Schrödinger’s Cat and Stealing Kids for Cash
I was reading about Schrödinger’s paradox that Schrödinger proposed in 1935 in the imagined experiment where a cat is put in a steel box with a Geiger counter, a vial of poison, a hammer, and a radioactive substance. When the radioactive substance decays, the Geiger counter triggers the hammer to release the poison that kills the cat. Because radioactive decay is unpredictable, there is no way to know when this will happen. Physicists say the atom exists in a state of superposition—both decayed and not decayed at the same time.
Therefore, until the box is opened, an observer doesn't know if the cat is alive or dead—because the cat's fate is connected to whether or not the atom has decayed, and the cat would then be, until observed, equally living and dead.
In other words, until the box was opened, the cat's state is unknown and therefore, the cat is considered to be both alive and dead at the same time until it is observed.
Eric Martell, an associate professor of physics and astronomy said, "If you put the cat in the box, and if there's no way of saying what the cat is doing, you have to treat it as if it's doing all of the possible things—being living and dead—at the same time.” The safest way, then, to guess what condition the cat is in is to imagine it is in all possible states at once.
The cat seems to get the short end of the stick here, that’s for sure. Here, Buddy, I’m going to put you in this metal box with some objects that eventually, unless you die of old age, boredom, or terror first, will kill you. Have fun.
When I was adopted, I was put into a kind of metal box as a part of a social experiment to see what happened when I was both observed and not observed, when I was both the baby on my original birth certificate (the one the state still says I can’t see yet) and the baby created by the amended birth certificate.
As with the cat, the safest way to guess what condition the cat is in: alive or dead, dying or thriving, is to imagine it is all of these states at once. I feel like that’s how adoption has continued to be a thing, how, for example, the world can let the children from the Mexico border be adopted instead of returned to their parents.
When you separate a mother from a child, they both are dead and alive at the same time. Human flesh of my flesh was never meant to be separated at birth or at a young age—one must be present for the other to stay alive, and this knowledge is hardwired into our brains. Hardwiring isn’t something you can play with without causing serious collateral damage.
The world sees these Mexican children, sees that they are alive, and the world thinks, What does it really matter who raises this child if it gets a nice house and new clothes? The child will have a better life than it did as a person whose parents are trying to escape poverty or who are trying to run their way to a better life. The child is alive and the child will be fine. But what I want to tell you is that when this child was separated from its parents, the child became both dead and not dead. The world assumes that death is signified by lack of brain function and rigor mortis and a funeral; the world assumes that when these kids were separated from their parents that, once again, because these kids have a pulse, life must have triumphed, and adoption then is a fine and viable option.
Since I wrote You Don’t Look Adopted and since I stared adoption in the eye, I see how all my life I have been both myself and not myself at the same time. I see this for the disaster it is: my nervous systems was built to support one person, not two, and the result is I have never fully been at home anywhere, including in my own skin.
If there is money, and there is, for people to adopt children torn without consent from their parents, there is money to fund search and reunion.
A person was not meant to be both dead and alive. We live and then we die. We aren’t meant to do both at once: that is called suffering, and suffering is the worst, especially when you are young and your mother isn’t there to rock you and tell you everything is okay.
We are a country living in the state of superposition—both decayed and not decayed at the same time. Stealing children for money is a state of deep decay, but we have choices. We can chose life.
We know from movie after movie that, at the end of the day, there is no place like home.
Get these children home.
