Americans gravitated toward individualism as people spread out in a new land that seemed wide-open with many opportunities. Many had to make individual decisions to come to America in the first place. Of course, this does not apply to slaves brought here by force, but in general the settlers saw numerous opportunities for individual enrichment.
The arriving farmers looked at land that was ready for farming. The indigenous hunting people already here saw the land differently as full of animals waiting to be hunted.
The arriving farmers soon outnumbered the hunters.
Succeeding generations leading up to and beyond the Industrial Revolution rewarded individuals showing initiative. These circumstances led American culture to elevate the value of individualism. American parents still encourage their children with words like “you can be what you want to be, even President of the United States.”
However, the problem with individualism in American culture is that it blinds people
circumstantial influences, especially when they have experienced more favorable circumstances than others. As a generalization, conservatives tend to favor individualism and progressives tend to see additional broader circumstantial influences. The result is two subcultures leaning in different directions. Historically, President Roosevelt in the 1930s questioned the individualistic forces of capitalism that brought great disparities of wealth and the Great Depression.
His opponents called him and his party “socialistic,” seeing America as becoming
like European countries. Democrats saw it as America maturing beyond its extreme individualism. The democratic policies of Social Security and later Medicare and Medicaid have come to be very helpful and taken-for-granted. Post-World War II policies of the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations favoring aid to the poor and less privileged were also largely accepted.
Start the day smarter. Get all the news you need in your inbox each morning.
Now we face a new era of clashing cultures with similarities to past competing viewpoints. The individualism in American culture has reasserted itself in gun culture. Examples of American individualism are the sayings, “It takes a good man with a gun to stop a bad man with a gun,” or “guns don’t kill people, it is people who kill people.” To think only in terms of individuals leads to half-truths that can be dangerous when they blind people to making laws that protect people.
One of the results of the ideology of individualism is to blame those who are having a hard time in their lives. Followers of individualism say things like, “If they only tried or worked harder, they would not be having so much trouble.” Again, this ignores other important factors beyond one’s control. Individualism can also encourage those who are comfortable in life to think they were able to achieve their comfort in life on their own, which is rarely true.
It would be a great help to the nation for people to understand both the power and blindness of individualism in American culture. We should seek to understand the influence on us of our physical and social circumstances.
A combination of events and circumstances has brought Americans to the cusp of
realizing many realities in American life. Some derisively call this realization as being
“Woke,” but coming to new understandings should not be derided.
It is important growth in both knowledge and wisdom.
It is also part of being a good citizen of America.
Of course, we will always be a society where people have differing and competing opinions.
Being a democracy means we agree to debate our views and participate in voting for people and policies that we support. We have two competing parties that lean in different directions. One is focused on individualism, which obviously has the value of encouraging individual initiative and innovation. The other considers broader influences in society that can either benefit or harm people. The right to own guns brings to light the danger of seeing only individuals instead of the circumstances of others in life.
I love the individual freedom to make decisions that I have had and would not want to give up that freedom.
However, I must acknowledge that I inherited advantages others have not had. Many people seem unconscious of the advantages they have received in life compared to others.
Our democracy is at stake because our nation is in a world where autocrats have arisen in a number of nations, including in America. Many people are drawn to such people as models of the strong individual they would like to be and who will make circumstances better for them. Instead, autocrats seek mainly to increase their own power.
Rev. Robert L. Montgomery, who holds a Ph.D. in social scientific studies of religion, lives in Black Mountain.
This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times:
Opinion: The problem with individualism in American culture
11 Specific Dating Beliefs Held By Confident Women — That Make Them Even More Desirable & In Control (msn.com)
In March 2020, at the start of the pandemic, Anya Magnuson’s own health was in crisis.
– Marla Broadfoot, Ph.D., May 3, 2022
The 21-year-old Minnesotan had already endured four brain surgeries, 35 lumbar punctures and about 11 weeks of hospitalization. At various times during the preceding
28 months, she was treated for fungal meningitis, an inflammatory disease known as Neurosarcoidosis, and finally a rare blood cancer called Erdheim-Chester disease.
None of the treatments her doctors had prescribed worked; in many cases, they made her condition worse. Her vision was failing. She lost feeling in her feet and could no longer walk. Her headaches were so brutal that after one 13-hour episode of vomiting and writhing in pain, she cried out, “Why can’t anyone fix me?”
Ronald Go, M.D., a Mayo Clinic hematologist, and Jithma Abeykoon, M.D., a Mayo Clinic hematology-oncology fellow, two of the large, interdisciplinary team doctors at Mayo Clinic treating Anya, began to question her diagnosis of Erdheim-Chester disease. They wondered whether they should biopsy her spinal cord again. A neurologist consulting on the case thought it would be too risky to perform the procedure in her current state.
While they debated the next steps, the world outside was shutting down. Within Mayo, only surgeries deemed to be “emergency” or “lifesaving” were permitted. Her case was a mystery, and it wasn’t clear if a biopsy would provide any answers or just cause more pain. “It was a really dark time,” says Colleen Kelly, Anya’s mother.
From left are Dr. Ronald Go M.D., a Mayo Clinic hematologist,
and Jithma Abeykoon, M.D., a Mayo Clinic Hematology-Oncology fellow,
in February 2021. Photo credit: Anya Magnuson
The early days
Anya is exceptional. In high school, she was a National Merit Scholar, editor of her yearbook and an all-conference volleyball player. She became fluent in Spanish while working alongside international students at a Twin Cities amusement park, eventually testing out of four semesters of the subject.
“She was very driven academically but driven to the beat of her own drum,” says Colleen.
The headaches began in November 2017 during her second year at Arizona State University in Phoenix. She felt like her head was going to explode. She went to the emergency department, but her symptoms were dismissed as migraines. Her next symptom emerged in early December while she was home for the holidays.
She told her mom that her hand was in the wrong place.
“That’s when I knew something more serious was wrong,” says Colleen.
The next night Colleen stayed up late, “madly” Googling Anya’s symptoms:
headaches, blind spots, numbness.
It was right after “idiopathic intercranial hypertension” — unexplained high pressure around the brain — came up in her search results that she heard her daughter trip
and fall upstairs. She took her to the hospital right away.
Anya spent three weeks in and out of the hospital, making little to no progress. But then she started seeing Johanna Beebe, M.D., a neuro-ophthalmologist who had done her residency at Mayo Clinic.
“We still consider her to be the first person who basically saved Anya’s life,” says Colleen.
Dr. Beebe spent the Friday afternoon before Christmas writing up Anya’s entire medical record and calling her old mentor in the hope of getting Anya admitted to Mayo Clinic.
Her safe space
At Mayo, it was another three weeks of testing to try to figure out what was going on.
At that point, the doctors charged with her care still didn’t have answers, but they knew they had to do something to relieve the dangerously high pressure on Anya’s brain.
In January 2018, they inserted a shunt and performed a craniotomy and brain biopsy, which was inconclusive. With little else to go on, they presumed that she had fungal meningitis and put her on the potent antifungal medication amphotericin.
Anya in February 2018, just before being discharged after her
third brain surgery. Photo credit: Colleen Kelly
During the months that followed, Anya endured an infection, emergency surgery, a different shunt, and another brain surgery. Yet she pushed on, traveling to Oklahoma for a photojournalism internship; Phoenix to resume her studies at Arizona State University; and Lima, Peru, for a reporting trip. By the time she returned home from college in May 2019, she had developed another new symptom: numbness in her feet and toes, making it hard to walk. Eoin Flanagan, M.B., B.Ch., a Mayo Clinic neurologist, suspected Neurosarcoidosis, an inflammatory disease that affects the nervous system. But positron emission tomography scans revealed strange dark masses along her lower spine.
“It was horrifying,” says Colleen. “You do not need to be a doctor to see it and think:
Oh my God, that’s awful. Whatever that is, it is not good.“
The doctors biopsied one of those masses and sent its DNA for sequencing. Though the sequencing wasn’t informative, the biopsy itself was. Anya’s tumors were chocked full of white blood cells known as histiocytes, a hallmark of Erdheim-Chester disease.
The finding was a surprise. Erdheim-Chester disease typically affects middle-aged men. Even then, it is exceedingly rare. Less than 2,000 cases had ever been reported. Dr. Go said in his 13 years as a community hematologist-oncologist, he had not seen a single case. Until Anya.
The doctors prescribed the off-label use of a targeted drug called Cobimetinib, which had been shown to help some patients with Erdheim-Chester disease. However, in Anya’s case, it was ineffective and came with debilitating side effects. Next, they tried the immunotherapy drug interferon to stimulate her body to fight the cancer.
That backfired, sending her into a downward spiral.
The summer and fall of 2019 were difficult for Anya.
Photo credits: Anya Magnuson and Nicole Neri
In July, she had debilitating side effects from the Cobimetinib — a painful and disfiguring facial rash, shown at left above, along with other symptoms. Then in November, she had to be taken to the emergency department after weeks of reactions to interferon. Her headaches became so excruciating she had to leave school.
Colleen flew to Arizona to get her, bringing her home in a wheelchair with a gallon-size bag of pain medications in her purse. Back at Mayo, they tried six rounds of the chemotherapy drug methotrexate. The side effects were manageable, but her disease kept progressing. Through it all, Colleen says she and Anya considered Mayo to be her safe space.
“Even when things were really bad, every time I drove her down there, I thought:
‘She’s at Mayo. It’s going to be OK because they aren’t going to give up.'”
One More Try
By March 2020, Anya was running out of options. In addition to the tumors in her lower spine, her positron emission tomography scan now showed suspicious activity in her upper spine. Doctors were concerned that she would be paralyzed soon.
They did another biopsy, which Karen Rech, M.D., a Mayo Clinic hematopathologist confirmed was consistent with the diagnosis of Erdheim-Chester disease. In addition, they sent off DNA from her tumor for another round of sequencing. As before, the sequencing failed to turn up any clearly pathogenic mutations. However, the report listed a “variant of unknown significance” — a genetic change whose impact on disease is unclear — in a gene called CSF1R.
“The variant had never been reported anywhere in the world,” says Dr. Abeykoon.
Luckily, he was already familiar with CSF1R. The previous day, Dr. Abeykoon had treated one of his patients in the sarcoma clinic with Pexidartinib, a CSF1R inhibitor that had been approved for a rare joint tumor known as Teno synovial giant cell tumor. There was a drug that could potentially treat Anya’s cancer. But first, the researchers needed to determine whether the CSF1R variant of unknown significance found in her tumor was in fact significant.
CSF1R is part of a family of genes that code for proteins known as colony-stimulating factors, named for their ability to stimulate the growth of entire colonies of cells in laboratory dishes. Mutations that activate genes like CSF1R have been shown to send cells growing out of control, fueling the development of tumors. Dr. Abeykoon asked Terra Lasho, Ph.D., a Mayo Clinic molecular biologist, to investigate whether Anya’s mutation was activating.
Terra Lasho, Ph.D., is a Mayo Clinic hematology researcher.
She mapped the sequence and found that the mutation disrupted a part of the CSF1R protein known as the “autoinhibitory region,” which keeps the protein’s activity in check. The disruption short-circuited the protein’s ability to shut itself down, forcing it into a state of perpetual activity. “I knew it was an activating mutation,” said Dr. Lasho,
“so, I emailed him back right away and told him we have to pursue this.”
Image created in BioRender.
But when Dr. Abeykoon applied for Anya’s insurance company to cover pexidartinib, which inactivates CSF1R, he was promptly rejected. No one had ever used the drug to
treat blood cancer before, and the insurers wanted to see evidence that it would work.
He tried to convince them again. And again. Finally, on the fourth try, he got someone from the insurance company on the phone and said, “If this was your daughter, and she was going to die in a month, what would you do?” They offered to insure the drug for a three-month trial.
A path forward
Anya started taking the medication right away. Within weeks, she had regained her
vision and her ability to walk. Three months later, a positron emission tomography scan indicated that the dark masses running up and down her spine had completely melted away. An MRI also showed no signs of disease.
Dr. Abeykoon recalls being “excited, cautiously excited” when he told Anya and Colleen that the treatment was working. Colleen remembers having no reaction to the news,
as she and her daughter sat stone-faced, side by side. Things had been so bad for so long.
“You have to realize that is how she and the entire family have survived is by basically not getting too upset when things are awful. But at the same time, you kind of steel yourself from getting too happy (when there’s reason to hope),” says Colleen. “It took a really long time to even begin to accept and believe that there was a path forward for a future.”
Unlike the relentless side effects that Anya experienced with previous medications, this one only had one apparent downside: It turned her hair white.
As her health returned, Anya said yes to everything, possessed with the desire to make up for lost time. She got a master’s degree in communications, earning her undergraduate and graduate degrees (in sickness and during a pandemic). She dyed her hair red, made new friends, traveled and worked three jobs.
The next challenge
So it seemed, Anya could finally resume her highly active life and pursue her career goals. Yet despite her apparent cancer remission, her biggest challenge was about to occur.
Last October, Anya was walking across the street with a small group of friends after their shift at a Minneapolis restaurant when the driver of an SUV hit her, throwing her more than 30 feet. The crash shattered her pelvis, broke her leg in three places, cracked her eye socket and fractured two bones at the base of her skull. It also left her with a traumatic brain injury.
She spent 28 days in the hospital and was off the cancer drug the entire time, prompting concerns that her tumors might return. Just as no one had ever used this drug to treat her cancer before, no one had ever stopped it so abruptly.
Anya returned to Mayo Clinic for a follow-up appointment in March. Though her bones had all healed, she was still adjusting to the realities of life with a traumatic brain injury. The looming question was whether she would have to deal with her recovery while also battling a resurgence of her cancer. She hadn’t noticed any of her old symptoms resurfacing. By every indication, she appears to have remained cancer-free.
Anya is making slow but steady progress on regaining her abilities from the brain injury. The same determination and spirit that carried her through her cancer odyssey is now helping her meet the difficulties of this latest challenge.
Anya enjoying coffee with her sister, Talia, in early 2022.
Photo credits: Colleen Kelly
As for the cancer, Dr. Go feels remarkably lucky at the outcome. He and other cancer researchers often search for a disease-causing mutation in their hardest-to-treat patients but never find one. They might find a mutation only to discover there is no off-the-shelf drug available to target it. And because many cancers are caused not by a single “driver” mutation but several, they might knock one mutation down only to have another step up to fuel the cancer. “So, you have to be lucky on many levels,” says Dr. Go.
Given all the challenges this individualized medicine approach entails, the story
of Anya’s success has taken on even more meaning. “You might say our team helped her, but she really helped us,” says Dr. Lasho. “Her success motivates us to keep going and to push the science forward.”
Recently, Mayo began treating another patient, a young woman who was even worse
off than Anya. Two months after taking Pexidartinib, she went from being bedridden to walking again. She and Colleen have begun texting back and forth, as she, too, benefits
and learns from Anya’s story, even as it continues to unfold. “It’s not just that Mayo saved her life,” says Colleen. “They saved her life using a way that didn’t exist before they came up with it.”
Tissue Damage Cues Memory T Cells to Stick Around, Now Researchers Know Why | Discovery’s Edge Discovery’s Edge (mayo.edu)
A Courageous Mind, and a Research Career in the Making | Discovery’s Edge Discovery’s Edge (mayo.edu)
Gloria Steinem slams Roe v. Wade repeal, says ‘there is no democracy’ without the right to choose (msn.com)
Muscle weakness with age: What’s normal and what can be done about it (msn.com)
Ageism is everywhere and can affect physical, mental health (msn.com)
Why Depression Can Wipe Your Memory Clean (msn.com)
A mass exodus from the Democrats’ America (msn.com)