Last year I wrote an essay entitled Civil(ity) Disobedience. All I questioned or searched for an answer to was what had happened to us as equal citizens and equally equal inhabitants of this country with its lengthy and often lofty promises; its amendments, emoluments, and codes. As custodians of the great irregular circle.
What has happened to our ability to connect elements and actions together when visually verifiable facts seem to matter less and less? This country is being stolen from the people who have always made it great. Am I talking only about America? Or Brazil? Or Austria?
Let me take you back a bit first.
Early in February of 2018 I happened to be well into what happened to be my first flare of the MS variety. Maybe brought on by stress or maybe it was just time. Or maybe the clinical trial I was participating in at the time stroked the wrong axon the wrong way…oh the potential for damage…
It was on the thalamus. The enhancing lesion. I named it Cassandra; blessed with prophecy and cursed by Apollo for nobody believed anything she claimed.
So my body was having trouble communicating with itself; one side would not to talk to the other, all up and down and side to side. Every pore spoken for and yet nothing worked exactly as it should. Not like a fantasy ‘should’ or ‘it should’ or even ‘should it?’ but the basics.
Simple eye-hand coordination. Some slight speech slurring combined with a hyperactive desire for assonance at all costs. Small things but it did need to end. And a change of protocols – drug therapies – was ushered in upon me. With consent of course.
Still the experience with the clinical trial was a sour bite in the end. I was dropped. And I had more tests to pay for.
Discussion with docs regarding what had happened was not going to happen and no further bloodwork, for the time being, would be needed.
Your fault, Sean. Apparently, you are not quite what we needed, Sean. Well, that’s just odd, Sean.
Yeah, ain’t it though…
I thought surely I would be important still for the study: one has to report on the failures as well as the successes right? What went wrong and why…
’Oh no, Sean, that is not going to occur. Lots of money involved here…’
Yes, I still have issues with Big Medicine. Thanks for being there always and yet making it all so complicated at the same time. So we move forward.
The flare passes along with time. There is furious debate while in Spain about the relocation of Franco’s remains while Lorca’s are still missing. Florence happened as did Michael. Hacking occurred; is occurring somewhere now. Sandy Hook was a false flag just like the targeted pipe bombs and…etc.
I honestly don’t know the exact numbers but Big Medicine/Pharma-wagon pushes loads of dough in behind crazy talk radio shows…of both political stripes. Yes, it seems tipped more in one direction for the simple reason: that side has been purchasing as much and as many media outlets as possible for the last 35+ years. And this is just a fact. And this fact is not open for debate.
Do you believe gerrymandering was simply an oversight? Stacking of the courts? The governorships?
Do we really care for our Vets…provide them with the long-term care they deserve…generally speaking?
It’s sick to say I know but it is almost like the molten debates about gun control. Maybe it is just use of the word control. But there is disaster…man-made or men perpetuated or large scale head in sand syndrome…and nothing changes except our abilities to predict such events with regularity. But making predictions and talking about them with frequent and increasing regularity is not exactly taking action is it now? Corrective measures in theory only. What the heck are we so skittish about?
Democracy is strangling.
Meanwhile, there was Kavanaugh. Khashoggi. Pipe bombs. Synagogue shootings. Kroger Market shootings. Just the past month, or days(?), in the big headlines. Smaller headlines:
- Brazil’s National Museum Catches on Fire
- Gay Sex Ban in India Thrown Out
- Election Chaos in Brazil
- Knife Attack in Paris
- Chile Approves Transgender Law
- France to Work on Poverty
- Iraq’s Parliament Breaks Deadlock
- Needles Found in Strawberries
- Former Malaysian Prime Minister Charged with Corruption
- March in Warsaw
- Tanzanian Ferry Capsizes
- Attack on Iran Military Parade
- Nigerian Pirates Kidnap Swiss Crew
- Haddad ahead of Bolsonaro in Brazil
- Buhari Nominated for Re-election in Nigeria
The link to Infoplease for September 2018. One quick micro search. Copy/ Paste. Color and font change.
And what if I had added something, a fabrication about a balm made from grapefruit and poppies curing strep throat and Ebola but withheld from the general public. It needed to be studied. More. At least another 20 years…when the current generation has forgotten altogether or is annihilated with all of the winning that has been thrust upon them. Isn’t that how snake oil works?
Needles in strawberries. I did not click. I do not want to know.
The idea of some such s@#t actually happening at any time, let alone in the 21st century, just bothers me. Really. Do you wonder sometimes if all of the ‘stuff’ happening around you and the rest of the great irregular circle has always been happening, and that you grew up ignoring, willfully misinterpreting the chains carefully laid out, and the cameras, and the monumental weakness before money?
I sure f^&*ing hope I win the lottery cuz I’m not sure I want to be in the front row for the finale. Those military parades are just awful. And oddly hyper-violent, Nationalistic, stroke fests.
But remember how responsive we all were, and how we still are; there are so many disparate sides involved. Even goodwill had rendered itself mad: theories and speculation and abnegation and shrugging and peevish sentiments remain public record. Handling the world on an empty stomach can’t be easy nor can processing events of the day.
And that’s a horrible metaphor to use I know. I know. I know they have worked at removing the litter and raw sewage from the beaches and waters of Boracay. I know that people fell to their deaths from a cliff in Yosemite. And I still had a moment to think about the disaster in Flint and the fact that the Catholic Church is still apologizing and giving out money. And now there is some very, very wealthy person in South Carolina. And there are indeed far too many people literally starving.
Do you know how many churches were crime scenes in the last 2 years? How many schools in the last 10? When did we lose the critical thinking skills that would allow connections and patterns to be made between who is in power and events, the actions committed during their tenure? It’s funny that nobody in the Obama Administration was ever indicted, and yet, avalanche of targeted BS notwithstanding, there were problems, there was hysteria and propaganda. And we all got a bit more jaded.
Where are our sanctuaries? Advice from the top chambers is just stay at home, lock the doors. Or walk boldly with a gun and pockets full of misinformation. Bolsonaro openly admires Pinochet like POTUS openly adores Kim Jong Un.
If only Mr. Rogers were secretly a ninja by night…
Sure people are aware, people in the right places o power, or control. It’s all monitored, even if just in passing and impassively. YOU…are not supposed to worry. YOU should be celebrating every day because today is the greatest day you’ve ever known (Did I just co-opt a Pumpkins tune?).
Yeah, I should be ecstatic because I have not been randomly shot or beheaded or raped or physically beaten down and trampled upon or excoriated publicly. Yet. Did I leave anything out?
Needles in strawberries.
Hazing. Pennsylvania. Now punishable as a felony. ‘Gosh welcome to the club. I sure hope you don’t drink yourself to death or assault woozy coeds during your stay here…man’…So this can’t be new.
We have drunk the punch…many times I wonder? Doesn’t matter what color or which side. It doesn’t. Even chaos is intoxicating and I understand the physiological reasons why that is but not the actual mechanics, the laws of Random A circling Random G and thus producing a climate where Super Typhoon WTF strengthens to Category 11. Perhaps it is just warm water. Again.
What is left to say? When we can’t even agree about the f*&^ing weather… Can we just talk a little…without a fact-checker being involved?
And Bolsonaro just won in Brazil. Nothing in this fact, coupled with the startlingly frigid air of affairs and bloodlust the world over, makes me feel generous and enthused about the near future.
Are we really rewinding? But we’ve come so far together…yet the jackboots are coming down our streets. All the boys cry wolf and all the girls think. And I am not apologizing for anything structurally or chronologically problematic today.
Please don’t get the idea that I am by any means despondent or despairing. I’m neither. And I also have no political allegiance (Obama jailed whistleblowers and let the financial sector off the hook, Trump flat out steals and lies. There – feel better?) so does that make me a pariah?
A socio-economic socialist nihilistic agnostic? That makes no sense whatsoever but I reserve the right to make stuff up as needed. For only a fool walks around with a weapon; for only a swamp diva silences its critics; for only little Virginia believes, still, that there is a Sanity Claus.
Surely I must have a tag. To be labeled is somehow to be human, or at least human made in America. Manufactured. Bold experiment. Brash hat. Reckless model. A nuisance variable – utterly unsystematic.
Neither a validation nor a strawberry.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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