnee County. I had hoped to see my district’s representative there, but he didn’t attend. No need to come out when one, you’re unopposed, two, there’s a supermajority in power so no need to work with the other side, and three, we frankly didn’t plan to get much done anyway, so why talk about it?

America’s rise to prominence following World War II was due to a massive increase in university attendance, heavily stimulated by the GI Bill. The return of war veterans, who had experienced the Great Depression in their childhood, along with the prior inflow of foreign academics who had fled persecution, led to a surge in college and university expansions. University enrolment in 1950 was seven times the proportion of college enrolment in 1900! This in turn resulted in a solid growth in the U.S. economy, expanded suburbs, and more subsequent Nobel Prizes. –But only for two generations.

Each month I want to provide you with regular updates about what’s going on in our nation’s capital and throughout the 4th District of Kansas. Here’s what happened in September.

Dear Doctors: A family friend is suddenly on hospice care because of esophageal cancer, which has spread to his lungs and liver. The thing is, he never even knew he had it. Other than getting the hiccups and losing some weight, he was fine. What causes this cancer? How common is it?

A couple of weeks ago, I took a week-long trip to Scotland to take a closer look at their cattle industry. Several years ago my late wife and I spent a couple of weeks there, exploring the drove roads (what we would call cattle trails). We even spent the night at Amulrie, which was the site of an early cattle tryst (i.e. a cattle market), where we stayed at an inn that the poet William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy had stayed in a couple of hundred years earlier.