For some folks, this is a new feeling, but I’m okay with that because…

Until now, the story among folks on the left seems to have been that the U.S. made a mistake in 2016 that it fixed in 2020.  2016 was a detour on the road to progress.  That 2020 correction showed that the country wasn’t as loutish as the outcome of the 2016 presidential contest might suggest.  Besides, liberals could live in the comfort that the popular vote hadn’t really elected the man who became the 45th president.  It was a quirk of the antiquated electoral college system.  Then, in 2020, it was okay if 74 million people voted for him because 81 million voted for President Biden.  The belief was that the 2020 majority didn’t agree with the misogyny, racism, homophobia and cynical mistrust of anyone who didn’t fit into a White nationalist view of the country.  

 

Now those explanations don’t hold. 

 

That’s because 77 million of our neighbors and relatives voted a convicted felon, serial liar, adjudicated sexual assaulter, and con man into the nation’s highest office after seeing all that for eight prior years.  He’s someone who would’ve been considered too toxic to run for any office in any other era.  Yet the results are unmistakably an endorsement of this person.  No aberration here.  The punch-to-the-gut feeling that people who voted against him now experience is stronger than 2016 because it’s clearly not a mistake.  He received 77 million votes.  As bad as the feelings were in 2016, this is worse because the election confirmed an undeniable truth of who the nation is. 

 

Pundits explain it as a vote on the economy, or on voters’ need to know that their government puts them first, or the limited news sources of some voters, or Democrats’ failure to tell their story.  However, all those are secondary to how well the Republican candidate played to voters’ fears about immigrants, transgender people, or people of color’s supposed criminality.  That message was central to Republicans’ ad campaigns in this election cycle. It’s a strategy that Republicans have been building for decades, and this time it worked perfectly.   Other explanations of the causes are, at best, secondary.  People agreed with the fear pitch that was at the core of that campaign.  Or, at the least, that central message wasn’t important enough for them to vote against it. 

 

Let’s be clear.  The nation didn’t suddenly veer to the right.  Actually, little changed in the intervening time between when the president-elect was voted out of office in 2020 and now.  He didn’t win by gaining large numbers in 2024 from 2020, and despite what the electoral college count says, this wasn’t a landslide.  About the same number of people voted for the then-president in 2020 as they did in 2024.  There’s a slight increase of three million votes in the president-elect’s 2024 numbers.  That increase was enough to elect him since he won by two million votes – that’s a 1.48% margin of victory. 

 

The difference is that Vice-President Harris didn’t receive all the votes that went Democratic in 2020.  In 2020, President Biden received seven million more votes than his opponent.  In the recent election, Vice-President Harris had six million fewer votes than Biden did in 2020.  If Harris had attracted the same numbers as Biden had in 2020, she would have won.  But six million people chose not to vote or changed their vote away from the Democratic ticket, leaving Vice-President Harris with that two-million-vote deficit.

 

The president-elect did win, and the numbers suggest that a lot of people have supported him all along.  If you’ve lived in the fantasy that the U.S. was immune from the autocratic impulses expressed by right-wing leaders in places like Hungary, this election ended that fantasy.  If you thought we’d continue unabated with the progress that began with the abolitionist movement and continued to the Seneca Falls Convention, Pullman porters, bus boycotts, and Stonewall without interruption, this election should have disabused you of that.  If you thought that the right wing was a small group of over-stimulated vandals waving tiki torches and playing pretend militia, this election extinguished that illusion. 

 

The votes that elected the 47th president came from a broad range of voters who were unwilling to vote for Vice-President Harris and were willing to ignore the president-elect’s many personal flaws, past actions, legal convictions, and stream of lies.  These voters didn’t just appear.  They’ve been here.  They most likely voted for him in the past and voted again for him now.  These are people from cities and suburbia and farmlands.  They heard what he said, and they want what he offered.  The U.S. majority is no longer silent.  It spoke. 

 

I’m not offering you comfort.  This isn’t the time to be comforted.  This may be the first time you’ve experienced helplessness and despair of this magnitude.  It’s my guess that the feeling may be heightened by knowing that what you see as true is not seen by over half the people who voted – and by people who didn’t bother to vote.  That means you’re in the society’s minority now.  This is a little of what it feels like to be far removed from that majority and the way it thinks.  It may be a new feeling for you; however, your current feeling is what people already at the margins already feel every day.  It’s not a new feeling for us to live on a knife’s edge under the daily scrutiny by a society that sees us and our ideas as exotic or even dangerous.  You may have had past empathy for excluded groups.  However, it’s one thing to have empathy, and it’s another thing altogether to experience and feel exclusion. 

 

That feeling you have now is what people of color, LGBTQI folks, immigrants, and the disabled live under every day.  It didn’t go away when the Voting Rights Act got passed in 1965, or when Barack Obama was elected.  My daily life under the gaze of a society that devalues me has always been the same.   Those 77 million people have always been there.  I interact with them on jobs, in schools, in grocery stores, in cafes – everywhere and every day.  My experiences with them didn’t start in 2016 or the most recent election, and how they interact with me hasn’t changed.   That means that while I’m saddened by the recent election results, I’m not surprised by them. 

 

The struggle for justice hasn’t been for a particular law, candidate, party, or election outcome.  The struggle is for ideals that are counteracted in the daily lives of marginalized people throughout the society.  It’s good when a particular party or candidate commits to supporting inclusion and justice.  But the election of one candidate or party hasn’t ever meant that our struggle is over.  This current election has, for those of us living in the forces that attempt to devalue us, just made what we experience daily more starkly visible to many who haven’t previously experienced marginalization.  The election helps other people experience what we experience.  So I’m okay with other people feeling this weight. 

 

It has been, is, and will be a long struggle.  Remember that the commitment to universal rights is a relatively new one in this country’s history.  Despite Jefferson’s assertion that “all men are created equal,” we know he didn’t intend women as part of that, nor did he mean the millions of enslaved people, including those he personally enslaved.  And he certainly didn’t include Native people.  The list of those excluded from participation at the nation’s founding is longer than the list of included people.  When the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were added to the Constitution after the Civil War, Congress attempted a correction toward inclusion for all.  However, those amendments were thwarted by states, municipalities, and federal actions for 100 years afterward, well into my lifetime. 

 

This demand for including everyone in opportunity isn’t one that the nation has had for very long.  It’s a demand that’s come from those who are excluded, not from people who benefitted from that system.  It’s not a surprise to any of us at the margins that we’re experiencing this latest backlash with the election of someone whose racism, homophobia, and misogyny are only outpaced by his narcissism.  His election isn’t the cause of the problems; it’s a symptom of who the nation is.  We’ve always known that the majority isn’t with us.  If they had been, these issues would’ve been resolved in 1865 or 1965. 

 

Let me offer some advice as someone who’s lived daily with the feeling you’re now experiencing:  First, and most importantly, be aware that this isn’t an easily resolved struggle.  The next election will not fix the problem.  Yes, the nation may once again elect a Democratic House or Senate.  But remember that 77 million of your fellow citizens voted for a self-announced autocratic government that devalues people at the margins.  In the future, the nation can elect Democrats to manage both houses and the presidency, as they did in 2020, but those 77 million people are still there.  Those 77 million people aren’t monolithic.  They represent a spectrum of thought, but the core of that thought will always devalue historically marginalized people.  That said, giving up isn’t an option.  Acknowledging the struggle and being aware of its future longevity is the starting point. 

 

Secondly, acknowledge that your feelings are real, but they’re not what’s going to change anything.  They can, however, be a catalyst.  I can’t tell you how to manage this feeling so that it catalyzes you to action.  I can only tell you how I’ve survived decades of living with these feelings.  I use them to commit to leading change.  Not participating in change.  Leading it.  I continually explore how I can act and when I can best act.  I don’t wait for invitations.  I take the anger, rage, pain, and dejection I feel and plan action. 

 

I don’t know what that means for you, but experience tells me that action is the only remedy.  For me, it shaped my choices of jobs, what I did in those jobs, and where I continue to act.  The only other choices are less healthy if I try to ignore or rationalize what I feel.  Instead, I use my experiences as impetus to remain engaged in changing what I don’t like – even though I know that it won’t change in my lifetime.  That’s a commitment I make to myself which is why I see this as leading.  Even in those moments when I have no idea where I can lead change, I go find people who are working for change and support them.  I may not change anything, but I guarantee that I find more peace than being stuck with this feeling or ignoring it. 

A journey through life, death, and living

The most unexpected moment of our extended drive through Canada and back last spring came on May 27.  While I kept and published an online travelogue of that trip, this moment doesn’t fit into a travelogue. 

 

We’d reached Plattsburgh, NY after a challenging week of both of us catching a virus and after I’d strained my back badly enough to require muscle relaxants, completely prone bed rest, and a walking cane when I was finally upright.  We spent a week locked away in a Montreal hotel recuperating.  That meant we had to miss the memorial celebration of our dear friend Ben Williams.  While we’d wanted to take the trip across the Trans-Canada Highway for decades, the timing was so we could attend that service.  We were within 130 miles of the memorial, but we ended up watching the video live stream on May 24 from our Montreal hotel room. 

 

A few days after the service, the hotel was full and could no longer extend our stay.  We were feeling better from the virus, and I could walk reasonably with the cane.  We left Montreal for Plattsburgh and were resting in our room watching an HBO documentary series that told the story of Stax Records.  The music and story had us in a good mood.  Mary’s cell rang.  The caller ID read that the caller was “Public Service.”  That seemed an odd ID, so she let it go to voice mail.  Within a few seconds of the last ring, my number rang with a call from the same ID.  I answered.

 

The caller confirmed my name.  He then explained that he was calling from the Pierce County coroner’s office.  There’s one reason a coroner’s office calls, so I knew it was bad news.  We only knew one person in Pierce County whom that office would be contacting us to discuss.  The caller then apologized that he was giving me this information over the phone.  He explained that our brother-in-law Bill had been found deceased in his apartment.  I’d already deduced something like that from the caller’s job title and the county.  But it made no logical sense as I listened. 

 

Bill was fighting lung cancer with a recent surgery and ongoing chemo treatments, but this was just two months into his treatment.  There had been no prior indication to me that he was at risk of death.  When I spoke to him two weeks prior, he sounded tired, and that was an expected part of all he’d recently experienced.  I’d been trying to reach him for a few days, but I figured I’d been calling at the wrong time.  I asked the coroner’s employee to explain what he said a few times so that I could process what he was saying.  Death rarely makes sense.

 

The coroner’s representative explained that a neighbor called police when she hadn’t seen Bill for a few days.  An officer came to conduct a welfare check.  When the officer had no response, he entered the apartment and found Bill.  The circumstances suggested that he died in bed of natural causes.  The officer called the coroner’s office who checked medical databases and found the records of his recent cancer treatment.  Mary and I were listed as emergency contacts there.  The coroner’s employee explained that the officer couldn’t leave the apartment and needed to know which funeral home to call.  I gave him the name of the cremation organization that Bill told me he’d joined.  I also explained that the most appropriate next of kin to make arrangements is Bill’s brother Peter who lives in another state.  I offered to give that number to the caller, but the caller replied that it also was in the records he’d found.  He would call Peter right away.  With that, we ended the call.  It all still made no sense.  I needed to call Peter and follow up.  Maybe he could give me some details that would help. 

 

To give some time for the coroner’s employee to make contact, I waited and then called Peter.  He had been as surprised as I was.  He had some additional details.  He had called Bill’s neighbor when he’d been unable to reach Bill.  Peter’s call to her prompted her to check on Bill.  She found newspapers piled at the door and called the police when she couldn’t get an answer at the door.  Peter and I discussed what the next steps were.  When Bill had the cancer surgery, he sent both Peter and me a detailed e-mail message that described what to do in the event of his death during that surgery.  I filed that without reading it, figuring that it was just an extra precaution and unnecessary since the surgeon told Bill there was minimal risk in the surgery.  Now Peter and I would have to read Bill’s instructions in detail.  Peter would have the bulk of responsibility, but both of would spend a lot of time in the months ahead managing the miscellanies of Bill’s life.

 

Some context:  Bill was my brother-in-law by marriage.  Mary’s sister Ana was married to Bill for over 30 years until Ana’s death in 2020.  We became the primary emergency contact for Bill because we were his only relatives in the area.  When Ana was alive, and for a few years afterward, Bill lived in the same community as we do.  For the last year of his life, he moved to a nearby community in Pierce County, the reason I could deduce the topic of the call from the coroner’s office.  For the three-and-a-half years after Ana’s death, Bill and I spoke regularly.  The two-week break in our regular phone calls (that ended with the call from the coroner’s office) was the longest we’d not talked in that time.  During our calls, Bill kept me apprised of what he was doing and, most recently, what was happening in his treatments.  It’s one reason I was stunned by this news.  He was in the early stages of treatment, not the late stages of cancer.  Everyone I’ve known at this point in cancer treatments was still at the hopeful stage of the battle.  By the time the county issued a death certificate, the coroner confirmed that Bill died of natural causes.  Still, though, now months afterward as I write, his death remains a surprise.  Much of the six months before his death had also been surprises for Bill.

 

Those surprises began on November 9, a little over six months before I received the call in Plattsburgh.  Bill had a colonoscopy scheduled that day.  Since he lived 40 miles away from where he planned to have the colonoscopy, and since the procedure was scheduled for morning, he stayed at a hotel across the street from the hospital clinic that would perform the procedure.  That way, instead of both of us having to be up at 5 AM for me to drive him there, he could get up at a more reasonable time, walk across the street, and I could meet him at the hospital.  I needed to be there to help him after the procedure.  The plan was to walk him from the procedure back to the hotel where he’d spend another night and drive himself home the next day when the effects of anesthesia were gone.  That was the plan.

 

On November 9, I arrived and walked into the hospital just as Bill walked into the lobby.  We serendipitously timed our arrivals perfectly, so we took the elevator upstairs to the colonoscopy clinic.  They took him in immediately, and I settled in for the one-to-two-hour wait that would follow.  I’d just had my own colonoscopy a few weeks before, and my wife had one a week before mine.  I knew this was a short procedure.  When two hours passed and I hadn’t been called to get him, I didn’t think anything of it.  There are a hundred reasons why medical procedures get delayed.  At two-and-a-half hours, I began to wonder what was happening.  At three hours, I was about to go to the desk and ask for an update when a nurse came into the waiting area and called my name.

 

She explained.  The colonoscopy had gone well; however, as Bill was coming out of the anesthesia, his heart rate dropped dramatically to around 20 beats per minute.  He had been conscious and communicating with the staff, but they were concerned.  The nurse and I got to the back room where Bill was resting on a gurney and as talkative as always.  His heart rate had returned to normal, but they needed to admit him to the emergency room so that a cardiologist could review what happened.  An attendant wheeled Bill’s gurney as we negotiated the elevators and hallways and arrived in the emergency room where there was some confusion about where to put Bill. 

 

The confusion got quickly resolved, and they put him into a one-person room – from my experiences with emergency rooms, an unusual step that suggested how seriously they took his condition.  They kept him connected to an EKG and monitored that closely for the next few hours.  Finally, the emergency room cardiologist determined that Bill needed to be transferred to their cardiac ward which was at another campus nearby.  November 9 was on a Thursday, and by the time they made the decision, it was late in the evening.  No beds were available in the cardiac ward.  They would try again on Friday to find a bed, and they would continue to monitor Bill carefully overnight.  I went home.

 

On Friday morning, I arrived to find Bill still in the emergency room.  The emergency services cardiologist strongly inferred a need for a pacemaker.  However, there wouldn’t be a definitive diagnosis until Bill could be transferred to the cardiac unit.  And if a pacemaker were required, it would have to wait until Monday anyway, since the schedule was full that day, and the hospital doesn’t implant pacemakers on the weekend.  So I visited Bill an additional two days in the emergency room where they monitored him until a cardiac bed opened on Saturday night.  When I visited him on Sunday morning, the hospital had transferred him to a cardiac bed.  There, the cardiac team diagnosed him with Wenckebach Syndrome, an irregularity of the heart rhythm.  He would need a pacemaker, so they scheduled him to have it implanted the following day. 

 

On Monday, I arrived as Bill was in the operating room receiving his pacemaker.  When the staff notified me that the procedure was completed, I waited in his room until they wheeled him in.  He was groggy but reasonably coherent.  By the time the surgeon arrived to check in on him, he was close to fully awake.  He and the cardiac surgeon discussed the procedure and its outcome.  Then the team left Bill to rest while I read news articles online.  I went back on Tuesday to give him a ride home.  That, I thought, was that.  He’d have to adjust to life with a pacemaker, but I’ve seen a lot of other folks do that.  It was fortunate they discovered the issue during the colonoscopy.   

 

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of the surprises.  Before they discharged Bill from the hospital, the cardiology team ordered an x-ray to check the pacemaker’s placement.  The placement was fine; but they also saw a mass on his lung and suggested further testing to determine what that was.  Within a few weeks that further testing revealed that Bill had lung cancer.  He wasn’t a smoker, but he had lung cancer.  It seemed unfair that someone who exercised to excess and didn’t drink alcohol or smoke would have cancer, especially lung cancer.  But there it was. 

 

Another cancer (of the colon) had killed Bill’s wife, Mary’s sister Ana, three years before.  After helping her navigate five years of cancer treatments that didn’t save her life, Bill was especially anxious.  The hospital recommended a thoracic surgeon to excise the tumor and an oncologist to manage the cancer overall.  In March he had the surgery and spent another five days in the hospital.  The tumor took hours to remove, but further testing showed no systemic spread of the cancer.  Within a few weeks, as he recovered from surgery, the oncologist prescribed chemotherapy once every three weeks.  He’d had one or two treatments when we left for our trip in early May, and he reported the effects were manageable.  Then in late May, six months after Bill went for a routine colon screening, I received the call I describe above. 

 

That was quite a journey:  from colonoscopy to a cardiac pacemaker to lung cancer and then death from natural causes.  Considering it now, my head still spins.  Life really is unscripted.

 

The experiences leave me reflecting on how I reacted to seeing people experience such dramatic life events when I was 20, or 40, or even 60.  In my twenties, I would’ve tried to have it make sense.  I’d be looking for the meaning that helped such a series of events fit into some grand scheme of the universe.  Was this an experience to prepare me for life’s challenges; was it a way of understanding the natural patterns of life and death; could I find some good in what happened?  I may have even kept that meaning-seeking approach into my thirties.  By my forties, though, I’d given up looking for meaning and patterns in life events.  I saw that people who lived self-absorbed, destructive lives thrived while people who selflessly sacrificed for others struggled.  I could be cynical about that and see life nihilistically.  However, I didn’t see any value in nihilism, so I avoided it.  But I stopped trying to find some grand pattern to life.  Instead, in my forties and fifties, I looked for lessons I might take to apply to my own life and the impact I wanted to have in that life. 

 

That changed, too.  As I entered my sixties and now in my early seventies, I no longer need a reason.  There aren’t lessons I can take and apply to my life in Bill’s death.  I learned from how he lived his life, as I’ve learned from just about every person I’ve known.  But his passing leaves me with no lessons to apply, no grand patterns to observe, and no meaning behind the death.  And now as I get closer to my own end, I’m okay with that.  I’m sad to have lost Bill.  I take lessons from having watched parts of his life, but not from his death.  His death just leaves me sad. 

 

That’s the biggest change from my younger days.  I can now understand and experience my emotions without having to take a lesson from an experience.  In the intervening 50 years, I’ve decided that death is loss – no more and no less.  I now experience it regularly as friends, family, and colleagues I’ve known die.  I talk with others my age and older who experience this, too.  As we age, we lose more of the people around us.  Our circles of relationship become smaller as the natural process of death continues.  Understanding and accepting the inevitability of that process doesn’t diminish the losses.  Those aren’t easy.  But without the burden of trying to decipher their meaning, I’m free to experience each death and reflect on what that person’s life meant in my life.  I retain each person’s memory as a vault of treasured, shared experiences.  And I retain my sadness as part of my knowledge of those people. 

 

Each of the deaths I’ve mentioned so far affected me differently because my relationship was different with each person.  Ben Williams (whose memorial service we intended to attend) and I were in graduate school together 30 years ago.  We’re of the same generation with similar values.  When we met, I was in my early 40s, and Ben and his wife Libby in their late 30s.  Mary and I connected with a few other folks during that time, and we all created a community that included one of the professors.  Over the years since then, we gathered sporadically, but the bond we began in grad school remained.  We’d begin discussions as if we were continuing a conversation from the previous day – even though a year or more might have passed since seeing each other.  During the pandemic, we met weekly for virtual cocktails via videoconferencing until that became bi-weekly and then stopped altogether as we all resumed more typical routines as pandemic restrictions lessened.  When Libby sent the group a note explaining that Ben had died from a sudden heart attack, through my tears, I couldn’t grasp his passing.  I still can’t since I expect that he’ll send me one of his famously long e-mail messages suggesting that we should connect via phone or video conferencing.  No lessons or patterns to learn from his death, just loss and sadness in knowing I won’t get another one of those messages. 

 

Mary’s sister Ana suffered from both colon cancer and the early stages of dementia in her final years.  Though I met Ana before I knew Mary, Ana was someone I never knew well.  She talked a lot in her earlier years, but the talking was a way of keeping anyone from really knowing her.  She’d talk about martial arts (she became an expert Wing Chun practitioner), or politics, or the price of groceries, or any topic.  She didn’t talk to communicate and rarely acknowledged what anyone else said.  She talked to fill the empty space between her and other people.  It was a trait in her family as many of them did the same.  As she faded into dementia and the effects of cancer, it was hard for me to feel her loss as deeply as I would for others I’ve known more closely.  I was as sad for the way in which she lived her last years as I was about losing her.  Bill’s death similarly affected me.  In our regular conversations, he remarked at how isolated he felt after Ana died.  Nothing could bring him any joy or comfort.  I watched as Bill’s experiences reinforced my understanding of the need for personal connections in my life.  In some ways, I’m relieved to know that he died peacefully in his sleep.  And, as with Ana, I’m sad that someone lived in such melancholy. 

 

In these three deaths, I see the current state of my evolution about death.  I’ve been aware of death throughout my life.  My father died when I was 15, and other relatives’ and friends’ deaths contributed to my awareness of death as a constant in life.  Now, as I contemplate my own ending, I see how death leaves only emotions.  Each of the deaths I describe here, and all the ones I can think of in my life, elicit different emotions.  I’m left to sort through them to understand what I’m feeling and why.  That seems a big enough task to process without seeking meaning or purpose.  I share all this publicly as a way of expressing some of those emotions – and in the hope that someone reads this and can see a reflection of their own emotional journey.  While I don’t see grand patterns of life from which to learn, shared emotion is something that feels very human.  It’s by sharing joy and grief and everything in between that we affirm life.   So I share these emotions as a way of affirming my life and the lives of all whom I’ve known. 

811... Medicine in a foreign land (May, 2024)

It started with a cold.  We’d driven 2700 miles from home, were staying in a hotel in Canada, and I felt miserable.  Coughing, running nose, wheezing.  I found the nearest pharmacy where I bought a box of Mucinex DM.  Then it was back to the hotel and falling asleep as the medication calmed the symptoms.  I awoke the next morning with the hope that it would be a quickly passing bug.  A fruitless hope.  The cold wasn’t subsiding.  While we’d planned to tour Montreal that day, and while we’d been looking forward to Montreal the whole way as we drove from the west, I wasn’t going anywhere that day.  We ordered room service, and the only food I could tolerate was the soup.  A second night of sweaty virus dreams while hoping the following day would be better. 

It wasn’t.  As I arose the next morning and went into the bathroom to shower, I coughed.  Just a regular, cold-induced cough to clear my chest.  I’d been coughing for a couple of days by then, so I thought nothing of it as it happened.  But this time, I felt a familiar pinch in my lower right back.  I’ve had issues with that muscle since the early ‘70s when I worked as a warehouseman.  That pinch told me that my back was about to become painful.  While I’ve experienced this for years, this time, though, what started as a pinch quickly became a searing stab.  I doubled over to relieve the tension on the affected muscle.  That reduced the pain.  But I found I couldn’t move any part of my body without radiating pain from that point in my back to everywhere.  If I moved either leg, the pain would stop me.  Even moving my hands to steady myself was exceedingly painful.  After a few minutes, I realized I was immobilized.  I called out to wake Mary for her help.

 

First, she tried to help me move.  But any movement exacerbated the pain.  With more time, my leg muscles were getting fatigued from my hunched position.  I needed a solution.  I could tolerate the pain of moving if that would bring some relief.  But going all the way to the floor seemed like a bad choice since I knew I wouldn’t rise again.  It would’ve been nice to have a wheelchair where I could collapse, and the thought of a wheelchair reminded me that the hotel room had an office chair.  Mary brought it to the bathroom door, positioned it, and I painfully pivoted so that I could slide into it while ignoring the tormenting pain.  It took a while, but I got into the chair.  After I fully landed, Mary pushed the chair back to the side of the bed.  It would take more agonizing movements.  With her help, I eventually landed on the bed – at an odd angle – but fully on the bed.  We weren’t going to see Montreal that day either. 

 

I spent the day taking some emergency pain pills that Mary had brought along.  If there’s a plus side to living with someone who suffers from fibromyalgia and rheumatoid arthritis, it’s that she travels with pain medications to cope with occasional flare-ups.  Those dulled the pain only slightly.  I remained immobile.  As the day proceeded, I found that I was trapped in place.  There was no evidence that I’d be able to leave the bed anytime soon.  I’d had back problems for years, but nothing like this.  I needed medical help.  However, we were in a foreign country with no understanding of the medical system.  We called the front desk, explained the situation, and asked the clerk what we should do.  The clerk explained that the province of Quebec has a special line to call.  We should call 811 where a nurse would answer and help us. 

 

We called and were greeted by a nurse who briefly took my medical history and got some critical details about my health, medications, and current condition.  I explained that I’d been taking Mary’s pain medications with little impact.  The nurse responded to ask if we had any muscle relaxants on hand.  She couldn’t tell me to take any of the muscle relaxants that Mary brought with her.  However, she could recommend that we obtain an over-the-counter muscle relaxant called Roboxin that contained methocarbamol, a medication that Mary knew because her physician had prescribed it for post-surgery the year before.  Robaxacet was a version of the same drug with acetaminophen added.  Both were available at any nearby pharmacy.

 

The nurse explained that I should try a muscle relaxant and wait for two hours.  If there was no improvement at that time, I should call 911 for on-scene emergency assistance.  She started a file so that, if necessary, EMTs would have preliminary information on me.  I hung up the phone, took one of the muscle relaxants that Mary had, and we waited.  Within two hours, I could move my arms and legs without initiating pain that previously streaked throughout my body.  The pill worked.  Within four hours, I could adjust my position on the bed so that I could sleep.  The next morning, I used the office chair by myself as a support to get up and get showered.  I was slow, but I could move well enough to get to the elevator and out to the parking lot.  A pharmacy nearby had walking canes, and I was able to drive to purchase a cane and some Robaxacet.  We extended our stay at the hotel to allow my back to get rested.  Between the rest and the medication, I became well enough to drive and finish the next 3,500 miles of our trip.  I walked with a cane for a few weeks afterward, and I was cautious about standing too much or twisting or lifting. 

 

The experience provided a few lessons.  Most importantly, the experience reinforced the value of what gets derided in the states as “socialized medicine.”  Quebec offers its 811 service to its residents, as well as to passers-through like me.  If I’d had a similar event in the U.S., I would’ve had to find a way to get to an urgent care center or hospital emergency room.  That would’ve been unimaginably painful to do.  It would’ve been impossible to do by ourselves and most likely would’ve required an ambulance.  If I’d gotten there, the expense to my insurance would’ve been much more than a box of pills and 30 minutes time by an RN.  Probably, if I’d been in the U.S., a call to the front desk where I explained that I was immobile would’ve meant a call to 911.  The costs of transporting me, and then the additional costs of emergency services would’ve been astronomical.  I then would’ve waited for hours while physicians ran a lot of expensive tests to confirm a diagnosis.  Finally, I would’ve been given an expensive, prescription muscle relaxant. 

 

Instead, I found relief in a few hours.  I spent no time in a hospital or urgent care clinic.  My private insurance and Medicare didn’t have to pay thousands of dollars.  The medication I needed was readily available without prescription – which makes sense since physicians, even in the U.S., have been prescribing methocarbamol since the 1950s.  It’s a safe, relatively inexpensive, and non-narcotic medicine that works well.  Quebec’s 811 system kept me free from lengthy, costly, and unnecessary treatments.  Because of it, I experienced quicker relief of my pain at a fraction of the cost that I would’ve incurred in the U.S. 

 

Now it’s someone else’s turn:  Tell me your story that proves the evils of socialized medicine. 

Living the golden rule

Just about everyone I know recognizes “the golden rule” about treating others like you want to be treated.  It’s fundamental to Christianity.  Like all simple ideas, though, there’s more to it.  According to the book of Luke (Luke 10:25-37), there are two basic rules to guarantee eternal life:  love god and love your neighbor as yourself.  Yes, there are other rules in Christianity to follow.  But the text in Luke reports that when Jesus was asked to explain how someone would live eternally, those are the two rules he identified.

The person who asked the question was a religious scholar.  He decided to set a rhetorical trap for Jesus.  He followed his original question about eternal life by asking Jesus to define who would qualify as a neighbor.  The answer gets lost when people glibly cite the golden rule.  Jesus’ response counters the selectivity that some folks seem to have when they consider whom they should love as they love themselves.  In response to the scholar, Jesus offered the parable of the good Samaritan. 

 

Today, the term “Samaritan” gets associated with good deeds and hospitals and charities because of that parable.  The word has lots of good connotations now.  In the times described by the gospel of Luke, however, the Jewish people whom Jesus was addressing generally disliked and distrusted Samaritans.  There was a history of enmity between the two groups that the contemporary listeners would immediately grasp.  Jesus selected the Samaritan as the good person in the parable to make a point.  That “neighbor” who should get treated as well as we’d like to be treated can be someone who’s completely opposite to us – and maybe even someone we dislike or fear.  The good Samaritan was a member of a despised group who took time from his day to help someone else who most likely hated him.  And it’s important to notice that the Samaritan took that action when two different religious people didn’t. 

 

Loving your neighbor as yourself isn’t, according to the text, about loving people like you.  It’s about treating others well despite your differences with them.  That puts a lot into perspective.  Someone who wants me to hate or fear others who are different than me isn’t practicing Christianity.  In case you don’t yet see the connection to our current situation, let me be clear:  Demonizing immigrants is anti-Christian.  Creating a political campaign that purposely lies to further those fears is anti-Christian.  That label applies to the people who create those stories and to the people who support them.  If you intend to follow biblical rules, it’s your role to help people who are different than you – to care for them as you would want to be.  If that doesn’t sound right, don’t take my word for it.  Go read. 

 

The parable and point are easy to understand when you read the parable completely.  If you read the whole context, you can’t miss the point.  Here’s the King James version of Luke 10:25-37:

 

25 And, behold, a certain lawyer stood up, and tempted him, saying, Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?

 

26 He said unto him, What is written in the law? how readest thou?

 

27 And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.

 

28 And he said unto him, Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live.

 

29 But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour?

 

30 And Jesus answering said, A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead.

 

31 And by chance there came down a certain priest that way: and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side.

 

32 And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place, came and looked on him, and passed by on the other side.

 

33 But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him,

 

34 And went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.

 

35 And on the morrow when he departed, he took out two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him, Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee.

36 Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?

37 And he said, He that shewed mercy on him. Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise.

Want to follow the teachings of Jesus?  Go and do thou likewise.

Found Phone Message Slip from 1979… the childless dog guy responds

 

 

Before people were constantly available through cell phones, e-mail, SMS, and videoconferencing, it was often challenging to connect with someone during the workday.  If you worked at a job that wasn’t at a desk, especially, phone message slips were how you knew someone was trying to reach you.  People with phones at their desks had pads of these.  When they received a call for someone who wasn’t available, they’d take the message, write the important details on one of these slips, and pass it along to that person.  One that I received years ago is what’s pictured above.

 

In 1979, I was a maintenance mechanic at the Santa Cruz Sentinel newspaper (their logo is at the bottom of the slip).  I didn’t have a mailbox where I received messages because I didn’t need one.  Nobody called me at work.  I’d worked in an office before I left that job to become a full-time student (and a full-time maintenance mechanic).  So these slips weren’t foreign to me – they just weren’t something I received at this job.  Maybe Debbie (whose initials are on the slip) waited for me to walk through the office and flagged me down to give me the message.  Or she may have come to the basement where the shop was to hand the note to me since the caller was requesting a call-back within 15 minutes.  Now years later, I can’t recall.  However, this magenta piece of paper had enough impact that I kept it as a memento and just found it in a stored, forgotten box 45 years later.  This message turned out to be the start of a very long journey that I couldn’t have anticipated or planned.  That journey continues even now.

 

The caller was a high school principal I knew.  I’d just completed the requirements for a bachelor’s degree in English the week before, and he was looking for somebody to fill in as a substitute English teacher for someone on maternity leave.   As I later learned, although that teacher gave the school months of notice about her impending delivery, the principal hadn’t found a replacement.  He was calling me on the Monday that made this teacher’s absence real because he had no teacher assigned to her classes.  I returned the call and the principal asked me to come for an interview.  I took time away from work that week for the interview and was offered the job.  A week after the call, the Sentinel graciously allowed me to leave with no notice, and I was a high school English teacher.  From that time forward until now and without interruption, I’ve been employed in education as a teacher, administrator, researcher, or consultant.  That magenta slip of paper started it all.

 

In over 45 years since, I’ve had the privilege of connecting to thousands of lives.  Education is about helping people build their dreams.  I’ve worked in those 45 years in many roles, but at the core of all my work is the hope that one more person could build one more dream through my efforts.  That’s an unparalleled privilege that educators have.  This work has also given me the flexibility to evolve from a secondary English teacher into becoming a college instructor and later professor who prepared teachers, to being an administrator who helped shape institutions, to being a researcher and consultant whose work expanded beyond the impact that I had in one institution.  It’s a gift that life has given me, and it began with that magenta piece of paper.

 

In reflecting on that message slip, I feel pretty good about my professional life.  Yet there are evidently some who believe that I shouldn’t have been allowed to have it.  My wife and I’ve always had dogs, not cats, and I identify as male; but the message from the Republican vice-presidential candidate is clear:  If you don’t have children of your own, you don’t belong in education.  Aside from his misogynistic targeting of women in his remarks, the senator is, I assume, telling all of us who haven’t reproduced to stay out of education.  His premise seems to be that the experience of giving birth to and raising a child is a prerequisite to educating others.  I don’t have children, so I must be one of those dangerous indoctrinators the senator suggests should be excluded from working in education.  No one should’ve called me 45 years ago seeking to interview me for a job unless I had children or was willing to commit to having children.

 

Does the last sentence in the paragraph above read as weirdly as it was to write?  As I think back on the thousands of students whose lives intersected mine, the programs I helped to build, the ideas I helped to develop and disseminate, the institutions I helped shape and continue to support, I wonder how they would differ if I weren’t there.  I’m realistic about what I accomplished in each of these roles.  I taught secondary students for fewer than 180 hours in a year, and college students even fewer.  Given all else that happened in a person’s year, whatever impact I made was small.  The colleges and universities I helped manage or with which I’ve consulted have taken ideas I helped create and have evolved them well beyond where I left them.  And any article, book chapter, or book that I wrote has now become just one item in a long list of references in someone else’s writing.  But all those small impacts exist.  Whatever anyone believes about me or my work, that work would not have existed if I’d been excluded from education – if the principal from 45 years ago would’ve decided I was unqualified from consideration because of my parental status.

 

Governor Walz is right to label these kinds of ideas as “weird.”  Until now, I’ve not had someone challenge my career choice because I wasn’t a parent.  Actually, I’ve experienced the opposite as the people I’ve been honored to serve allow me into their lives as I celebrated their successes, counseled them through disappointments, attended their performances, participated their life milestone events, or shared their confidences.  That doesn’t make me a parent.  I didn’t walk the floor holding them as they struggled with whooping cough, or worry about whether they were getting the right nutrition as they grew, or stay up waiting for them after a late night.  But many of my former students and former colleagues found a place in their lives for me, and I’ve found a place in my life for them.  If I hadn’t returned that phone call 45 years ago, I wouldn’t have those connections.  And that ability to connect with others, to share in their lives and they in mine, seems a much better metric of who should be in education.  It’s definitely a better metric than a procreation test.