Saturday, February 26, 2011

The Waiting Room

The waiting room is crowded, but not so much that people have to share armrests, which pleases me. People are scattered about the room. Some of them are waiting for news of a loved one, while others are waiting to be admitted. It is truly a room for waiting. Nancy is sitting to my right, and I'm rubbing her back. She is nervous, as she is about to have surgery on her foot, to remove a hallux valgus and the bunion it is causing. This will be done via an osteotomy. Basically, a bony bump at the base of her big toe needs to be removed. She wouldn't let me do it with my home podiatry kit, so here we are.

While I have a lot of experience with surgery, Nancy does not, but she is handling the stress well. At this particular moment, as we wait for her name to be called, she is a bit annoyed because she can't drink Diet Coke, or smoke. She can't even drink any water. Her mouth is dry, and she's a little miserable. Despite that, she is in good spirits. Every so often I lean over and kiss her head. No matter how often we are told that this is routine surgery, we are still nervous. If anything were to happen to Nancy, I'd be lost forever.

Ten minutes have passed, and they have called Nancy into the "little room" where they make you wear a Johnny, lie down on a gurney, and freeze your ass off before knocking you out for the actual surgery. As she continues on her journey, I'm sitting in the waiting room and reading Down and Out in London and Paris by George Orwell. As I look around the room, I notice that I'm the only person without a cell phone. A 50-something Hispanic woman is closest to me and is talking very loudly on her little phone. "Aww, don't hit the dog, he's a good dog," I overhear her say, and then, "I love you" three times before she terminates the call.

About an hour later, I'm still thinking about the dog. Did her husband or lover or whatever really hit a dog, or is this just a familiar, playful conversation? Naturally, I do not know. Sometimes, my father and I will get angry with one of the cats (Ghost) and say, "That's it! Pack up your squeaky toys, Ghost, you're going to the farm!" Or even, "If you scratch your claws on that couch one more time, I'm going to fucking kill you!" These are jokes. But was this woman joking? I'll never know. I sigh, and return to my book.

Two hours later and I'm still reading. A couple of people are in the waiting room with me. There's a sign around here somewhere prohibiting food and drink, but I brazenly ignore it and open my Diet Coke. At some point I finished the Orwell book, and am now reading some kind of baby magazine. Woman in it are asking physicians, nurses, mid-wives, and swamis about baby. Why is my baby turning purple? Why does my 8 month old son have an erection? Is it ok to put a crying newborn in a HPC WS-299C soundproof wall safe while he suffers through colic and won't shut the hell up? Good questions, all. I'm fascinated.

4 hours and 58 minutes later, a nurse pops through the door and asks for "Mr. Darren Lyle." I jump up and say, "That's me. Is everything ok? Can I see her now?" The nurse replies, "Yes, she is doing very well. She sent me out here to get a Diet Coke from you." That's my Nancy. At that moment I had half a can left, and I gave it to the nurse. She turned and went backstage without another word. My fiancee was making her wishes clear, and the nurses were quick to grant them. Nancy wanted Diet Coke, dammit, and that's the end of it. Diet ginger ale? Ice water? No, no, no. In my mind she says to me, "I don't want that piss."

They soon buzz me in and I enter the large recovery room, festooned with curtains marking off each patients turf. In the 20 seconds it takes to find Nancy, I see two asses, both peeking out of poorly tied johnnies. As I look around, beyond a curtain, I hear the woman I love say, "When can I go, I need a cigarette." I smile.

When I find her, I kiss her. She doesn't want anything that she can't smoke at the moment, but she kisses me back and smiles, nonetheless. There is a deep sense of relief that she made it through this surgery. Routine or not, it's surgery. I was worried. A dull ache pounds from a place deep in my chest. I'm an emotional person, and I get a little chocked-up. Nancy looks great, despite just having had surgery. Her little foot is thickly bandaged.

We get our things together, and watch the pouring rain as we wait for our ride to take us home.

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Empathy Needs To Make A Comeback

The recent dust-up in Wisconsin (and on to Ohio and Indiana) regarding the fundamental right of workers to collective bargain seems to have fired up the left, at long last. Most people today seem ignorant of the history of the labor movement, and forget that safety regulations in the workplace, prohibitions against child labor, the establishment of a minimum wage, overtime pay, and collective bargaining were hard fought victories that were paid for with the blood of average people who had simply had enough. The people who crammed into the Wisconsin State House in Madison drew a proverbial line in the sand and said, "No more without a fight." They, too, had simply had enough. Beyond layoffs and pay cuts, which are part of the bargaining process and accepted as such by the rank-and-file (no strike, soft or otherwise, was called for until collective bargaining itself was threatened).

Republicans, naturally, try to divert attention away from this, and portray public employees as greedy little pigs who refuse to make sacrifices, like everyone else, to balance their state budgets. Teachers are attacked as thugs. Governor Walker of Wisconsin is lauded as a man of reason and honesty, tellin' it like it is. We are simply out of money, they say, and have no other choice. Strangely enough, there is money for tax cuts for the wealthy, but that's a post for another day.

How many people understand that this isn't about employee pension contributions, wage cuts, or any other specific negotiations of any given union? How many people, in a country where only 7% of the population is in a union, even know what is collective bargaining? Do we have to pay for the same real estate twice by retreating and then fighting again to re-achieve these rights?

These questions don't keep me up at night, as bothersome and upsetting as they are. They don't teach labor history in school very much, and as I said, most people simply have no union experience. And this assault was very easy to predict. Republicans have been attacking unions with vigor for decades, and they finally got to the core issue, the very thing that makes a union a union. We can educate people who have forgotten, or never knew, what the workplace was like before organized labor took a stand. Yes, we can do that.

What bothers me, shakes me, keeps me up at night, is the lack of empathy and compassion for those who are scared for their families and themselves. Massive cuts in pay, at a time when the economy is in shambles and the cost of food and gas keeps climbing ever higher, could shatter families. Poverty is a terrible thing. It causes fear, anxiety, depression, and attacks the dignity of people. And who is in the cross-hairs of union busters? Mostly teachers. Working class men and women who have taken on a task of great importance and difficulty. To educate our children and satisfy endlessly concerned parents that this endeavor is taken seriously, attentively and carefully. To work against budget cuts (many teachers buy supplies for their students) and make sure no child falls through the cracks. A teacher influences that fate of every student, every single one. How many of us were inspired by a teacher and guided towards a course of action that has led to a better life? Young people without any sense of self-worth are encouraged to apply to college (I was). Who would envy a teacher's job?

Yet these people are attacked with a hateful vengeance. After a trillion dollars was spent in a historically (for any country) unprecedented bail-out of banks, we watched as massive bonuses were paid out to the very people who caused the banking crisis to begin with. What was their excuse? We need to attract the best people, and we need to pay them a lot of money to keep them, thus bonuses are given, with tax-payer money.

We need to pay well to attract the best people, they said. Consider that. If a job doesn't pay well, what person of worth would take it?

So I ask, who would go into teaching at this point in history? Who would take on the responsibility? The long hours? The expensive education? The very people who take care of and educate our children are attacked with greater ferocity than the crooks at Goldman-Sachs. Millionaire bankers who game the system with complex algorithms in order to make more millions are attacked less passionately than working class teachers.

Have we lost our fucking minds?

How can we argue one minute that we need to pay bankers an absurd amount of money to attract the best and brightest, and then argue moments later that we should nickle and dime teachers, a field that most of us would agree needs to attract the best people. Not only that, but to deform the system permanently so they can never again negotiate a contract.

Even if you disagree with teachers, why is there such anger against them? Is it a symptom of the times? It seems to be. A modicum of understanding for other people shouldn't be such a challenge. That brings to mind another issue, abortion.

Is it so hard to understand that a 14 year old incest victim, carrying a baby, would want to at least have the option of having an abortion? Anti-choice people are rabid, and pretend not to understand that a rational, decent, morally scrupulous human being would want to have an abortion. Where is empathy? Is it so difficult to imagine that your daughter, friend, mother, aunt, sister, et al may want to turn to abortion as a solution?

These two issues, unions and choice, have compelled a lot of strong, ferocious commentary against people. Just people. It's so easy to judge and attack people in the abstract. It's like road rage. Someone cuts you off and you want to shoot them, but if eye contact is made or the two drivers know each other, there is understanding. How else could you explain the anger, the nastiness, regarding these two issues? People who don't know the teachers who are protesting in Madison are quick to call them terrible names and accuse them of every bad thing. Or attack an incest victim who needs help paying for an abortion?

Empathy and compassion need to make a return. Regardless of how you feel intellectually about the pro and con arguments with these issues, it's time to remember our humanity and put the vitriol aside. These are our countrymen and women, our sisters and brothers.

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Where Am I?

This morning I accidentally went to the wrong hospital for an appointment. I've lived in this city all my life, which makes this particularly disconcerting. Mt. Auburn Hospital and Cambridge Hospital melt into each other in my feeble mind. Years ago, I awoke in Cahill House, a nuthouse attached to Cambridge Hospital. Not knowing where I was (having been delivered there in a less than totally conscious state) I asked the man in the next bed where I was, exactly. He said, "Some psych ward, or something." That much was clear to me. "Which one?" I asked again, staring through the thick screen and bars covering the window next to me. The view didn't help me ascertain my location. It was a city, that I knew, but which one? It was morning, and people looked busy, going this way and that, most of them with coffee in their mitts. My roommate, a handsome, tanned young man with a foreign accent that was difficult to place, said, "Mt. Auburn Hospital." For three days I wandered the halls, attended therapy, shaved with a rubber razor, and ate countless graham crackers while thinking I was at a totally different hospital.

That little bit of misinformation has led to years of inconvenient and embarrassing mistakes. The wrong data was baked right into my mind over several days, and nothing was going to change that. Nothing. Wires had been crossed. Thus, this morning Nancy and I arrived at Mt. Auburn Hospital when we were supposed to be at Cambridge Hospital. "This isn't the right hospital." Nancy told me. "Yes it is." I replied, a bit annoyed. After all, she just moved here from Duluth and had been to the hospital only once.

But she was right. It was so humiliating. I chalked it up to electro-convulsive therapy and the aforementioned experience at Cahill. Why not?

Memory is a fragile thing. At the rate I'm going, I'll be able to hide my own Easter eggs pretty soon. At age 38 my mind is shot, after years of psychiatric drugs and various treatments, along with a strong possibility that my mind was weak and screwed up from the get-go. And there is always the chance that, as a baby, someone dropped me on my soft little bean. Does the five second rule apply to babies dropped on the floor? Pick him up within five seconds and he won't have a ruined brain for life. Maybe someone dropped me on my little fontanel and didn't pick me up within five seconds. Eep.

Friends tell me that they make stupid mistakes like this, just like me. I'd like to believe them.

Some guy, age 20 or so, won't stop calling his brother from the back stoop of their flat, perhaps 200 feet away from my window. "Hey, Ryan!" he yells, over and over again, filling the courtyard with noise from his pie hole. If you'll excuse me, I'm going to go find Ryan, or grab the fellow doing the yelling and beat the holy hell out of him. Ryan go home, or stop calling for Ryan. Something has got to give. There he goes again. "Ryyyaaaannn!" Somewhere in the distance, a reply. "What?!" A conversation between two people a quarter mile apart is brewing.

This is why guns are dangerous. They compel their own use. I would have shot this prick already if I were packing heat.

But I digress.

What was I talking about?

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Thinking of Wisconsin

In 1992, I met Frank P. Zeidler at the Socialist Party National Convention at the Hotel Wisconsin in Milwaukee. Comrade Zeidler was the Socialist mayor of that great city from 1948 to 1960. I'll never forget the conversations we had, and the time he took to encourage me. I made a motion at that convention, and he seconded it. As the chair of the SP Health Care Work Group, and a young man out of his depth (I'm a terrible public speaker), I needed all the encouragement I could get.

Every year since then, up until 2005, he sent me a Christmas Card. He died in the summer of 2006. Frank was a kind, thoughtful, wonderful human being. The recent protests in Madison have me thinking of him.

If I could be in Wisconsin, I'd be singing this with my brothers and sisters with Frank in mind. Let us sing of solidarity!
When the union's inspiration through the workers' blood shall run,
There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun;
Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one,
But the union makes us strong.
CHORUS:
Solidarity forever,
Solidarity forever,
Solidarity forever,
For the union makes us strong.
Is there aught we hold in common with the greedy parasite,
Who would lash us into serfdom and would crush us with his might?
Is there anything left to us but to organize and fight?
For the union makes us strong.
Chorus
It is we who plowed the prairies; built the cities where they trade;
Dug the mines and built the workshops, endless miles of railroad laid;
Now we stand outcast and starving midst the wonders we have made;
But the union makes us strong.
Chorus
All the world that's owned by idle drones is ours and ours alone.
We have laid the wide foundations; built it skyward stone by stone.
It is ours, not to slave in, but to master and to own.
While the union makes us strong.
Chorus
They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn,
But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn.
We can break their haughty power, gain our freedom when we learn
That the union makes us strong.
Chorus
In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold,
Greater than the might of armies, magnified a thousand-fold.
We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old
For the union makes us strong.

Monday, February 14, 2011

A Few Words About Social Security

You hear it on the news almost every night, particularly if you happen to watch Moneyline or any show that deals with the economy, and/or provides investment advice. It's a mantra that is repeated over and over again, that Social Security is not a viable entity and will be bankrupt within 30 years (depending on the rate of inflation). The Congressional Budget Office estimates that Social Security with be just fine until 2037, based on an estimated inflation rate of 2.8%. The problem, detractors say, is that inflation will probably hover over 3% or more, creating a bankrupt Social Security system within years, not decades.

There is a big, fat hairy omission in this analysis.

The money that is deducted from your paycheck, and met by your employer, is placed ever-so-gently into the Social Security trust fund. But it's not as if your money sits there waiting for you to retire. After current beneficiaries are paid, surplus dollars are used to buy bonds from the US Treasury. While the trust has the bonds, the money is then in the Treasury, where Congress can use it for any purpose.

So the same Republicans (and some Democrats) bitching about the health of Social Security are borrowing from it to pay for whatever they like, and complaining about the cuts necessary to make good on the money owed.

This is the first year that Social Security has had to cash in one of those bonds in order to make good on it's obligations. This is going to keep happening, and Congress is going to have to pay the IOU's it never should have borrowed from the trust fund in the first place. And every time Congress has to pony up on an IOU, senators and representatives of a certain ilk are going to complain that they are "bailing out" Social Security, when all they are doing is paying money back into the trust fund that was borrowed.

It's not unlike borrowing money from a friend, and then acting as if you're giving him or her your hard-earned money out of charity when you pay back the loan. The money you owe your friend.

Social Security is a total, absolute and complete success. That doesn't mean it doesn't have problems, but none of them are fundamental. And millions of Americans are fed, provided with necessary health care, and kept off the streets solely because of this program. Those who want to chip away at Social Security, to privatize it in part or entire, don't give a flying fuck about the people it helps. And if they get their way and take us back to a time when the elderly and disabled lived on the streets, in doorways, in parks...they won't care. It's a game to them.

It's not to people like me. It's life and death.


Friday, February 11, 2011

Yay for Pills

All the wonderful little pills that cascade into my face. Each of them has a mission; replace thyroid hormone, prevent seizure, cool the dude out, etc. They are all invited into my humble flat and shown into a waiting room, which is little more than a shoe box. There they wait, until they are needed. And they will be needed.

I see you there, little pink pill. You can try to hide, but I will find you and inhale you into my liver. Schwooop! Yes, yes, there is a big white one comically hiding behind the little one. Don't even try to get away. You are mine.

People who have to take pills are stronger than most of the weaklings who could never understand how fucked up a human being can be. Embrace your pleasant fiction about strength! Enjoy the lie!

Tuesday, February 08, 2011

The Black Feather

Mortal thoughts and fear in a murder of crows, of
black wings that never will we seen
Deep in the forest, with no eye or camera to catch the sight
Brimming with dark tips that stab at the sky, at the trees, at each other
In a pack with young and old alike, with thoughts unknown to us
Of doubt, silent in the wood
Each with an end seen, fear and longing never known to man
Deliverance from pain
A dark feather where a comrade once perched
How will it end, for each black bird alone?
Do other beings in the world around
Think and feel as they do?
The dawn draws concern, to hunger and thirst
What to eat? What do drink? Where to go?
Who to avoid to last just one more day




Monday, February 07, 2011

Four Books All Americans Need to Read

Penn State University recently conducted a study that found something that has me annoyed and upset this morning. The majority of biology teachers stay away from teaching evolution, to avoid controversy. Another 13% teach creationism exclusively.
My university major was evolutionary biology.Some of my fondest m emories from my time at UMass Boston are of Dr. Gibbons and his Forensic Osteology class, and Dr. Summers' Human Variation class, which was hard but sort of fun. Gibbons was my major adviser, and he often took me out to lunch to talk and gossip. I remember discussing the ovarian bursae of the tree shrew and what that means for taxonomical classification. Good times! Three times he took me to Harvard University, where he worked every Thursday. They have a lot of bones over there, yes indeed. On a side note, I met world-renowned entomologist and "ant guy" E.O. White. I swooned.

Sentimental, I am.

If you'd like to learn about evolution, here's a short list of books for those of us who find themselves wondering about evolution. If you're a "creationist" you especially need to read these. Evolution is as real as gravity. If one doesn't understand natural and artificial selection, fitness, adaptation, etc., then one simply cannot stand in judgment of evolution. So very many people criticize evolution without knowing anything about it. Among scientists, there is no debate about the existence of evolution. None. Refined details about this fossil or that gene are studied and reviewed and discussed, of course. It's an exciting, very active field. But no biologist refutes evolution.

It can be seen in the in the field, where bones are found and rigorously dated by association, location, and carbon dating. I highly recommend The Complete World of Human Evolution by Peter Edwards & Chris Stringer. It's very accessible.

New antibiotics have to be developed constantly to combat evolving germs, like MRSA. And in the creation of an updated influenza vaccine every year. An outstanding book on this subject is Evolution in Health & Disease by Koella and Stearns.

One of the greatest scientists to walk the Earth was Charles Darwin. Naturally, it would be wise to read his On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection. Most people have heard of it, but not so many have actually read it. Darwin was a careful scientist, collecting data in the field for years before spelling out his theory.

Finally, there is Science on Trial: The Case for Evolution Douglas J. Futuyma. I just read this and enjoyed it quite a bit. Futuyma covers the material well, and answers some questions posed by "creationists."

Enjoy.

Tuesday, February 01, 2011

Snow, Curley and Flamethrowers

Boston is currently enjoying yet another major storm, with piles of snow growing higher and more numerous. This letter, written by legendary Boston mayor James Michael Curley to MIT, asks about the practicality of using flame-throwers to melt snow. If this is too small to read, you can also find the letter (and Dr. Compton's response) here. Enjoy.