"Negative Approach"
I keep
searching
for words
that'll
out live me
Doing the
right thing
even though
it's not
reciprocated
Obsessing
over my health
most of the
time mentally
I've done more
bad than good
nobility is
overlooked
through my
transgressions
I'm remembered
Names like Hitler
or Dahmer still
ring an alarming bell
to millions of citizens
bring up Jonas Salk
and most of the time
people are dumbfounded
I'll be deleted
like outdated porn
taking up space
on a hard drive
if I keep up
this positive
approach
I better change
my ways
before I lose
my ticket to
immortality
I'm denigrating
my poems
since bad
is so alluring
Polio Fighter Salk -- Boris Artzybasheff
Adolf Hitler was the leader of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei [NSDAP, "Nazi": National Socialist German Workers' Party] who ruled the Germany from 1933 to 1945 as its Führer ("Leader"). He was responsible for starting the European phase of World War II, which led to the loss of 29 million soldiers and civilians, and launching the Holocaust to exterminate Jews, Gypsies, Poles, and other Untermenschen ("sub-humans"), leading to the genocide of at least 5.5 million Jews and millions of others. The Nazi regime was also responsible for the killing of an estimated 19.3 million civilians and prisoners of war.
ReplyDeleteJeffrey Dahmer, "the Milwaukee Cannibal," was a serial killer and sex offender who raped, murdered, and dismembered 17 males between 1978 and 1991. Many of his later murders involved necrophilia, cannibalism, and the permanent preservation of body parts. He was sentenced to 15 terms of life imprisonment in 1992 and was beaten to death by a fellow inmate at the Columbia Correctional Institution in Wisconsin.
The polio virus is transmitted by fecal matter and secretions of the nose and throat, enters its victim orally, establishes itself in the intestines, and then travels to the brain or spinal cord, causing death or various degrees of paralysis. In 1938 US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the world's most famous polio victim, had founded the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (known as March of Dimes Foundation since 2007) to fund the development of a vaccine. A decade later Jonas Salk of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine undertook a project funded by the foundation to determine the number of different types of polio virus, then extended this project towards developing a vaccine, assembled a research team, and spent the next seven years on the task. The 1952 American epidemic was the worst outbreak in the nation's history, with nearly 58,000 cases reported (3,145 died, 21,269 were left with mild to disabling paralysis). The field trial to test the Salk vaccine involved 20,000 physicians and public health officers, 64,000 school personnel, 220,000 volunteers, and over 1,800,000 school children. When news of the vaccine's success was made public on 12 April 1955, Salk was hailed as a "miracle worker" and the daywas proposed as a national holiday. He also campaigned for mandatory vaccination, claiming that public health should be considered a "moral commitment."When asked who owned the patent to the vaccine, Salk said, "There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?" In 1960, he founded the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, and in the 1990s he researched a vaccine against HIV. When he was 13, Salk had entered Townsend Harris High School, a public school for intellectually gifted students named after the founder of City College of New York (CCNY), a tuition-free institution that produced more Nobel Prize winners (eight) and PhD recipients than any other public college except the University of California at Berkeley." After only two years at Townsend, Salk entered CCNY. At the urging of his Russian-born mother he put aside his aspirations of becoming a lawyer and instead concentrated on classes necessary for admission to medical school, receiving a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry in 1934, then enrolled at New York University Medical School due to its comparatively cheap tuition and its lack of a Jewish quota.