Tag: resistance

In the Land of Zoom

jono55

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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It was the best of times …

jono55

Andy Borowitz is still out there seeing and telling it like it is (or at least as he sees it) Here is his latest.

Complicating Donald J. Trump’s plan to send troops to Chicago, on Tuesday thousands of National Guard members called in sick with bone spurs.
The White House was plunged into chaos after receiving over seven thousand notes from guardsmen’s podiatrists, sources said.
At the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. vowed that he would get to the bottom of the bone spurs epidemic by enlisting the nation’s finest medical minds, including Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil.
“A sudden outbreak of this size is very suspicious,” Kennedy told reporters. “The most likely culprits are COVID-19 vaccinations.”

That is beautiful. Just beautiful. If he were here in Paradise I would hug him, even though I generally avoid those things like the plague. To me hugs are a socially acceptable form of assault.

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Finally – a break from the 90 degree-plus heat! I don’t know how to behave. Here it is mid-day and I am outdoors without a medical attendant and I am not pulling a wagonload of water bottles behind me.

Today I am reminded how summer once was, a season to be joyful and dancing and singing’s praises rather than cringing from it in fear and a double-slather of sunscreen.

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Sugar Magnolia, by the Grateful Dead, live at Fillmore East

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From The New Yorker

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Not one of you has asked me: “Hey, Jon, how is the psychedelic mushroom farm coming along?” So I will tell you, even though you obviously have no interest. First of all, I am growing small quantities of psilocybin-containing mushrooms, or shrooms. It’s not quite a farm, more like the smallest container garden you can imagine. Secondly, we have no plans to ingest these things in the amounts necessary to produce a psychedelic effect, but are microdosing to try something new in our approach to chronic pain struggles where standard methods have failed.

There is a lot of evidence, although it is largely anecdotal and sorely needs to be studied systematically, that many people are helped through this microdosing. Along the way if we inadvertently find ourselves in some celestial glade dealing with blue animals that eat from our hands and sing to us in Spanish, we will know that we are not in the land of microdosing any more and must retreat and reduce the amount we are taking.

That’s how it works, when it works. Anyone can buy the materials needed for mushroom culture online, but in only two states (Oregon and Colorado) can you legally grow shrooms for your personal use. But even here, try to sell the mushrooms to anyone else and you can be in trouble written large. Here’s a decent summary of the situation in our state.

So the basic rules here in Paradise are:

  • personal use has been decriminalized
  • selling them violates state law and fines or imprisonment could occur
  • you can share them with friends and family members
  • the physical space allotted to growing shrooms can be no bigger than 12×12 feet

My first crop was on the dismal side as far as quantity is concerned, but hey, so were my last couple of years with tomatoes in the back yard. If I were to describe my gardening skills I am not quite a black thumb, but I am more properly located in the “numb thumb” area.

Black thumb: This term implies a natural or notable inability to make plants grow successfully. 

Brown thumb: Similar to black thumb, “brown thumb” also signifies a lack of gardening skill and a tendency for plants to fail in one’s care.

Numb thumb: This is a more informal and sometimes preferred term for someone whose lack of success is due to a lack of effort or understanding, rather than a complete lack of skill. 

This is a photo taken from the web of a lovely crop of Golden Teacher shrooms, the species that I am presently fiddling with. At no time thus far has my production looked anything like this.

I am not too tempted to chomp down on a large mushroom to experience new worlds since I barely fit into this one. Remember, I was a practicing physician in the sixties, and was involved in the care of many who were having what was euphemistically called a “bad trip.” Three vignettes may reveal why I am reluctant to try them myself.

A young man is in the emergency room having been vomiting for hours and is moderately dehydrated. The nurse tells me that he has ingested some sort of mushroom. I ask if she has any idea what kind when a groaning voice from the man on the ER bed calls out “Amanita muscaria.” It’s not the only time a patient diagnosed their disease for me, but it was the only time that one did it in Latin.

In the middle of a deep winter night in the Upper Peninsula local police find a young man standing naked in a snow-filled churchyard and singing anti-war songs loudly enough to bother the neighbors.

He was admitted to hospital for hypothermia and being seriously out of tune. We never determined the exact species he’d eaten because not even he knew what he had been messing with.

One more young man who had sampled some shrooms was brought in in restraints by the Minneapolis police. His offense was to shout obscenities loudly and repeatedly on a downtown street and when the gendarmes tried to reason with him he became enraged and attacked them. They were having none of that, and thus the restraints. I was working a shift as an ER doctor and called the man’s physician of record. I reported that the patient was tied to a bed, incoherent, unable to have a conversation worth anything and asked the worthy doctor what we should do with him, expecting an order for a temporary protective psychiatric admission. I was surprised when his MD advised me to send him home and direct the patient to call the office in the morning and get an appointment to be seen. I sputtered in disbelief for a moment and said: “But doctor, the man is not in his right mind and will likely not remember anything we tell him.” The answer received was: “Put a note in his pocket.”

I hung up the telephone and called another attending physician who promptly admitted the unfortunate gentleman to psychiatry for a short stay.

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From The New Yorker

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The Wheel, by the Grateful Dead (Live at the Fox Theater)

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If we were only to read the papers to form our view of present-day American life, there would be an epidemic of razor blades and warm baths, I’m afraid. Because all of the news is dominated by one very poor excuse for a man. We are living inside of that perfect storm where all of the elements came together that were necessary to bring our democratic experiment to a halt. A pause, not an ending.

One of those elements is the media who have revealed their own weaknesses by utterly failing to give “equal time”to the stories of resistance, and to the excitement building in that largely uncovered sphere.

There are millions upon millions of brave hearts out there, and some of them write so very well. If you need something to brace a tired spirit there is no shortage of people to provide just that. One of them is a guy named Jack Hopkins, who put this piece together, and who frames the story in a way that fits better with what I encounter on the ground here in Paradise. I offer you a repost of his substack entry: Outlasting the MAGA Darkness. Right On, Brother Jack, right on. (I am sooo fixated in the Sixties … you’d think i’d be embarrassed).

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“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair“

Charles Dickens: A Tale of Two Cities

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When Resistance Becomes Duty

jono55

On Friday Robin and I drove to Ridgway to join in a rally being held there against some of Cluck’s policies. I was going to say “”more reprehensible” policies but stopped myself – they are nearly all reprehensible.

It was a breezy day and sometimes two hands were required to keep the signs under control. Ridgway is a smaller village so there was not a huge crowd, but it was an enthusiastic one. A local grocer brought out two cases of bottled water as his contribution to the event.

Just that day I had learned about yet another man who had been whisked away by ICE and this time for a while there was no record to be found anywhere of what had happened to him. He had become the latest of our Desaparecidos. After several days had passed our government confessed that he was in prison in El Salvador. He has not been accused of any crime.

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Across the Borderline, by Ry Cooder with Harry Dean Stanton

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On Saturday I attended a meeting of the local Indivisible group that was held at a church in Montrose. This chapter of Indivisible had been dormant since the end of the first Cluck administration, but new governance has resuscitated it.

Robin and I had lunch with the leader a couple of weeks ago to get more information and to volunteer our services in whatever capacity is needed.

Brought together by a practical guide to resist the Trump agenda, Indivisible is a movement of thousands of group leaders and more than a million members taking regular, iterative, and increasingly complex actions to resist the GOPs agenda, elect local champions, and fight for progressive policies.

From the Indivisible.org website

The group is just getting up and running, and Robin and I are excited at being part of something positive in this era of routine and rampant negativity.

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Robin is ecstatic, and when Momma is happy, it’s ditto for moi. While we were watching one program on PBS there appeared a “commercial” for another. It seems that the Earth was short at least one more season of “Call the Midwife,” so the gods mercifully have come up with the fix. Season 14 is now available for your viewing pleasure. There are only 8 episodes, and no assurances that a Season 15 is to come, so to treasure them and watch them s-l-o-w-l-y would be my advice, savoring each wholesome morsel.

I say “wholesome” not because the program is something bland and fluffy straight out of la la land, which it is not. But because it is based on realities, rather than something wholly imaginary. The problems that the characters deal with are sometimes harsh ones, are not always solvable, and are presented in a way that leaves the viewer smarter than they were when they started.

Someone is giving good medical advice to the writers of the series, and as a result I have almost no negative criticisms of the science presented, which is a rarity for me. Usually I am leaping from my chair, fists raised, and exclaiming: “That never happens like that, you jumble of blooming idiots!”

(At present we are watching the PBS series Marie Antionette. It is only two seasons long, and we pretty much know there won’t be a third group of episodes. That’s the problem with the baked-in spoiler that comes with a historical program like this one.)

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Uncle John’s Band, by the Grateful Dead

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The song Uncle John’s Band is my favorite cut from the first Grateful Dead album I ever purchased, which was Workingman’s Dead. Bought it in 1970, right after the album’s release. Loved it then, love it now.

Here’s a link to the lyrics.

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Yesterday in a supermarket parking lot, I saw this sticker in a car window. It did not please me. Especially not at a time when we are experiencing a major measles outbreak here in the U.S. The largest in decades and it shows no signs of slowing.

I know that this is an example of the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment. And I know that this means that people who say the most awful and stupid things have exactly the same rights as I do when I utter my unassailable truths and scientific verities in the most beautiful and mellifluous tones.

But the sticker is stupid and untrue and dangerous and children will die. Completely unnecessarily.

What I want now is a 28th Amendment to the US Constitution that would allow me to take a propane torch to stickers like that and give them a good frying. Now I grant that this would also be stupid and dangerous, because if the owner saw me do it and took offense (how could they not?) the ensuing melee would end unpleasantly for me, I am pretty sure.

But there is a difference between children suffering and dying and an ancient dude getting what he deserved for vandalism. While this sticker may be protected speech, it is the sort of ignorant discourse that kills. Today it is measles … I wonder what will be the next preventable disease that we all get to learn about because like a vampire it has risen in its un-deadness to once again stalk our streets?

Forget that propane torch … what I really want is a stout cudgel. I feel the need to administer some vigorous corrections, and there is a particular group of students who have shown themselves unreachable by ordinary instructional methods.

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How It Ends, by Goose

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It is a good time to speak out. This is not a drill.

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First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Martin Niemoller

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