Day twenty-six. Down to just an occasional coughing fit reminiscent of a bronchial orangutan. With luck I’ll be through it all by the end of the weekend and can start afresh this next week. In the meantime, I’m still trying to get plenty of sleep and not over extend myself. I’m not doing a lot outside of work other than writing – on those evenings when I don’t feel too draggy. Writing these missives, movie reviews, work progress notes, and stuff my publisher wants keeps my brain active but at times I can only do so much before I stare blankly at the screen without anything more to say. I look at the prodigious and well reasoned output of someone like Heather Cox Richardson and I wonder how she can possibly do it. Maybe if I was a trained historian with an encyclopedic knowledge of US history – which I am not.
In terms of the areas in which I do have training and expertise, not much has changed this week. Measles continues to spread. Covid and flu numbers remain high (but down from what they were earlier this winter). The bird flu continues to lay waste to factory farming – don’t expect the price of eggs to come down in the near future. It’s difficult to tell what’s happening on the international front given the severing of ties between the US and WHO and the muzzling of CDC but there are rumors of a new respiratory virus in China and a filovirus in Africa. Who knows if either of these will get out and start wreaking havoc.
In politics, POTUS used his bully pulpit to hurl personal invective, insults, and both misinformation and disinformation to a joint session of congress. But that’s neither new or surprising. The Secretary of the VA announced that he will cut the VA’s workforce by 83,000 jobs (about 20% of the total). What that will mean for services or for what I do within the VA who knows? I assume they’ll simply remove the house call program wholesale nationally as being inefficient. It’s been a dream of the right wing to privatize VA services and monetize them for corporate profit for decades so that’s likely the short term set of moves. Veterans around here tend to skew pro-Republican and may be a bit surprised to find their benefits curtailed as time goes on.
I hear about various other things in my readings and internet wanderings but I can’t always tell what is true and what is hyperbolic rumor. Both left and right are so busy lobbing verbal grenades and propagandistic memes at each other that it isn’t always possible to decipher what is actually going on and I try my best to stay relatively objective when it comes to politics and to comment on policy and not on personality. While I’m on the blue team, I don’t think that means all red team ideas are automatically wrong or backwards and that all blue team ideas are delivered from the gods on stone tablets. It’s much more nuanced than that. I’m a firm believer in shades of gray.
Much of the current dysfunction can be traced back thirty or forty years to the ascendancy of the Baby Boom (then known as the Yuppies) who gravitated to centers of power in coastal cities and began to discount anyone who did not do the same or share their values – flyover country. As the center of the country, both geographically and economically, hollowed out through policies aimed to bolster the more monied classes, those left behind, became more and more desperate for a voice. The modern Republican party, especially Trump, gave them that but has done so mainly by funneling impulses into destruction and hardening of partisan lines, rather than in compromise, dialogue and cooperation, traits necessary for functional society.
The left also refuses to unify, generally splintering itself over purity tests of one kind or another which diminishes their power or ability to accomplish things on a national scale. The ostracism of Al Franken over a poor taste joke was a huge strategic blunder. The inability to understand the history of the Palestinian conflict. I read a news article about the cancellation of a student production of Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins at Northwestern last week. I assumed it was due to right wing complaints of the glorification of presidential assassins and the message this could send about the current administration. No, it was due to left wing complaints about the use of the N word in a song lyric, placed their deliberately due to historical conflict and to make the audience feel uncomfortable. If we on the left cannot accept the more uncomfortable parts of our past, how can we accept those on the right to honor such ideals?
What’s someone of the center left to do? I work to educate younger LGBTQ people about the realities of the experiences of my generation so that they don’t have to go through the same things. I try to stay informed, while using my brains to try and stay out of the weeds of propaganda. I use my talents to create things that can help people see problems – in healthcare, in society, in aging – in new ways. I don’t have the answers to most of what’s facing us but somebody out there does. Maybe I can be a spark to help light a fire.
Life, The Universe, and Everything 