I had a cold this week, not an unsurprising sequel to a period of stress, so I’ve been a bit low energy and under the weather and haven’t felt like doing too much constructive. I have made my way through my usual weekly thickets of progress notes, the unravelling of thorny personal issues amongst patients and friends, and even got a couple of chores done around the house so I think things are going relatively well. I have a weekend with minimal obligation so I’m going to try and knock out another legal case and at least unearth the study out from under the top layer of detritus thats come to rest from the academic office having come home to roost. If that all happens, I’ll consider it a win.
I’m looking ahead at my calendar for 26-27. There’s not a whole lot on it yet other than fall travel dates and singing the Messiah in December. Other things will come, they usually do. I have received some notifications regarding auditions for upcoming projects that would fit in with other commitments so I may flex those muscles over the next few weeks. In the meantime, maybe a little bit of laziness is called for after a rather busy 25-26 season which included a couple of foreign trips, three plays, a musical, directing Shakespeare, two operas, several symphony concerts, and a serious illness requiring hospitalization and surgery. I am less than a year away from becoming officially geriatric myself. I’m still trying to figure out how that happened.
As things may be a bit slower than usual the next couple of months, I am trying to get things organized in my head (and on the laptop) regarding getting a complete draft of the new book, Boom, put together. (Perhaps I should retitle it Jug ‘O Boom’ as an homage to Dungeon Crawler Carl which has become my latest pop culture obsession – I’m nearly done with book three and will probably make my way through the whole series by the holidays. For those who haven’t heard of it, imagine The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy crossed with a truly sadistic Dungeons & Dragons campaign). This is causing me to have to plow back through The Accidental Plague Diaries to lift the sections which discussed generational aging and impacts on society and institutions so I have somewhere to start on those pieces. In looking back at what I wrote not all that many years ago, I’m reminded what a wrenching time 2020-2022 was for society and for individuals, how much pain and trauma we endured. And now I’m looking at a society that seems to want to bury all of it in collective amnesia.
This does not strike me as being a healthy impulse (but an understandably human one). If there’s one lesson I have learned in life, it’s that trauma and pain and the negative aspects must be dealt with. If they are not, they will come out later in mutated forms and wreak additional havoc physically and psychologically and that’s not good for anyone. The administration, led by the Department of Health and Human Services is trying to extirpate the collective memories of that time. It’s doing nothing to honor those who sacrificed for others. Somewhere between 3500 and 4000 health care workers died in 2020 in the US from occupationally caught covid. No one seems to have kept count one the vaccines came out of what happened after. The structural changes in health care that have taken place following the pandemic is pushing all of my generation of clinical providers towards the exit. In another era, I might have worked another decade; not now.
For the last fifty years, the holes in the care system have been filled by immigration and the importation of workers willing to take lower level jobs or of high skilled workers to make up for what our system does not produce for various reasons. Haitian, Eritrean and Somali nurses aids, Filipino nurses, South Asian physicians have all become common and important pillars of the system. It’s all about to come crashing down. Let’s look at Florida which has some 800 skilled nursing facilities with about 90,000 residents. There are roughly 85,000 nurses aides/CNAs employed in these facilities. Of these, about 45,000 are immigrants. About 1/4 of these immigrants are Haitian. Nearly all of them lost their ability to work with the administration’s recent rescinding of Temporary Protected Status for Haitian immigrants. You can say, if you are of a certain political persuasion, Great! 12,000 new jobs for native borns. Immigrants fill these jobs for a reason. Native borns don’t want them. They are low paid, low status, back breaking labor. Anyone who has cared for an infant or toddler knows how stenuous it can be. Now imagine that toddler is two hundred pounds. Alabama is not as badly off as Florida looking forward for various demographic reasons but the long term care industry is not in good shape and, for the most part, I no longer make any recommendations regarding facilities as most have been bought up by corporate entities in post-pandemic consolidation and generally aren’t being run in the way that they were a decade ago.
The administration seems bound and determined to break pretty much every societal institution that has led to American power and prestige in the post World War II period. We can all speculate on the reasons. Putin trying to diminish the West due to unknowable holds over the president, the billionaire class as disciples of Curtis Yarvin, trying to prepare for a future technocracy in which they hold all reins of power, just the natural cycles of history which every eighty years or so turns over when the lviing memories of why instiutions and rules were created dies out so people think they no longer apply. The media is pretty much gone, bought up by those who wish to curry favor with Hegseth eviscerating Stars and Stripes editorial independence, which has existed since The Civil War, being only the most recent blip on the radar screen. The courts have been packed. SCOTUS could be won back with an expansion of one justice for each circuit (which should have been happening all along) but I’m not holding my breath. Everyday there’s a new horror story about the thugs of ICE ignoring law and human decency. Our new concentration camps remain full. (One thing I wonder, if ICE is reined back and immigrants are no longer in the cross hairs, who will the system decide is worthy of such treatment as those cells will be filled and the money will flow to the owners under federal contract for someone to be in residence and brutalized – I’d say the LGBTQ community is in line and I have no illusions that my social position or resources will protect me should the Christianists have their way).
The midterms, happening in about ten weeks, are promising for the Democrats, but I am, once again, under no illusions that the current administration will allow free and fair elections. I have no idea what executive orders, scare tactics, or chicanery is on the table. Unfortunately, our winner takes all system means that it doesn’t take a major shift in voting patterns to create a starkly different result. We would be better off with some sort of proportional representation to allow miniority voices and opinions to be heard but that would take a constitutional convention and that would open up a can of worms like we’ve never seen.
I think I better just stick with working through my ideas on the aging Baby Boom, an area in which I have some decades of expertise and an ability to envision some solutions and stay out of the other areas of politics and society. It gets too depressing. I think it’s a cocktail before and a cocktail with dinner evening.
Life, The Universe, and Everything 