Robin and I attended a Zoom conference this week on taking risks and staying safe. These might seem contradictory goals, but … not really. When authoritarianism descends on a society, there are two basic choices. One is to accept the darkness, and the other is to promote light wherever one can. There is no 100% safety in either choice.
If a person chooses the latter path, they will stand out like candles burning in a darkened church. This would be taking risks, but doing nothing brings its own set of penalties. One of the speakers tossed out a phrase that stuck with me, and still is echoing around my brainpan three days later. The phrase? Joy is coming. That’s it. So simple.
But it helps me focus on the why of resistance. It’s not hard to get disoriented when the insults and assaults come at you as rapidly as they have this past year. Like dried morsels of cowflop fired from a Gatling gun. It’s also easy to become disheartened, until you hear someone start talking about joy. About finding some of that precious substance in every day. Small bites. The hand of a friend or a song that cuts right through the noxious fog emanating from Washington DC. “Joy is coming” resonates because those in the resistance believe that we will eventually succeed, and what a day that will be!
The only questions are when that will happen and how many more tragedies like the murders of Renee Flood and Alex Pretti will take place before it does. The deaths of these two people are drawing much attention because of the their brazenness and the so-easily disproven lies of the administration. But last year there were 32 deaths of men and women held in custody by ICE. Thirty-two! If these ICE goons act so brutally when out in the open, one wonders what horrors are happening inside their walled-off detention centers.
However … joy is coming. Do not wonder if it is. Do not forget what needs doing.
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I recently learned that there is a frontline warrior in our own family. I have a granddaughter who lives in south Minneapolis. Yesterday her mom emailed me this update on that young woman’s daily reality:
“I thought you all would like to know that ***** (and *****) are on the front lines of the Mpls protests. They are trained in safety/medical and carry rapid response gear. ***** has witnessed two abductions and a car ramming by ICE. They have organized grocery delivery for 8 families. They set up a Go Fund Me for their neighbors too afraid to work. At her job, ***** works directly with low/no income brown and black staff and interns under deep stress. She is struggling with keeping a hopeful and helpful attitude. But doing ok. There are more heroes than demons in Minneapolis!”
Warms my heart and gives me so much hope. I am sending every good wish, every scrap of metta that I possess to her and all those who are doing such good work for the rest of the country out there in Minneapolis.
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Ahhhhh, once again, Bruce Springsteen takes his art to the streets, this time those of Minneapolis. His heart has always been with the people, rather than the princes of the world.
And one more thing, my friends. On Friday Bruce went to Minneapolis and played this song on the stage of the First Avenue, a landmark bar and music venue. The First Avenue was where Prince played whenever … .
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A story. I was living and working in Hancock MI, which was at that time a town of 4600 souls located in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. One evening a woman delivered a healthy baby boy in the local hospitl, but I was called immediately because the child and mother had a problem with Rh factor incompatibility in their red blood cells, and the child was affected. I won’t go into detail on the mechanics of this disease but what happens is that the child can become severely jaundiced, to the point where its brain can be permanently damaged if the jaundice level gets too high. Lab tests done on the infant shortly after birth revealed that an exchange transfusion was indicated, the earlier the better.
Pediatricians of that era were nearly all experienced in doing this procedure, and I went to talk to the parents of the baby about what needed to be done. The problem was, and I knew this before I entered their room, was that they were members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses church, which forbids transfusions of blood of any size at any age. I told the parents that my duty was to safeguard the health of the child, and in this case there were no medical alternatives to what amounted to exchanging the child’s blood with that of a donor.
The parents refused to allow me to do the procedure, I told them that I would then contact legal authorities to attempt to override their wishes. By now it was getting pretty close to midnight, so when I called the judge on duty to procure such permission, he was a bit put out at me at having wakened him, and proceeded to instruct me in why it was not a good idea to wake judges from a sound sleep. None of this improved my already low opinion of the legal profession, but I listened with all the humility I could muster to his tirade because I needed something from him that could not wait until morning, and I finally got it. Now all I had to do was to round up the blood and equipment and personnel to do the transfusion and get it done as soon as I could.
But while I was receiving advice on dealing with judges, there was another drama in play. The OB/Nursery area was immediately adjacent to the passenger elevators. The child’s mother, dressed in a nightgown, asked to be given her baby for a feeding. She then walked to the elevator which was being held open by her husband.
The door closed and the trio was whisked down to ground level and from there they walked quickly to the hospital exit, where a warmed car was waiting, being driven by a member of their church.
And off they went into the winter night. In effect, since the courts had just taken custody of the infant, she had kidnapped her own baby.
Down the hall I came still smarting from the judge’s lecture, and when the nurse told me that my patient had now disappeared, I … well … maybe the best characterization would be that I lost my composure. Pretty completely. My normal cool and professional demeanor was nowhere to be found. I ranted, I raved, I asked to be given the papers needed to file a child neglect report. And then I was informed of something I found even more unbelievable. The baby’s father had remained at the hospital after his wife had been driven away, and would like to talk to me.
He and I had an uncomfortable conversation where he repeated his belief that the transfusion would have caused irreparable spiritual harm to his son, and that was why they had acted as they did. He apologized to me for not following medical advice, but was firm in believing that he had done the right thing. I had calmed down quite a bit by the time he was finished, but I told him that I would be reporting him and his wife to social services for exposing the infant to possible great harm, and we went our separate ways.
Six weeks later I was working in my office when my nurse informed me that the family was now in Room 3 with their baby, for a routine well child visit. The child was still slightly jaundiced, but otherwise seemed healthy. One caveat was that if there had been neurological injury caused by a high jaundice level, it might not be detectable at such an early age, so I can’t say that I know the true end of the story, because that was the last time I saw the family or heard anything further about the baby.
And my new BFF the judge? Well, I always hoped that some evening when I was on emergency room call, he would be brought in with some painful malady or another (perhaps having been shot in the ass by Dick Cheney), and that I could have moved oh so slowly, and delayed over the longest time possible, to provide him with the comfort he needed. That opportunity never presented itself.
Petty? More than a little, I’ll grant, but can you recall any time that I claimed I was perfect?
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Another song inspired by the heroic uprising in Minneapolis, this time written by someone less famous but no less skillful, Marc Skjervem.
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Little Home In The Valley 