I picked up Mitch Albom’s The Little Liar wondering if I needed to read another story about the Holocaust. I almost didn’t check it out. We live in a world at war. We live in a world where starvation, strife, and civilian casualties are collateral damage of those wars. Yet war continues to be waged. I am glad I checked the book out. I read it in less than twenty-four hours. A unique voice serves as narrator in The Little Liar. It is Truth. Albom masterfully uses that narrator to explore the meaning of truth and to illustrate the horror of man’s inhumanity to man. Four characters, Nico, his brother Sebastian, Fannie, and Udo pull the reader into the story and demand the reader’s attention from start to finish. In a way, their stories have been told before, but as written, they seem startlingly fresh and compelling. In the context of what’s happening in the world, their stories are more than relevant. Rather than mar the story by retelling it, I want to share what I call the wisdom of Albom. “Never be ashamed of a scar. In the end, scars tell the stories of our lives, everything that hurt us, and everything that healed us.” “But questioning a madman is like interrogating a spider. They both go on spinning their webs until someone squashes them out of existence.” “How could fishing boats keep rolling so innocently? How could the world eat when all those prisoners were starving? How could things look so terrifyingly normal here…?” Why do world leaders create scenarios where these questions still are relevant today? Read this story. Keep asking the question. Why do we still wage war?
Quiet Horror
I am not a sommelier, but I do know what wines I like. I am not a movie critic. I have friends who critically analyze movies, their production, stories, costumes, and acting. Not me. Having said that, I do not take lightly writing about The Zone of Interest. It still haunts me. I read the novel by Martin Amis before watching the movie. Usually, books satisfy me more than the movie productions of them. Not so in this case. The opening scene portrayed a family outing. Men wore swimsuits like the one my dad wore when he took me to the local pool and taught me to swim. Women and children sat on blankets spread across the grass. A river lazed in the background. What it didn’t show, but what I knew from reading the book, was this all took place in the shadow of a death camp. It registered for me as quiet horror. No audible dialogue, just the establishment of an atmosphere that was down to earth while being obscene for someone who knew the secret of the setting. Throughout the movie, ordinary people did their jobs, followed orders, created innovative machines, even fought to remain in the penumbra of Auschwitz, with little reference to the people who suffered and died. In one scene, women quibbled over who would take what from a collection of garments confiscated from prisoners. I couldn’t help but see vultures picking over the flesh of dead animals. What gut-punched me the most was a scene, not from the 1940s, but a modern scene in which uniformed workers cleaned the floors of a what seemed to be a Holocaust Museum. Again, no dialogue, just people doing their jobs as if they either did not know or had become immune to the context. Encased in glass, a mountain of shoes stood in the background. Another quiet horror. I remember my shock and grief when I saw a similar display at the museum in Washington, D.C. It made visible and real the number of lives taken during the Holocaust. I often think of The Zone of Interest in a world at war in so many places. I must wonder if, because of our responsibility for mundane tasks and day to day survival, do we become immune to the quiet horror of man’s inhumanity to man? The Zone of Interest helps keep me from becoming so.
AOC
This week I discovered I’m not too old to embrace a new hero, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, after she rebuked Mr. Yoho for his misogynistic hostility. Finally, someone illuminated the subtle, accepted subjugation of women, verbal male judgement. Her speech on the floor of the House inspired this sixty-nine-year old, who gave up on modern young women having an interest in gender issues. Her words reminded me of an incident from over twenty-five years ago.
One Halloween I went to work wearing a Hillary Clinton mask. I know some reading this may think “Well that would scare anyone.” But it was during the Clinton years, a time when a sense of well-being flourished, generated by the charisma of an energetic president. Mrs. Clinton, I would never disrespect her by calling her Hillary without invitation, labored to propose a plan for universal health care. I’d read research about the cost benefits of health maintenance versus regaining health after a crisis. A study out of Cook county asserted that health maintenance was cheaper. I augmented my Clinton mask with hand printed IDs made from index cards and intended to pass them out instead of candy. I delighted in a clever costume spiced with a bit of politics. Where better to ponder the ailing condition of American health care than in a big city ICU?
In the break room, I bumped into a frequent antagonist, a short man with an arrogance matched only by a need to dominate and a skilled physician. I handed him a card. I never expected my crudely made prop to light a fuse. Our debate began. He ranted about costs and insurance and hard work; I responded with questions about the responsibility to citizens of one of the wealthiest nations in the world, with the research I had reviewed, with the concept of moral compass. At some point, my mask came off, not just the Clinton façade, but the mask of restraint I learned to wear around the ego-fragile co-habitants of my work environment. How’s that for jargon?
We steamed up the break room. An audience assembled. When we agreed to disagree, one on-looker deemed me the winner of the exchange. The crowd dispersed. The two of us remained. My opponent agreed I won the round. Then, and this is why I am writing this, he spoke.
“It’s not what you said, it was your delivery.”
How was I supposed to say it? With please and thank-you and a curtsy. With a flash of cleavage. With apology or passivity. His words suggested a certain demeanor would make challenging him more acceptable. He diminished his stature even more with the innuendo.
I will keep my eye on AOC. I will listen to what she has to say. I know the internet has lists of the “craziest” or “dumbest” things AOC has said. The time for womanspeak is now. I will listen and hope it will be heard.
On turning 68 in 2019
My 68th birthday looms. It creeps towards me, tenacious, heat resistant like the ground cover in my shrubs. I tear up clumps of the succulent green with baby’s breath like flowers and throw it in the dirt. In a week, it is spreading, thriving, a lush carapace for soil turned to dust by the sun.
This year I am grateful I am upright, as I am every year. My gait deviates a bit. My right leg swings out to the side when I walk; the right foot wobbles before it hits the ground. That’s MS for you. If stopped by a cop, I refuse to try and walk in a straight line, because I’ll always look drunk. I’m prepared to refer him or her to the clinic, to the doctor, where I log intermittent moments of my journey and hope to have enough time left to create a few more.
I am grateful for a partner who gives me space for my obsessions, who loves me for who I am, who still holds my hand when we sit on the sofa together.
I am grateful for the fact that the moment I sit before a blank page and type just a few words, something awakens. My mind pinballs from the present to the past to the present to the future. I create sorceresses and serial killers and murder victims. I reencounter patients and students and lovers I’ve sequestered in that biological computer known as my brain. I read books and see what I’ve missed in my stories. I revise and think to myself “Who needs drugs when the mind is immersed in the magnificent process of creating?” I want to be TC Boyle and JC Oates and Margaret Atwood and Cormac McCarthy and Octavia Butler and Wallace Stegner and Andy Warhol and Van Gogh all rolled into one.
I want to see my son perform on The Ellen Degeneres Show. His songs come up on my play list when I’m working out and my pace quickens. I can’t believe how talented he is.
Mine is a wonderful life.
Then reality abrades its noxious way into my consciousness and I mourn. I mourn for what I see as the erosion of all the progress women my age thought we made in the early 70’s.
I remember reading Our Bodies, Our Selves and began to see and understand my body as my own, divorced from the “body politic” and not distorted by “the Gaze.” I celebrated a sense of visibility and having a voice that was and would be heard. I chose a career with a “living wage.” I smugly thought, if I have children, they will be proud of what my generation accomplished for my gender. Foolishly I rested on my laurels thinking the fight was over, the battle, no the rights, had been won. Forever.
As 68 gets ready to bulldoze over 67, I mourn the current socio-political climate, which, like my ground cover, proliferates and spreads. What it spreads is not pretty or protective. It spreads ignorance, prejudice, and hate. I mourn the roll back of resources and funding that will guarantee women reproductive health and personal freedom. I mourn that money and connections allowed a sex trafficker a lighter punishment and enabled him to commit the same crime again, reaffirming that women and girls in this country are nothing more than cheap merchandise. I mourn that the top elected official in this country voiced his sense of entitlement when it comes to women’s bodies, a “man” who so misunderstands sexual assault that he deflects allegations of it with “She’s not my type.” I mourn that it took two daring sports figures to get people to face the injustices and inequities that plague our so called free and democratic society. I mourn the fact that I fear the physical environment in which my grand-children will live and grow.
My birthday wish: Let me do one thing that will make the world a little bit better.
A letter to the DNC and all potential Demeocratic presidential candidates
An opening platform of “Beat Trump” is not enough, Mr. Biden, and stoops to the pep rally antics of Mr. Trump, well illustrated by Ben Fountain in Beautiful Country Burn Again.
If you want my vote, regardless of your gender, faith, or sexual orientation, these are the problems I want addressed in your campaign:
- Clear distinction between pro-birth v. pro-life. It is not the physical act of bringing a child into the world that forces women to consider termination of pregnancy, it is the provision of food, health care, education, shelter, and emotional support. If a woman is a criminal for terminating a pregnancy, why isn’t a man criminalized for not taking responsibility for his off-spring. It takes two to conceive.
- In a wealthy, industrialized nation, health care is a necessity and a right. If this country is to maintain its place of leadership in the world, affordable, accessible healthcare and medications should be available for citizens. Conscience must come before capitalism and profits.
- A clear-cut plan for the humane management of immigration must be forthcoming, not in a few years, now.
- Proactive action must be taken to preserve the environment for future generations.
- Politics must maintain a modicum of civility and address issues rather than using name calling and obscure allegations to incite voters.
- Term limits must be considered so those who govern are in touch with the present, not languishing in the past’s quagmire of social mores and standards.
- Elected officials must be held accountable to the people who elected them.
Just a few thoughts for the day after my morning coffee.
The Second Amendment Blues
The month of June from any old calendar in a spider webbed, abandoned garage. A picture of a woman whose breasts spill around two tiny triangles of diaphanous fabric. You know the one I mean. Her nipples punctuate the centers of each. She straddles a Harley-Davidson and ogles the barrel of a gun, its size distorted by the photographer.
In Starbucks a man fumbles for his wallet, pulls back his jacket, and exposes a carved mahogany gun handle. A man in low-riding jeans shops at Walmart, bends over to grab a fifty-pound bag of dog food. His t-shirt pulls up. The handle of a Smith and Wesson beckons from his butt crack.
Mine’s bigger than yours.
Some people see guns as phallic symbols, some merely as weapons of defense. I carry my own weapon of defense, a silent partner, a barrier that protects me from encroachment by the intolerable. Depression. Religion promises the Savior walks a path with the faithful. My intimate friend, depression, rides within. I slide back the panel to the hidden compartment in my bed’s headboard and sequester my gun there. I want easy access to the tool of my exit strategy.
Although I don’t remember it, I suspect I experienced depression the first year of my life, the year I learned I wasn’t worthy. My mother told me a story. “You learned to swim in urine because I was too tired to change your diaper. You never cried.”
Not worthy of a clean diaper. Praised for holding back my tears. Learning to survive.
My Mom in post-partum depression, I diagnosed in fifty or so years of retrospect and after forty years a nurse. A gene passed on to a daughter? A mother’s gift?
Days on my bike. Hours away from home. I found a steep hill at the middle school and pushed off. My feet hovered above the brake pedals. I imagined my metallic midnight-blue bike a flying unicorn. With my stringy blond hair whipping in the wind, I sped down the bumpy, stone encrusted hill. My gaping mouth shrieked in glee and fear. I didn’t want to die. I wanted to fly and land in a place where if my mother looked at me, she really saw me, and maybe even liked me. A place where I liked me.
A diary of lasts and leasts. The last girl in my class to get her period. The girl with the flattest chest. The girl with the fewest choices for dress shoes to wear to the sixth-grade dance because of her shoe size. Adolescence ravaged my face. Loneliness gutted me, either with, or because of, the distorted world view of an introvert, a label I didn’t understand at the time. I zeroed in on every dead bird in a storm drain after a heavy rain, every daffodil flattened by tornadic winds.
A taste of love. My first true love I lost to miles and time and adversarial politics. I learned people break-up for reasons more powerful than the comfortable familiarity of a friend who fumbles through a first kiss and heated pleasure with no shame. The next love, an insecure adolescent, lost on some now-well-named spectrum, who dropped out of his collegiate rat race, showed up on my doorstep, the date of his last bath unknown, his face familiar through the thick lenses of Lennon-like wire-framed glasses. After I encouraged him to shower, we explored each other. His mouth left a purple bruise on my breast, and he took off. He wrote an acerbic good-bye, rife with blame, on pieces of toilet paper. Thankfully unused.
Then the university. Miles away from home. People with whom I had no connection. I drank until I cried in chest-heaving sobs. My sorrow, so powerful, convinced my roommate I had been raped. Not my body, just my heart. I didn’t sleep. Studied all night. Took a Spanish final exam, answered all the questions in French. Hungover in two foreign tongues. I need a gun.
My career grounded me, then ground me down. A caretaker, a professional nurse. A person in control challenged by the exponential changes occurring in technology and in the role designated as the “handmaiden of the physicians.” Responsibility without rights. Accolades for successes and the demonstration of newly acquired knowledge; blame for failures that meant loss of life. Sleepless nights. What did I do wrong? Could I have done more? Retracing every drug administered, every vital sign documented, every word spoken to the patients, to the families, to the doctors, to the bleary-eyed face in the mirror. I need a gun.
A son. The greatest joy. I promised I would never make him feel unworthy. Even when I went to visit him in jail. On Mother’s Day. On his birthday. I failed. On that day I left before our time was up. I made another promise, loud and honest and unwavering. “If this happens again, I won’t be visiting you in jail when I’m fifty.” I need a gun. My feet burn constantly. I know I am not walking on hot coals, but occasionally I look down, hoping I am. Because if I am, I can step off them and the pain will stop. One day I touched the outside of my slow cooker. A blister erupted where my skin brushed against the stainless steel. My hands feel like that every day. I worry about pissing myself. When I awaken, vision blurry from sleep, I fear I am going blind. My body attacks itself. I need a gun.
Today I have had enough.
Sitting on the edge of my bed, I considered the pills I collected over the years from various therapists. They half-filled the plastic, amber container with the child-proof cap. It opened with a push and a twist. I re-engaged the cap. It snapped into place. I rolled the container between my palms as if I were shaping clay. The pills skittered, no tickety-ticked, against the plastic and sounded like mice playing, unseen, behind wallboard. I saw myself drifting away dreaming of the perfect life I should have, but not sure what it should be. I knew my heart would slow and become erratic, would struggle to thrust every drop of blood out toward the ends of my body. I knew my breathing would stop, a task forgotten. Then I saw rescuers and intubation and hospitalization and questions and anti-depressants and the guilt-laden faces of my family.
I think of the garage where my pink Peugeot mountain bike hangs on hooks, unused. A battered filing cabinet organizes instruction manuals for the coffee pot, the generator, and the robotic vacuum I named Frisbee. Hand-made Mother’s Day cards with a childish scrawl, pictures from innumerable seasons of sports, and vet records of a favorite cat, long dead, crowd the top of one drawer. How easy it would be to leave surrounded by these bits of history. A bottle of wine, my favorite pillow, the made-in-China blanket with the Grand Canyon on it, iPhone, and ear buds. So easy to start the car, listen to music, take one final trip.
My first job I cared for a girl the EMS brought to the ICU. Cherry red lips, in a perfect application of color, belied the displacement of oxygen by carbon monoxide on the blood. It starved her brain of oxygen and left a robust, young body without a command center. I didn’t know what happened to her after she left ICU, but I knew the consequences of complete immobility.
I thought about a gun. Any gun. I wouldn’t put it in my mouth and pseudo-fellate it. I understood recoil and the chance for a misfire. A bullet pushing through my palate, exploding an eye, ripping through my cheek, or, worst of all, trashing my sanctuary of words. No. I would press the muzzle under my chin just above my Adam’s Apple and I wouldn’t give myself time to think. The move would be swift and smooth and sure and my finger would be poised to pull the trigger. A blast to the brain stem. No more worries about being worthy. The perfect exit strategy.
Thank God I don’t own a gun.
The month of June from any old calendar in a spider webbed, abandoned garage. A picture of a woman whose breasts spill around two tiny triangles of diaphanous fabric. You know the one I mean. Her nipples punctuate the centers of each. She straddles a Harley-Davidson and ogles the barrel of a gun, its size distorted by the photographer.
In Starbucks a man fumbles for his wallet, pulls back his jacket, and exposes a carved mahogany gun handle. A man in low-riding jeans shops at Walmart, bends over to grab a fifty-pound bag of dog food. His t-shirt pulls up. The handle of a Smith and Wesson beckons from his butt crack.
Mine’s bigger than yours.
Some people see guns as phallic symbols, some merely as weapons of defense. I carry my own weapon of defense, a silent partner, a barrier that protects me from encroachment by the intolerable. Depression. Religion promises the Savior walks a path with the faithful. My intimate friend, depression, rides within. I slide back the panel to the hidden compartment in my bed’s headboard and sequester my gun there. I want easy access to the tool of my exit strategy.
Although I don’t remember it, I suspect I experienced depression the first year of my life, the year I learned I wasn’t worthy. My mother told me a story. “You learned to swim in urine because I was too tired to change your diaper. You never cried.”
Not worthy of a clean diaper. Praised for holding back my tears. Learning to survive.
My Mom in post-partum depression, I diagnosed in fifty or so years of retrospect and after forty years a nurse. A gene passed on to a daughter? A mother’s gift?
Days on my bike. Hours away from home. I found a steep hill at the middle school and pushed off. My feet hovered above the brake pedals. I imagined my metallic midnight-blue bike a flying unicorn. With my stringy blond hair whipping in the wind, I sped down the bumpy, stone encrusted hill. My gaping mouth shrieked in glee and fear. I didn’t want to die. I wanted to fly and land in a place where if my mother looked at me, she really saw me, and maybe even liked me. A place where I liked me.
A diary of lasts and leasts. The last girl in my class to get her period. The girl with the flattest chest. The girl with the fewest choices for dress shoes to wear to the sixth-grade dance because of her shoe size. Adolescence ravaged my face. Loneliness gutted me, either with, or because of, the distorted world view of an introvert, a label I didn’t understand at the time. I zeroed in on every dead bird in a storm drain after a heavy rain, every daffodil flattened by tornadic winds.
A taste of love. My first true love I lost to miles and time and adversarial politics. I learned people break-up for reasons more powerful than the comfortable familiarity of a friend who fumbles through a first kiss and heated pleasure with no shame. The next love, an insecure adolescent, lost on some now-well-named spectrum, who dropped out of his collegiate rat race, showed up on my doorstep, the date of his last bath unknown, his face familiar through the thick lenses of Lennon-like wire-framed glasses. After I encouraged him to shower, we explored each other. His mouth left a purple bruise on my breast, and he took off. He wrote an acerbic good-bye, rife with blame, on pieces of toilet paper. Thankfully unused.
Then the university. Miles away from home. People with whom I had no connection. I drank until I cried in chest-heaving sobs. My sorrow, so powerful, convinced my roommate I had been raped. Not my body, just my heart. I didn’t sleep. Studied all night. Took a Spanish final exam, answered all the questions in French. Hungover in two foreign tongues. I need a gun.
My career grounded me, then ground me down. A caretaker, a professional nurse. A person in control challenged by the exponential changes occurring in technology and in the role designated as the “handmaiden of the physicians.” Responsibility without rights. Accolades for successes and the demonstration of newly acquired knowledge; blame for failures that meant loss of life. Sleepless nights. What did I do wrong? Could I have done more? Retracing every drug administered, every vital sign documented, every word spoken to the patients, to the families, to the doctors, to the bleary-eyed face in the mirror. I need a gun.
A son. The greatest joy. I promised I would never make him feel unworthy. Even when I went to visit him in jail. On Mother’s Day. On his birthday. I failed. On that day I left before our time was up. I made another promise, loud and honest and unwavering. “If this happens again, I won’t be visiting you in jail when I’m fifty.” I need a gun. My feet burn constantly. I know I am not walking on hot coals, but occasionally I look down, hoping I am. Because if I am, I can step off them and the pain will stop. One day I touched the outside of my slow cooker. A blister erupted where my skin brushed against the stainless steel. My hands feel like that every day. I worry about pissing myself. When I awaken, vision blurry from sleep, I fear I am going blind. My body attacks itself. I need a gun.
Today I have had enough.
Sitting on the edge of my bed, I considered the pills I collected over the years from various therapists. They half-filled the plastic, amber container with the child-proof cap. It opened with a push and a twist. I re-engaged the cap. It snapped into place. I rolled the container between my palms as if I were shaping clay. The pills skittered, no tickety-ticked, against the plastic and sounded like mice playing, unseen, behind wallboard. I saw myself drifting away dreaming of the perfect life I should have, but not sure what it should be. I knew my heart would slow and become erratic, would struggle to thrust every drop of blood out toward the ends of my body. I knew my breathing would stop, a task forgotten. Then I saw rescuers and intubation and hospitalization and questions and anti-depressants and the guilt-laden faces of my family.
I think of the garage where my pink Peugeot mountain bike hangs on hooks, unused. A battered filing cabinet organizes instruction manuals for the coffee pot, the generator, and the robotic vacuum I named Frisbee. Hand-made Mother’s Day cards with a childish scrawl, pictures from innumerable seasons of sports, and vet records of a favorite cat, long dead, crowd the top of one drawer. How easy it would be to leave surrounded by these bits of history. A bottle of wine, my favorite pillow, the made-in-China blanket with the Grand Canyon on it, iPhone, and ear buds. So easy to start the car, listen to music, take one final trip.
My first job I cared for a girl the EMS brought to the ICU. Cherry red lips, in a perfect application of color, belied the displacement of oxygen by carbon monoxide on the blood. It starved her brain of oxygen and left a robust, young body without a command center. I didn’t know what happened to her after she left ICU, but I knew the consequences of complete immobility.
I thought about a gun. Any gun. I wouldn’t put it in my mouth and pseudo-fellate it. I understood recoil and the chance for a misfire. A bullet pushing through my palate, exploding an eye, ripping through my cheek, or, worst of all, trashing my sanctuary of words. No. I would press the muzzle under my chin just above my Adam’s Apple and I wouldn’t give myself time to think. The move would be swift and smooth and sure and my finger would be poised to pull the trigger. A blast to the brain stem. No more worries about being worthy. The perfect exit strategy.
Thank God I don’t own a gun.
The month of June from any old calendar in a spider webbed, abandoned garage. A picture of a woman whose breasts spill around two tiny triangles of diaphanous fabric. You know the one I mean. Her nipples punctuate the centers of each. She straddles a Harley-Davidson and ogles the barrel of a gun, its size distorted by the photographer.
In Starbucks a man fumbles for his wallet, pulls back his jacket, and exposes a carved mahogany gun handle. A man in low-riding jeans shops at Walmart, bends over to grab a fifty-pound bag of dog food. His t-shirt pulls up. The handle of a Smith and Wesson beckons from his butt crack.
Mine’s bigger than yours.
Some people see guns as phallic symbols, some merely as weapons of defense. I carry my own weapon of defense, a silent partner, a barrier that protects me from encroachment by the intolerable. Depression. Religion promises the Savior walks a path with the faithful. My intimate friend, depression, rides within. I slide back the panel to the hidden compartment in my bed’s headboard and sequester my gun there. I want easy access to the tool of my exit strategy.
Although I don’t remember it, I suspect I experienced depression the first year of my life, the year I learned I wasn’t worthy. My mother told me a story. “You learned to swim in urine because I was too tired to change your diaper. You never cried.”
Not worthy of a clean diaper. Praised for holding back my tears. Learning to survive.
My Mom in post-partum depression, I diagnosed in fifty or so years of retrospect and after forty years a nurse. A gene passed on to a daughter? A mother’s gift?
Days on my bike. Hours away from home. I found a steep hill at the middle school and pushed off. My feet hovered above the brake pedals. I imagined my metallic midnight-blue bike a flying unicorn. With my stringy blond hair whipping in the wind, I sped down the bumpy, stone encrusted hill. My gaping mouth shrieked in glee and fear. I didn’t want to die. I wanted to fly and land in a place where if my mother looked at me, she really saw me, and maybe even liked me. A place where I liked me.
A diary of lasts and leasts. The last girl in my class to get her period. The girl with the flattest chest. The girl with the fewest choices for dress shoes to wear to the sixth-grade dance because of her shoe size. Adolescence ravaged my face. Loneliness gutted me, either with, or because of, the distorted world view of an introvert, a label I didn’t understand at the time. I zeroed in on every dead bird in a storm drain after a heavy rain, every daffodil flattened by tornadic winds.
A taste of love. My first true love I lost to miles and time and adversarial politics. I learned people break-up for reasons more powerful than the comfortable familiarity of a friend who fumbles through a first kiss and heated pleasure with no shame. The next love, an insecure adolescent, lost on some now-well-named spectrum, who dropped out of his collegiate rat race, showed up on my doorstep, the date of his last bath unknown, his face familiar through the thick lenses of Lennon-like wire-framed glasses. After I encouraged him to shower, we explored each other. His mouth left a purple bruise on my breast, and he took off. He wrote an acerbic good-bye, rife with blame, on pieces of toilet paper. Thankfully unused.
Then the university. Miles away from home. People with whom I had no connection. I drank until I cried in chest-heaving sobs. My sorrow, so powerful, convinced my roommate I had been raped. Not my body, just my heart. I didn’t sleep. Studied all night. Took a Spanish final exam, answered all the questions in French. Hungover in two foreign tongues. I need a gun.
My career grounded me, then ground me down. A caretaker, a professional nurse. A person in control challenged by the exponential changes occurring in technology and in the role designated as the “handmaiden of the physicians.” Responsibility without rights. Accolades for successes and the demonstration of newly acquired knowledge; blame for failures that meant loss of life. Sleepless nights. What did I do wrong? Could I have done more? Retracing every drug administered, every vital sign documented, every word spoken to the patients, to the families, to the doctors, to the bleary-eyed face in the mirror. I need a gun.
A son. The greatest joy. I promised I would never make him feel unworthy. Even when I went to visit him in jail. On Mother’s Day. On his birthday. I failed. On that day I left before our time was up. I made another promise, loud and honest and unwavering. “If this happens again, I won’t be visiting you in jail when I’m fifty.” I need a gun. My feet burn constantly. I know I am not walking on hot coals, but occasionally I look down, hoping I am. Because if I am, I can step off them and the pain will stop. One day I touched the outside of my slow cooker. A blister erupted where my skin brushed against the stainless steel. My hands feel like that every day. I worry about pissing myself. When I awaken, vision blurry from sleep, I fear I am going blind. My body attacks itself. I need a gun.
Today I have had enough.
Sitting on the edge of my bed, I considered the pills I collected over the years from various therapists. They half-filled the plastic, amber container with the child-proof cap. It opened with a push and a twist. I re-engaged the cap. It snapped into place. I rolled the container between my palms as if I were shaping clay. The pills skittered, no tickety-ticked, against the plastic and sounded like mice playing, unseen, behind wallboard. I saw myself drifting away dreaming of the perfect life I should have, but not sure what it should be. I knew my heart would slow and become erratic, would struggle to thrust every drop of blood out toward the ends of my body. I knew my breathing would stop, a task forgotten. Then I saw rescuers and intubation and hospitalization and questions and anti-depressants and the guilt-laden faces of my family.
I think of the garage where my pink Peugeot mountain bike hangs on hooks, unused. A battered filing cabinet organizes instruction manuals for the coffee pot, the generator, and the robotic vacuum I named Frisbee. Hand-made Mother’s Day cards with a childish scrawl, pictures from innumerable seasons of sports, and vet records of a favorite cat, long dead, crowd the top of one drawer. How easy it would be to leave surrounded by these bits of history. A bottle of wine, my favorite pillow, the made-in-China blanket with the Grand Canyon on it, iPhone, and ear buds. So easy to start the car, listen to music, take one final trip.
My first job I cared for a girl the EMS brought to the ICU. Cherry red lips, in a perfect application of color, belied the displacement of oxygen by carbon monoxide on the blood. It starved her brain of oxygen and left a robust, young body without a command center. I didn’t know what happened to her after she left ICU, but I knew the consequences of complete immobility.
I thought about a gun. Any gun. I wouldn’t put it in my mouth and pseudo-fellate it. I understood recoil and the chance for a misfire. A bullet pushing through my palate, exploding an eye, ripping through my cheek, or, worst of all, trashing my sanctuary of words. No. I would press the muzzle under my chin just above my Adam’s Apple and I wouldn’t give myself time to think. The move would be swift and smooth and sure and my finger would be poised to pull the trigger. A blast to the brain stem. No more worries about being worthy. The perfect exit strategy.
Thank God I don’t own a gun.
The month of June from any old calendar in a spider webbed, abandoned garage. A picture of a woman whose breasts spill around two tiny triangles of diaphanous fabric. You know the one I mean. Her nipples punctuate the centers of each. She straddles a Harley-Davidson and ogles the barrel of a gun, its size distorted by the photographer.
In Starbucks a man fumbles for his wallet, pulls back his jacket, and exposes a carved mahogany gun handle. A man in low-riding jeans shops at Walmart, bends over to grab a fifty-pound bag of dog food. His t-shirt pulls up. The handle of a Smith and Wesson beckons from his butt crack.
Mine’s bigger than yours.
Some people see guns as phallic symbols, some merely as weapons of defense. I carry my own weapon of defense, a silent partner, a barrier that protects me from encroachment by the intolerable. Depression. Religion promises the Savior walks a path with the faithful. My intimate friend, depression, rides within. I slide back the panel to the hidden compartment in my bed’s headboard and sequester my gun there. I want easy access to the tool of my exit strategy.
Although I don’t remember it, I suspect I experienced depression the first year of my life, the year I learned I wasn’t worthy. My mother told me a story. “You learned to swim in urine because I was too tired to change your diaper. You never cried.”
Not worthy of a clean diaper. Praised for holding back my tears. Learning to survive.
My Mom in post-partum depression, I diagnosed in fifty or so years of retrospect and after forty years a nurse. A gene passed on to a daughter? A mother’s gift?
Days on my bike. Hours away from home. I found a steep hill at the middle school and pushed off. My feet hovered above the brake pedals. I imagined my metallic midnight-blue bike a flying unicorn. With my stringy blond hair whipping in the wind, I sped down the bumpy, stone encrusted hill. My gaping mouth shrieked in glee and fear. I didn’t want to die. I wanted to fly and land in a place where if my mother looked at me, she really saw me, and maybe even liked me. A place where I liked me.
A diary of lasts and leasts. The last girl in my class to get her period. The girl with the flattest chest. The girl with the fewest choices for dress shoes to wear to the sixth-grade dance because of her shoe size. Adolescence ravaged my face. Loneliness gutted me, either with, or because of, the distorted world view of an introvert, a label I didn’t understand at the time. I zeroed in on every dead bird in a storm drain after a heavy rain, every daffodil flattened by tornadic winds.
A taste of love. My first true love I lost to miles and time and adversarial politics. I learned people break-up for reasons more powerful than the comfortable familiarity of a friend who fumbles through a first kiss and heated pleasure with no shame. The next love, an insecure adolescent, lost on some now-well-named spectrum, who dropped out of his collegiate rat race, showed up on my doorstep, the date of his last bath unknown, his face familiar through the thick lenses of Lennon-like wire-framed glasses. After I encouraged him to shower, we explored each other. His mouth left a purple bruise on my breast, and he took off. He wrote an acerbic good-bye, rife with blame, on pieces of toilet paper. Thankfully unused.
Then the university. Miles away from home. People with whom I had no connection. I drank until I cried in chest-heaving sobs. My sorrow, so powerful, convinced my roommate I had been raped. Not my body, just my heart. I didn’t sleep. Studied all night. Took a Spanish final exam, answered all the questions in French. Hungover in two foreign tongues. I need a gun.
My career grounded me, then ground me down. A caretaker, a professional nurse. A person in control challenged by the exponential changes occurring in technology and in the role designated as the “handmaiden of the physicians.” Responsibility without rights. Accolades for successes and the demonstration of newly acquired knowledge; blame for failures that meant loss of life. Sleepless nights. What did I do wrong? Could I have done more? Retracing every drug administered, every vital sign documented, every word spoken to the patients, to the families, to the doctors, to the bleary-eyed face in the mirror. I need a gun.
A son. The greatest joy. I promised I would never make him feel unworthy. Even when I went to visit him in jail. On Mother’s Day. On his birthday. I failed. On that day I left before our time was up. I made another promise, loud and honest and unwavering. “If this happens again, I won’t be visiting you in jail when I’m fifty.” I need a gun. My feet burn constantly. I know I am not walking on hot coals, but occasionally I look down, hoping I am. Because if I am, I can step off them and the pain will stop. One day I touched the outside of my slow cooker. A blister erupted where my skin brushed against the stainless steel. My hands feel like that every day. I worry about pissing myself. When I awaken, vision blurry from sleep, I fear I am going blind. My body attacks itself. I need a gun.
Today I have had enough.
Sitting on the edge of my bed, I considered the pills I collected over the years from various therapists. They half-filled the plastic, amber container with the child-proof cap. It opened with a push and a twist. I re-engaged the cap. It snapped into place. I rolled the container between my palms as if I were shaping clay. The pills skittered, no tickety-ticked, against the plastic and sounded like mice playing, unseen, behind wallboard. I saw myself drifting away dreaming of the perfect life I should have, but not sure what it should be. I knew my heart would slow and become erratic, would struggle to thrust every drop of blood out toward the ends of my body. I knew my breathing would stop, a task forgotten. Then I saw rescuers and intubation and hospitalization and questions and anti-depressants and the guilt-laden faces of my family.
I think of the garage where my pink Peugeot mountain bike hangs on hooks, unused. A battered filing cabinet organizes instruction manuals for the coffee pot, the generator, and the robotic vacuum I named Frisbee. Hand-made Mother’s Day cards with a childish scrawl, pictures from innumerable seasons of sports, and vet records of a favorite cat, long dead, crowd the top of one drawer. How easy it would be to leave surrounded by these bits of history. A bottle of wine, my favorite pillow, the made-in-China blanket with the Grand Canyon on it, iPhone, and ear buds. So easy to start the car, listen to music, take one final trip.
My first job I cared for a girl the EMS brought to the ICU. Cherry red lips, in a perfect application of color, belied the displacement of oxygen by carbon monoxide on the blood. It starved her brain of oxygen and left a robust, young body without a command center. I didn’t know what happened to her after she left ICU, but I knew the consequences of complete immobility.
I thought about a gun. Any gun. I wouldn’t put it in my mouth and pseudo-fellate it. I understood recoil and the chance for a misfire. A bullet pushing through my palate, exploding an eye, ripping through my cheek, or, worst of all, trashing my sanctuary of words. No. I would press the muzzle under my chin just above my Adam’s Apple and I wouldn’t give myself time to think. The move would be swift and smooth and sure and my finger would be poised to pull the trigger. A blast to the brain stem. No more worries about being worthy. The perfect exit strategy.
Thank God I don’t own a gun.
The month of June from any old calendar in a spider webbed, abandoned garage. A picture of a woman whose breasts spill around two tiny triangles of diaphanous fabric. You know the one I mean. Her nipples punctuate the centers of each. She straddles a Harley-Davidson and ogles the barrel of a gun, its size distorted by the photographer.
In Starbucks a man fumbles for his wallet, pulls back his jacket, and exposes a carved mahogany gun handle. A man in low-riding jeans shops at Walmart, bends over to grab a fifty-pound bag of dog food. His t-shirt pulls up. The handle of a Smith and Wesson beckons from his butt crack.
Mine’s bigger than yours.
Some people see guns as phallic symbols, some merely as weapons of defense. I carry my own weapon of defense, a silent partner, a barrier that protects me from encroachment by the intolerable. Depression. Religion promises the Savior walks a path with the faithful. My intimate friend, depression, rides within. I slide back the panel to the hidden compartment in my bed’s headboard and sequester my gun there. I want easy access to the tool of my exit strategy.
Although I don’t remember it, I suspect I experienced depression the first year of my life, the year I learned I wasn’t worthy. My mother told me a story. “You learned to swim in urine because I was too tired to change your diaper. You never cried.”
Not worthy of a clean diaper. Praised for holding back my tears. Learning to survive.
My Mom in post-partum depression, I diagnosed in fifty or so years of retrospect and after forty years a nurse. A gene passed on to a daughter? A mother’s gift?
Days on my bike. Hours away from home. I found a steep hill at the middle school and pushed off. My feet hovered above the brake pedals. I imagined my metallic midnight-blue bike a flying unicorn. With my stringy blond hair whipping in the wind, I sped down the bumpy, stone encrusted hill. My gaping mouth shrieked in glee and fear. I didn’t want to die. I wanted to fly and land in a place where if my mother looked at me, she really saw me, and maybe even liked me. A place where I liked me.
A diary of lasts and leasts. The last girl in my class to get her period. The girl with the flattest chest. The girl with the fewest choices for dress shoes to wear to the sixth-grade dance because of her shoe size. Adolescence ravaged my face. Loneliness gutted me, either with, or because of, the distorted world view of an introvert, a label I didn’t understand at the time. I zeroed in on every dead bird in a storm drain after a heavy rain, every daffodil flattened by tornadic winds.
A taste of love. My first true love I lost to miles and time and adversarial politics. I learned people break-up for reasons more powerful than the comfortable familiarity of a friend who fumbles through a first kiss and heated pleasure with no shame. The next love, an insecure adolescent, lost on some now-well-named spectrum, who dropped out of his collegiate rat race, showed up on my doorstep, the date of his last bath unknown, his face familiar through the thick lenses of Lennon-like wire-framed glasses. After I encouraged him to shower, we explored each other. His mouth left a purple bruise on my breast, and he took off. He wrote an acerbic good-bye, rife with blame, on pieces of toilet paper. Thankfully unused.
Then the university. Miles away from home. People with whom I had no connection. I drank until I cried in chest-heaving sobs. My sorrow, so powerful, convinced my roommate I had been raped. Not my body, just my heart. I didn’t sleep. Studied all night. Took a Spanish final exam, answered all the questions in French. Hungover in two foreign tongues. I need a gun.
My career grounded me, then ground me down. A caretaker, a professional nurse. A person in control challenged by the exponential changes occurring in technology and in the role designated as the “handmaiden of the physicians.” Responsibility without rights. Accolades for successes and the demonstration of newly acquired knowledge; blame for failures that meant loss of life. Sleepless nights. What did I do wrong? Could I have done more? Retracing every drug administered, every vital sign documented, every word spoken to the patients, to the families, to the doctors, to the bleary-eyed face in the mirror. I need a gun.
A son. The greatest joy. I promised I would never make him feel unworthy. Even when I went to visit him in jail. On Mother’s Day. On his birthday. I failed. On that day I left before our time was up. I made another promise, loud and honest and unwavering. “If this happens again, I won’t be visiting you in jail when I’m fifty.” I need a gun. My feet burn constantly. I know I am not walking on hot coals, but occasionally I look down, hoping I am. Because if I am, I can step off them and the pain will stop. One day I touched the outside of my slow cooker. A blister erupted where my skin brushed against the stainless steel. My hands feel like that every day. I worry about pissing myself. When I awaken, vision blurry from sleep, I fear I am going blind. My body attacks itself. I need a gun.
Today I have had enough.
Sitting on the edge of my bed, I considered the pills I collected over the years from various therapists. They half-filled the plastic, amber container with the child-proof cap. It opened with a push and a twist. I re-engaged the cap. It snapped into place. I rolled the container between my palms as if I were shaping clay. The pills skittered, no tickety-ticked, against the plastic and sounded like mice playing, unseen, behind wallboard. I saw myself drifting away dreaming of the perfect life I should have, but not sure what it should be. I knew my heart would slow and become erratic, would struggle to thrust every drop of blood out toward the ends of my body. I knew my breathing would stop, a task forgotten. Then I saw rescuers and intubation and hospitalization and questions and anti-depressants and the guilt-laden faces of my family.
I think of the garage where my pink Peugeot mountain bike hangs on hooks, unused. A battered filing cabinet organizes instruction manuals for the coffee pot, the generator, and the robotic vacuum I named Frisbee. Hand-made Mother’s Day cards with a childish scrawl, pictures from innumerable seasons of sports, and vet records of a favorite cat, long dead, crowd the top of one drawer. How easy it would be to leave surrounded by these bits of history. A bottle of wine, my favorite pillow, the made-in-China blanket with the Grand Canyon on it, iPhone, and ear buds. So easy to start the car, listen to music, take one final trip.
My first job I cared for a girl the EMS brought to the ICU. Cherry red lips, in a perfect application of color, belied the displacement of oxygen by carbon monoxide on the blood. It starved her brain of oxygen and left a robust, young body without a command center. I didn’t know what happened to her after she left ICU, but I knew the consequences of complete immobility.
I thought about a gun. Any gun. I wouldn’t put it in my mouth and pseudo-fellate it. I understood recoil and the chance for a misfire. A bullet pushing through my palate, exploding an eye, ripping through my cheek, or, worst of all, trashing my sanctuary of words. No. I would press the muzzle under my chin just above my Adam’s Apple and I wouldn’t give myself time to think. The move would be swift and smooth and sure and my finger would be poised to pull the trigger. A blast to the brain stem. No more worries about being worthy. The perfect exit strategy.
Thank God I don’t own a gun.
The month of June from any old calendar in a spider webbed, abandoned garage. A picture of a woman whose breasts spill around two tiny triangles of diaphanous fabric. You know the one I mean. Her nipples punctuate the centers of each. She straddles a Harley-Davidson and ogles the barrel of a gun, its size distorted by the photographer.
In Starbucks a man fumbles for his wallet, pulls back his jacket, and exposes a carved mahogany gun handle. A man in low-riding jeans shops at Walmart, bends over to grab a fifty-pound bag of dog food. His t-shirt pulls up. The handle of a Smith and Wesson beckons from his butt crack.
Mine’s bigger than yours.
Some people see guns as phallic symbols, some merely as weapons of defense. I carry my own weapon of defense, a silent partner, a barrier that protects me from encroachment by the intolerable. Depression. Religion promises the Savior walks a path with the faithful. My intimate friend, depression, rides within. I slide back the panel to the hidden compartment in my bed’s headboard and sequester my gun there. I want easy access to the tool of my exit strategy.
Although I don’t remember it, I suspect I experienced depression the first year of my life, the year I learned I wasn’t worthy. My mother told me a story. “You learned to swim in urine because I was too tired to change your diaper. You never cried.”
Not worthy of a clean diaper. Praised for holding back my tears. Learning to survive.
My Mom in post-partum depression, I diagnosed in fifty or so years of retrospect and after forty years a nurse. A gene passed on to a daughter? A mother’s gift?
Days on my bike. Hours away from home. I found a steep hill at the middle school and pushed off. My feet hovered above the brake pedals. I imagined my metallic midnight-blue bike a flying unicorn. With my stringy blond hair whipping in the wind, I sped down the bumpy, stone encrusted hill. My gaping mouth shrieked in glee and fear. I didn’t want to die. I wanted to fly and land in a place where if my mother looked at me, she really saw me, and maybe even liked me. A place where I liked me.
A diary of lasts and leasts. The last girl in my class to get her period. The girl with the flattest chest. The girl with the fewest choices for dress shoes to wear to the sixth-grade dance because of her shoe size. Adolescence ravaged my face. Loneliness gutted me, either with, or because of, the distorted world view of an introvert, a label I didn’t understand at the time. I zeroed in on every dead bird in a storm drain after a heavy rain, every daffodil flattened by tornadic winds.
A taste of love. My first true love I lost to miles and time and adversarial politics. I learned people break-up for reasons more powerful than the comfortable familiarity of a friend who fumbles through a first kiss and heated pleasure with no shame. The next love, an insecure adolescent, lost on some now-well-named spectrum, who dropped out of his collegiate rat race, showed up on my doorstep, the date of his last bath unknown, his face familiar through the thick lenses of Lennon-like wire-framed glasses. After I encouraged him to shower, we explored each other. His mouth left a purple bruise on my breast, and he took off. He wrote an acerbic good-bye, rife with blame, on pieces of toilet paper. Thankfully unused.
Then the university. Miles away from home. People with whom I had no connection. I drank until I cried in chest-heaving sobs. My sorrow, so powerful, convinced my roommate I had been raped. Not my body, just my heart. I didn’t sleep. Studied all night. Took a Spanish final exam, answered all the questions in French. Hungover in two foreign tongues. I need a gun.
My career grounded me, then ground me down. A caretaker, a professional nurse. A person in control challenged by the exponential changes occurring in technology and in the role designated as the “handmaiden of the physicians.” Responsibility without rights. Accolades for successes and the demonstration of newly acquired knowledge; blame for failures that meant loss of life. Sleepless nights. What did I do wrong? Could I have done more? Retracing every drug administered, every vital sign documented, every word spoken to the patients, to the families, to the doctors, to the bleary-eyed face in the mirror. I need a gun.
A son. The greatest joy. I promised I would never make him feel unworthy. Even when I went to visit him in jail. On Mother’s Day. On his birthday. I failed. On that day I left before our time was up. I made another promise, loud and honest and unwavering. “If this happens again, I won’t be visiting you in jail when I’m fifty.” I need a gun. My feet burn constantly. I know I am not walking on hot coals, but occasionally I look down, hoping I am. Because if I am, I can step off them and the pain will stop. One day I touched the outside of my slow cooker. A blister erupted where my skin brushed against the stainless steel. My hands feel like that every day. I worry about pissing myself. When I awaken, vision blurry from sleep, I fear I am going blind. My body attacks itself. I need a gun.
Today I have had enough.
Sitting on the edge of my bed, I considered the pills I collected over the years from various therapists. They half-filled the plastic, amber container with the child-proof cap. It opened with a push and a twist. I re-engaged the cap. It snapped into place. I rolled the container between my palms as if I were shaping clay. The pills skittered, no tickety-ticked, against the plastic and sounded like mice playing, unseen, behind wallboard. I saw myself drifting away dreaming of the perfect life I should have, but not sure what it should be. I knew my heart would slow and become erratic, would struggle to thrust every drop of blood out toward the ends of my body. I knew my breathing would stop, a task forgotten. Then I saw rescuers and intubation and hospitalization and questions and anti-depressants and the guilt-laden faces of my family.
I think of the garage where my pink Peugeot mountain bike hangs on hooks, unused. A battered filing cabinet organizes instruction manuals for the coffee pot, the generator, and the robotic vacuum I named Frisbee. Hand-made Mother’s Day cards with a childish scrawl, pictures from innumerable seasons of sports, and vet records of a favorite cat, long dead, crowd the top of one drawer. How easy it would be to leave surrounded by these bits of history. A bottle of wine, my favorite pillow, the made-in-China blanket with the Grand Canyon on it, iPhone, and ear buds. So easy to start the car, listen to music, take one final trip.
My first job I cared for a girl the EMS brought to the ICU. Cherry red lips, in a perfect application of color, belied the displacement of oxygen by carbon monoxide on the blood. It starved her brain of oxygen and left a robust, young body without a command center. I didn’t know what happened to her after she left ICU, but I knew the consequences of complete immobility.
I thought about a gun. Any gun. I wouldn’t put it in my mouth and pseudo-fellate it. I understood recoil and the chance for a misfire. A bullet pushing through my palate, exploding an eye, ripping through my cheek, or, worst of all, trashing my sanctuary of words. No. I would press the muzzle under my chin just above my Adam’s Apple and I wouldn’t give myself time to think. The move would be swift and smooth and sure and my finger would be poised to pull the trigger. A blast to the brain stem. No more worries about being worthy. The perfect exit strategy.
Thank God I don’t own a gun.
Nurturing a Culture of Violence
Since the birth and proliferation of rap music, the negative references to women and the outright violence espoused against law enforcement have been highlighted as reflections of the violent nature of that particular art form. I don’t need to pick on rap music to open a discussion about the cultivation of violence in our society. Time after time the media provides examples where cruelty and disregard for another human being occur without consequence.
Ray Rice cold-cocks his girlfriend and drags her from an elevator. Video tapes document the assault, yet he faces no jail time. Ndamukong Suh stomps on Aaron Rodgers’ leg without repercussion. Only Adrian Peterson has experienced a detour in his life journey, because society views children as the most trusting and most vulnerable when it comes to families and child abuse. George Zimmerman has been arrested once again because of some sort of aggressive behavior. When the publicity and accompanying storm subside, how will the lives of these people really be affected?
What disturbs me most is the trickle-down effect of societal norms that allows extreme behavior to go unchallenged. A patient threatened to punch me in the nose if I didn’t turn him from his side to his back. He had no extra “meat on his bones” placing him at risk for a pressure ulcer near his tailbone. He also had what’s called atelectasis or areas where the lung had collapsed. I didn’t take his threat seriously; but I took it to heart. I explained the importance of protecting his skin integrity and changing position to expand his lungs.
Once I got away from the bedside, I asked “What makes a person, even in jest, fear, or frustration, think that sort of threat is legitimate or reasonable?” The patient wasn’t drugged. He clearly made eye contact. He effectively communicated his needs. At some level, he believed it was okay to use a threat of violence to get his way. Has our passive acceptance of violence committed by certain somewhat “untouchable” members of society become equated with condoning it?
A threat of physical violence accompanied by a smirking grin does not lessen the threat. In some jurisdictions, third degree assault is defined as when a person injures another person, just not physically. Did the patient frighten me? A bit. Did he make me cautious the next time I approached him to provide his care? Yes. Does that constitute injury? Perhaps not. But with someone less experienced, it might change that person’s ability to perform his job, and that is an injury.
Later the same day, I prepared to give the man a shave. I told him how my husband told me over and over that even when men are very sick, they enjoy a good shave. He whispered “Thank-you” and proceeded to contort his face, jut his chin, pull his upper lip taut so I could get the sprinkle of white stubble growing there with his Ultra-Fine Hydro 3 razor. Not one nick from this nurse, thank-you very much. I got through the day with no more threats, but found when I got home that his words flayed my professional armor and gutted me. It hurt to think someone for whom I cared, a person I monitored for every change in heart rate or oxygenation, a person I knew as a complex and amazing individual, could threaten to hit me. The behavior fell outside my frame of reference and left me stunned.
After I started thinking about violence in modern society, the assault at Charlie Hebdo occurred. When did a different opinion or an offensive political satire become an impetus for murder? Has society become so infected with the virulence of violence that people will soon be walking on eggshells with every thought, word, and deed for fear of mortal retaliation? Just as bacteria has evolved into superbugs, will violence grow exponentially and influence progress, creativity, and innovation? Will freedom no longer have meaning?
Ebola: Its Impact on the American Mind Set
With the same shock and speed as the planes that destroyed the Twin Towers, the Ebola virus razed the last bastion of the American Myth: the Ivory Tower of impenetrability. Americans have long enjoyed the belief that being surrounded by two oceans distanced them from the diseases, political turmoil, and wars rampant in other countries. Thanks to Thomas Duncan, we now know the truth. For that I am thankful. Just as we gave up many personal liberties after the 2001 assault on our country, protocols for community health and safety will change the way we live in a post-Ebola environment.
Criticism abounds in Dallas’ handling of the health threat. I commend the response and wonder what would have happened had Mr. Duncan chosen a less populated area without the same health care and security resources to respond as quickly as Dallas did. Responsible citizens must be prepared to give some more for the sake of community health and safety. The CDC recommends using facilities with practiced expertise in the care of infectious patients. This follows the logic used to quash the polio epidemic. This type of care requires special training, equipment, and mental toughness.
Our national security depends on us being ready to handle crises regardless of their nature. Weapons of mass destruction take on new meaning. While attempting to master the arms race, what attention has been paid to that which we have least control: biological weapons? Our enemies seem enchanted with brutality and the horror inspired by genocide and butchery. However men who are intelligent enough to assume power over large groups will see the potential in wielding weapons that are poorly secured and understood. This is no time to be cavalier or lax. Aggressive and proactive measures must be instituted to control and manage Ebola.
Health care professionals, defense specialists, and the NSA must collaborate with the full support of Congress and the White House to insure the safety of the American people.
Where are the cell phones?
Finally the media is addressing the silence of over two hundred passengers and their cell phones. A CNN expert suggested that the plane was too high for the towers to reach the phones. If that’s true, then why is the FAA considering the issue of allowing use of cell phones in flight? In response to people recalling the plane that went down in Pa. and last minute communications, he stated that those calls were made via “air phones” on the back of the seats that required the caller to swipe a credit card before calling. Really? Wasn’t that plane low enough for cell phones to pick up tower signals? And yesterday another expert stated the plane was flying low in an attempt to avoid being detected by radar. If just one of the passengers were alive, wouldn’t he have called someone? To the untrained ear, the inconsistency in reporting smacks of cover-up and subverts any confidence in the media. To date, there are far more questions than answers, more doubts than reassurances.
The Way of the World, the End of the 2014 Games
The Way of the World
For some there is logic in the separation of church and state. In the vicarious excitement I experience when I watch the Olympics, the same logic follows: there should be a separation of politics and sports. I don’t care how these athletes vote (if they live in a place that has voting), who they sleep with, or the ideology of their home country. It is breathtaking and inspiring to watch athletes who have trained for years, sacrificed in all aspects of their lives, and reduced the measure of all their commitment to one competition and the acquisition of an Olympic medal. As with all things logical, there is a caveat.
I gasp when I witness the flight of skiers and snowboarders. I marvel at their lack of fear. When the skaters spin and leap and lift, I feel dizzy from their speed and height. I love the wild helmets, the beauty of the designer costumes, and the almost alien looking accouterments of the hockey players. Olympic competition represents a celebration of athleticism, work ethic, health, and the global community. Unfortunately at the end of the competition, there are other channels, other conduits. I see and vicariously experience the devastation of Syria, oppression and death in the Ukraine. Appreciation of stellar athletes becomes moot.
As the Olympics close, these thoughts plague me. The press covers the adoption of homeless dogs by an athlete while Syrian refugees starve and wonder where to go for safety. A Canadian journalist, as well as a competitor, complain about judging known to be subjective for years, while citizens in Kiev are judged and shot to death in the street. A team that has practiced with another for two years charges their coach with favoritism, conveniently not apparent until the pair gets into the national spotlight. A snowboarder nurses his failure to win a medal by touring with his band. In the aftermath of this great sporting event, what are we missing? So many questions arise. What will be left behind when all the athletes are gone? What social and environmental detritus will the Olympics of Sochi have generated? Considering all the money, energy, talent, and resources invested into the sports events, is the world a better place? Is there less domestic violence? Is there fresh water for all the people in Africa? Is the nuclear clock any less close to striking the time for Armageddon? The Olympics brings the world together in a microcosm of competition and comradeship on a stage in such isolation that it does little to bring the rest of us to a peaceful co-existence where all become good stewards of the earth and its people.
All complaints and hubris aside, it IS just a sporting event. And it IS time to move on.