This past Wednesday evening, on PBS, they played the end of their series on the 9 months of pregnancy that creates a human.
This is the program overall:
9 Months That Made You
And it was this last part of the series I'm speaking of:
It was interesting, period, no surprise, being on PBS as it was, but one part, especially, struck me.
One part told of how, in Canada, there had been a huge ice storm that struck a city. A doctor used that event to study the effects of stress on pregnant women and their offspring.
The results were fascinating.
The children born after this event were stunted mentally and even physically and by clear, even measurable degrees. It seems the children were slower to gain speech as infants and not as developed in later years when it came to sports, etc.
It's pretty stunning what this means, at least in part.
While we're all human and lots of us put stress on ourselves and/or others, it shows that people with less means, the poor, are quite possibly if not likely to be exposed to this stress and so, hold them back again, mentally and physically.
I've known people, even friends who made fun of people "inbreeding" and their conclusion that was why they were stupid or poor or both or whatever.
With this not completely surprising scientific revelation, it seems clear there's even more "nobless oblige" or responsibility of the moneyed or gifted people to help others than people might want to admit or recognize. That being "your brother's keeper" becomes even more real and actual.
So when people or, worse yet, whole political parties say or claim that people really can "pull themselves up by their own bootstraps" or that we're all equal so none deserve any more help than another, not only are they not being very "Christian", it's also patently untrue, as this science shows.
We have more obligation than ever to be "our brother's keeper" on this planet, in this life, in spite of widely held beliefs otherwise.
Jesus was right.
Not Right Wing but right.
Who'da' thunk it?
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