“You should know better,” I can hear Jane whispering in my ear. “You can’t argue with people whose minds are already made up. When they discover they can’t argue with your evidence, they’ll call you names, tell you they could defeat your evidence and logic but that it would take too long.”

And she would be right.

But I care too much about kids’ lives to let the know-nothings beat up on public schools and the people who teach in them. We both did. So I argued.

I don’t understand why people care only about themselves and their immediate offspring. I don’t understand how people can care only about the current moment and not the future. I don’t understand how people can think that what was good enough 30 years ago is good enough now.

I like hammers, but I’d rather use a nail gun if I have need of more than a few nails. I can use a screwdriver, but again, there is nothing like a power-driver if you have a lot to do.

Imagine it is 1982. Imagine you have just been diagnosed with breast cancer. It’s Stage III. You’d best be getting your affairs in order. Your chances of survival are that bad. In fact, be diagnosed with anything other than basal cell skin cancer and your prognosis is not good.

I lost a friend to lung cancer that year. They sent him home to die. There was not much they could do for him where we were beyond that. They gave him morphine for the pain, but when he died there were gouge marks on the wooden arm of the chair he practically lived in.

But let’s stop the clock right there. Let’s forget about unraveling human DNA. Let’s forget about personalized care. Let’s forget about mammograms on machines as good as we have today. Let’s forget about lumpectomies–radical mastectomies were good enough for Granny, so they’re good enough for today.

We all have fantasies about how things were in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s. They seem like simpler times–and in many ways, they were. But I cannot forget the nightmares during and after the Cuban Missile Crisis. I cannot forget the friends who went to Vietnam and, either literally or figuratively, never came back. I cannot forget the fathers and mothers who wasted away in front of their adolescent children from this form of cancer or that which we could cure today.

This weekend, I learned that a former student was recently diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. He is maybe 21 years old. He has a tough road ahead of him. But 40 years ago, there was only a road to death. I’d be saying good-bye to him rather than offering to drive him to Boston for treatment.

The next time someone tries telling you the old days were good enough, ask them if they’d give up the strides we’ve made in cancer treatments. Of course they’ll tell you that is different. But is it really?

NET shows us what happens when the past was good enough. For four decades, there was no government spending on it–and precious little private spending. My wife died because of that. There are thousands more who have die–and who will die–because of that.