And so it begins again...

Welcome Back Wagner College.

Obviously, we are back in session, we have the first week of classes under our belt, and the Allen Koehler Show is officially back on the air!

Shall we begin with the weeks leading up to our on-air return?

Obviously, Allen and I are RA's in Towers Hall, meaning that the two weeks before school began had us in training for that position. Interestingly enough, Show manager and Laundry List host Diez is an RA, as is field reporter Chris Fourman, as is new sports personality Stephanie Burnett. So we had the unique oppurtunity to all be back together early, and so over the weekend during training, Allen thought it would be a good idea to take all of us away on retreat, to reflect on the show, and to look ahead to our year. It was a really great experience for our show as a staff, and helped connect us through a great campfire with s'mores, a two on two volleyball tournament, and some late night bonding in our cabins that I will refrain from posting here for the sake of appropriateness. Don't worry, it was a christian camp. It didn't get too wild.

So now we were back and refreshed, and of course, we had a show to prepare. August 26th, we learned a lot about ourselves, and our show. We had no guest on this week, so our suffering audience had to listen to Allen, Stephanie, and myself for two full hours. Chris had the night off, because he had tickets to the Red Sox Yankees game, meaning that the one time he was actually in the field at a newsworthy event, he took the night off. Thanks Chris, keep working hard.

One of the topics that came up on last week's show was circumcision. It is an interesting topic to me, and I had many conversations with an aquaintance from my past who was a Ob/Gyn who had performed many many births and also had done the procedure on many many infants. He was not a proponent of the procedure. Now, I was raised to believe that it was a good procedure, it was more sterile, helped prevent disease, etc. etc. That is what I was raised to think. Turns out, in the past twenty years, these perceptions that I had have mostly been proven wrong.

The British Medical Association released a statement in 2006 that said "it is now widely accepted, including by the BMA, that this surgical procedure has medical and psychological risks."[41] Goldman (1999) discussed the possible trauma of circumcision on children and parents, anxieties over the circumcised state, a tendency to repeat the trauma, and suggested a need on the part of circumcised doctors to find medical justifications for the procedure."

Ultimately, there are arguments that say that the procedure should only be done in cases of medical necessity, although I could not find what situation would make circumcision a medical necessity. There are also several religious rites that involve circumcision.

As Diez gave us on the air, there are a lot of decreasing percentages (the procedure is down 25% since the 70s) in the amount of circumcisions done yearly. That doesn't mean that the procedure is going away, however, because there is no evidence that any religious organizations are rethinking their own dogmas in terms of what is or is not humane.

It is an interesting topic, one we could talk about for a whole show, although I doubt we would get huge viewership for it.

For more info, check out this website:
http://kidshealth.org/parent/pregnancy_newborn/medical_care/circumcision.html

Tune in next week to the show. We have a comedian on.

-Gavin