My recent encounters with medical care in the United States have not been entirely reassuring. My sister was diagnosed with a brain tumor and cancer in her spinal fluid June 9. She had surgery for the brain tumor June 10. Exactly three weeks later she was moved to Calvary Hospital in the Bronx, the only hospital in the United States devoted exclusively to end-of-life care. Treatment was abandoned.

Officially, we’re 11 days from the fall season and if you’re not a football enthusiast you don’t have much to look forward to. America, and the rest of the world, is waiting for an anticipated outbreak of swine flu, or as it’s officially known, the H1N1 virus. Also on the fall horizon are health care concerns – will we have universal coverage or not – a Virginia employment outlook that’s stagnant and the upcoming state election for governor.

Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer will pay fines totaling $3.2 billion for, among other irregularities, plying doctors with golf outings, massages and lavish vacations to encourage them to prescribe medications for uses other than intended, which may explain why I received a Viagra prescription for post-nasal drip.

I jest, of course, about my off-label prescription. My personal physician would never fall sway to drug company bribery, and I would never question the ethics of an individual who has open access to the most sensitive parts of my body.

My father was a primary care physician, and when Medicare was first proposed more than 40 years ago, he was dead-set against it. He was not only against it, he and my mother were what today would be called “activists.” For months the dining room table was littered with materials for the letter-writing campaign. They were clear that they did not want “socialized medicine.”

Last week, the fourth king died from brain cancer and America’s working and poorer classes lost a great champion. Using a deck of cards as a metaphor, Sen. Edward “Ted” Kennedy, D-Mass., represented the last king; the other three were his brothers, President John F. Kennedy, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and Nobel Prize winner and civil rights champion Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

At least in recent decades Americans have equated financial independence with adulthood. You aren’t really grown until you can support yourself. You are cautioned not to marry or have children, adult tasks, until you can support yourself. Some young people are told point-blank by their parents that after undergraduate school, and for some after high school, they are on their own. People who may give generously to their favorite charities frequently draw the line at continuing to fund adult children. “Oprah” shows are done on what to do about children lingering in the basement after their parents think they should be gone.

Last week’s column contained two glaring mistakes and I regret both. The thing that I most regret is that I profiled a demonstrator.

First, I want to thank everyone who pointed out my error. Online comments and those I received by e-mail didn’t mince words in letting me know the AR-15 rifleman I referred to was African American.

I got cash for my first clunker, but it wasn’t a government rebate.

It was $100 or so from a guy at a gas station who figured he could salvage enough parts to turn a slight profit from a vehicle that had been wrapped around a locust tree.

I know it is a cliché, but in my case it is true: I never cease to be amazed. It happened this morning before my coffee had dripped into its carafe. Bill Steigerwald, a columnist from Pittsburgh, stated that large numbers of polar bears are not starving and drowning because of global warming. I disagree, but that wasn’t the amazing part. It was his reasoning. His evidence was that no one has published pictures of dead polar bears.

After learning that people armed with guns have been showing up at President Barack Obama’s town hall meetings, I must change the last sentence of last week’s column.

It read, “I’m thinking that many of the 54 million supporters want you to lead marches and demonstrators, too.”

On June 10, I left Staunton on a train to New York because my sister was having surgery for a brain tumor.

A little over a year ago, on July 9, 2008, to be exact, the Rev. Jesse Jackson was caught on tape making crude remarks about presidential candidate Barack Obama. Jackson was frustrated that Obama, in an effort to become president for all Americans as opposed to being the president of African Americans, never openly spoke about blacks’ issues. By not focusing on black issues, Obama was elected president.

Very reasonable members of our community have questioned why the new name for our local hospital.

1. Three people can keep a secret, but only if two are dead.

When Cambridge, Mass., police Sgt. James Crowley arrested Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. for resisting arrest July 16, racial profiling once again raised its ugly head. The next week during a presidential news conference about health care, a reporter asked President Barack Obama about the incident. Obama answered the question, saying Cambridge police acted “stupidly,” arresting a 58-year-old (black) man with a cane for breaking into his own home.

After the withdrawal of Del. Chris Saxman, R-Staunton, the entrenched four-term incumbent well funded by special interests in Richmond, the 20th House District suddenly became the only open delegate seat in the Valley north of Roanoke, making it the area’s most competitive race (“A familiar ring in the 20th,” July 30). It became a doable race for a moderate, fiscally conservative Democrat to win.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell on Monday allowed former Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick to return to the pro footfall, conditionally. NFL teams have begun returning to training camp. Vick can join one and play in the final two preseason games. He could be cleared to play in the opening week of the regular season or forced to wait for a decision from Goodell until Week 6.

The state has closed 18 interstate rest areas and plans to close another by September. Traveling I-64 over the weekend, my family and I can attest to the need to keep all of the stops open.

Almighty God hath created the mind free.” So Thomas Jefferson opened his Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom. In that founding document of our Commonwealth, Jefferson went on to decry fallible religious or political leaders who would try to influence freedom of conscience through social or political pressure, begetting “habits of hypocrisy and meanness.”

Do you know the old saying, that if you tell a person that he or she did or said something often enough he or she will eventually believe it, even if from day one they were sure they didn’t?

Hallelujah! Shout it from the rooftops. Employers may discriminate again. A 5-4 Supreme Court decision two weeks ago takes this country back 51 years to the time just before passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Discrimination won’t be as blatant as it used to be but it will occur. Employers who were hesitant to discriminate before won’t feel any pressure now not to do so.

Up until our 13-year-old daughter went to the beach with extended family and left my wife and me behind to fret about shark attacks, sunburn and teenage boys, I had, over the course of my life, sent no more than a dozen text messages.

I read yet another one of those editorials about the joys of simple living.

While having lunch several years ago, I told several co-workers that Michael Jackson would one day be considered the equal of Wolfgang Armadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven and Johann Sebastian Bach. One of them was astonished that I’d make the statement. After Jackson’s sudden passing last week and taking into account not only America’s but the world’s reaction to it, I stand by my previous prediction.

As the crow flies — or more appropriately as the snake slithers — the Savannah River Ecology Lab in South Carolina is roughly 200 miles from my house.

A 13-year-old boy was recently suspended from his crumbling, inner-city middle school in Michigan.  His family had immigrated to the United States because, in his words, “My parents wanted a better life for us than fighting. There is no government in Somalia, no army or police to keep the peace. Different tribes and groups of people were fighting and killing each other to gain power.”

I applaud Augusta County supervisors’ decision to hire an economic development director, a move that will increase the county’s tax base and job opportunities for the area’s unemployed. But I have several questions.

Suze Orman says it. So do the other financial advisors I see in magazines, newspapers and on television. It keeps popping up. The advice is this: Take care of yourself first; only after you are sure that your financial future is secure do you help anyone else.

In a June 11 column (“Guns, fear being stockpiled”), Nelson Graves asked to be enlightened concerning some issues that appear to be disturbing for him.

It is with the purpose of enlightening him that I now write, and while I do not have room to respond to all of his concerns, I intend to address the points where he needs enlightenment the most.

I hear daily, as do most of you, that the “government” is the enemy. Conservative radio talking heads, most leading Republicans and conservatives and a great many Independents all complain about the government interfering in their lives.