The Legacy of Woody Guthrie
TheAcsMan | Posted on Monday, April 9, 2012 at 11:04AM | tagged Arlo Guthrie, Barclays VXX, Goldman Sachs, Huntington's Chorea, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, JP Morgan, ProShares Ultra Short Silver ETF, Titanic, Wody Guthrie | Email Article | Share Article → 
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When I was growing up, Arlo Guthrie was a rebel.
In an era when songs were neatly packaged for radio play and rarely even approached 4 minutes in length, his "Alice's Restaurant" was a beautiful gift for those disk jockeys with Irritable Bowel Syndrome. Prior to that, the first 4+ minute song to regularly receive airplay was "Ode to Billy Joe" in the summer of 1967.
Arlo Guthrie wasn't an accidental rebel. It was in his genes.
His father, Woody Guthrie blazed the trail.
Fascinatingly, despite the off beaten path of his ne-er do well life, Woody Guthrie is best remembered for his stirring songs, such as "This Land is Your Land," that sing the praises of America's natural beauty, as well as our own rights as a free people..
But he left behind another legacy.
That was for the passage of the genes necessary for that horribly generative neurological disease, Huntington's Disease, a disease which makes itself known during early adulthood and then eats away at the core of those so cruelly afflicted, until they just wither away to nothingness upon expiration
Huntington's Disease itself is at the core of a great ethical issue and internal personal conflict, as the presence of the gene combination necessary for it to manifest itself as the disease in future years can easily be known long before signs and symptoms appear.
The question facing the heirs of Woody Guthrie is whether they want to know their fate, especially since there is no treatment and certainly no cure.
How do you live your life knowing with absolute certainty that you will begin a horrible descent? How do you look your own children in the eye knowing that you may have very well passed the same fate onto them?
The dilemma is further heightened when you consider the possibility that the health insurance companies that may pay for the diagnostic testing may conceivably then become the very same companies to deny care on the basis of the insured having a "pre-exisiting condition."
We were never meant to know the unknown.