The Very Bad, No Good, Weird Year and a Half.

 My husband told me tonight, "You haven't made a post on your blog in a while. Why not?" Well, it's been a very weird year and a half. 

In March 2023 my colon ruptured and I needed emergency surgery. I had over 12 inches of intestines removed. The entire experience was made even more difficult by a family member who didn't want to honor my request for no visitors while I was in the hospital. The pain when I woke up from surgery was unbelievable in its scope, and I had an ostomy that I had no clue how to care for. Imagine waking up to discover that you've been gutted like a Sunday fish and that you have an attached bag that collects all your defecations on the outside of your body. Now imagine someone wanting to visit while you're in that condition, and when you say, "No," they become upset and then tell you that their pastor is going to come visit. First, the pastor isn't MY pastor and second, I'm a nonbeliever and I barely know him.  I should have let him visit and had my blindingly white ass cheeks sticking out of my gown and made sure my ostomy bag was leaking. The experience humbled me in many ways and also allowed me to shift through what is important and what isn't. My boundaries are important.

I had the ostomy reversed in July 2023, but I'm still having some issues. I having a colonoscopy done on Halloween. I'm dressing up like a Queen (I have a tiara and hot pink boa) for the procedure and I'm writing on my bare butt cheek in Sharpie, "Be Careful" and on the other butt cheek, "Shallow, Not as Deep as it Appears." So, that was the very bad, no good, weird year and half. 

But good things did happen: my youngest son was married in a lovely ceremony to a woman who is just perfect for him, and my other two kids are kicking ass in this thing called life. They all three are. And the grandkids are also holding their own and learning and growing and are healthy. And what more could a mom/grandmother ask for? 

I saw Buddy Guy perform in September 2023 and I saw Barenaked Ladies perform this past Friday night. Music heals. There is still a stack of books on my TO READ list and a ton of books that sit in bookstores waiting for me to buy. Some of the most memorable reads of the past year and a half are "Tender is the Flesh," "Fourteen Days," Demon Copperhead, "A Cloud Shaped Girl, "When Women Were Dragons," and "The Class of '65." 

When I revisit this blog again, the election will have been decided and all I can hope for is that we retain intact our Constitution, that a repeat of Jan 6th isn't replayed, that women's rights and LGBTQ rights are enshrined into federal law, that big money corporations are made to start paying their fair share in taxes (I'm looking at you Amazon, FedEx, Bank Of America, Citigroup, HP, Walmart, and Google), that healthcare for all Americans is made available, that the wars in Ukraine (Slava Ukrani!) and Gaza end, and that every human in the U.S and beyond is treated with dignity and respect.  When a presidential candidate says at a rally, "On day one I will launch the largest deportation program in American history. I will rescue every city and town that has been invaded and conquered," and calls immigrants "blood thirsty and vicious" then it's time to question the morality and values of that candidate (And yes, that was said at Madison Square Garden tonight). A person who views anyone who is not like themselves as "other," will one day see you and me as "other." And that can't be allowed to stand ever again.

 Also, I'm re-reading "The Stand" by Stephen King for the ninth time. Happy Almost Halloween and Colonoscopy Day!! 

No, You Don't Know Him.

 

Every time I think I’ve been able to put it behind me, it rears it ugly head and bites me again. Yesterday an arrest warrant was taken out for my small town sheriff for sexual battery on a prominent Atlanta judge.  And with that news the people came out of the woodwork who don’t believe he did it because, “I’ve known him my whole life."

            I thought I knew male members of my own family too, but two of them sexually molested two minor family members, and half of my family won’t even admit that it happened, even though one of predators (and yes, he groomed an underage girl for years so he’s a predator) tearfully begged me to forgive him and, “Please, don’t tell my wife.”  He had no concern for his victim, just himself.  The half of my family that thinks that my not wanting to be around this predatory family member is just because of politics can kiss my pale behind. Every time I read about a man doing something like my sheriff  is accused of doing, I get angry. I know how many women and girls aren’t believed and I know what they have to live with. Every time I hear women denying that sexual assault happened to other women, it cuts me to my heart. If women can’t even support their fellow sisters, what is to happen to us?

            Let justice play out, but if my sheriff is guilty, hold him accountable. And don’t make excuses for him because “I know him so well.” No, you don’t. That's not a defense.

The Times They Are A'Changin'

 

My twelve year old granddaughter and I are several generations apart. She begs for Roblox gift cards and spends her days in worlds of her own creation. She’s boujee and frenetic and carefree. She dances and throws her arms with abandon. And she wears Mom jeans.

            My teen years in the 70s, with its free love and marijuana smoke hanging heavy over concert venues while cops just winked at us as we toked, were just as carefree, but thankfully Mom jean free. AC/DC sang about wet patches on seats, Fleetwood Mac’s Gold Dust Woman addressed drugs, Rush sang about dystopian futures, Ted Nugent growled about Wang Dang Sweet Poontang, and REO Speedwagon sang about a barely legal teenage girl. We sang loudly and didn't give one thought to what the lyrics meant. It was only decades later that I realized what these songs were really about.

            Then the 80s exploded and sexual lyrics became even more overt (or maybe I was just noticing more). Women started singing about sex right along with the men. Madonna sang about being like a virgin and Pat Benatar challenged men to hit her with their best shot, and Joan Jett owned her Bad Reputation. There was sweet romance with Heart and clean good fun with the Go Gos.  We were Footloose looking over our shoulder for that Man Eater or those Betty Davis Eyes while Simple Minds reminded us, “Don’t Forget About Me.”  The Police glorified stalking with Every Step You Take and we sang along at the top of our lungs. Boy George moaned, Do You Really Want to Hurt Me and we felt the pangs of broken romance to the core of our young wounded hearts. While this music was blossoming and booming I was in my early twenties, just starting my life with a clean slate and a fresh optimistic view of the future and of my role in the world.  

            That was almost forty years ago. I’m now a bit jaded and suspicious and careful. My heart has been broken so many times it has deep fissure cracks in it and I don’t trust as easily as I once did. I walk in a mine field in a society molded by social media that has us grappling with politics and religion and justice and equality and truth. A world where science isn’t real, families are divided, a pandemic has killed over five million people worldwide in a little over a year and a half, cops kill young black men with impunity, disillusioned fear soaked people storm our Capitol building in D.C to overturn an election, people attack flight attendants on planes, conspiracy theories leave us reeling, and we’re split into our own insular communities that internet algorithms have created. A Brave New World.  

        I still listen to 80s music so I can re-live a time when worries were fewer and the future was secure with hard work and hope. Meanwhile, my aforementioned twelve year old granddaughter skips down the road on our walk to the store singing loudly,  “I always feel like somebody’s watching me!” a song released in 1984 by one hit wonder band Rockwell. 1984, the year I became a mom for the first time and my rose colored glasses began to slip.  "Yes, baby," I want to tell my granddaughter as she skips gleefully, “they are watching you. So be very careful, but meanwhile dance, dance, dance! And don’t listen to W.A.P until you’re old enough to understand it."                                                                                                                            

Insanity: AIDS vs Covid Response

 

I’m re-reading the book “And the Band Played On” by Randy Shilts about the AIDS crises in the 1980s and it’s bringing back memories of that time. It’s also showing me that we haven’t learned much, which is why the Covid response has been so scattered and ineffective.

            When AIDS hit San Francisco in the early 80s, there was a movement to shut down the bathhouses because risky sexual behaviors in the bathhouses were spreading AIDS.  The owners of the bathhouses didn’t want them closed down because they’d go broke, so they put money above public health and instituted a movement to keep the bathhouses open regardless of the health implications. There was a clear cut divide in the gay community concerning this issue. One side wanted to pretend that nothing was happening and to keep living their lives as if there wasn’t a deadly new virus worming its way into the community. Then there was the other side that was looking into the future at the long term consequences of keeping bathhouses open as AIDS exploded and starting killing off many talented, loving, productive good people. Then there was the straight community who listened to Jerry Falwell and couldn’t be bothered with the issue because "AIDS is a lethal judgment of God on the sin of homosexuality and it is also the judgement of God on America for endorsing this vulgar, perverted and reprobate lifestyle" (Falwell, 1987).  Blood banks didn’t want to cause undue alarm and hurt their profits, so the blood bank lobby pushed back against testing donors by hiding behind a false concern of how testing donors would impact the gay community (which was a real concern during the homophobic 80s). Blood banks didn’t care about the gay community though. They cared about profit. So for love of profit masquerading as “my rights,” outraged morality, and blind ignorance, there have been over 700,000 AIDS related deaths since the early 80s.

            We’ve heard the same “my rights” arguments about closing establishments and wearing masks in public since March 2020. Money over public health. “My rights’ over public health. I thought we’d be able to put that thinking behind us by learning from the mistakes that were made during the AIDS crises, and that we would be mature and responsible and concentrate on the health issues and not the “my rights” issues, but sadly I was wrong.  When a government doesn’t take responsibility for a health crises and give needed assistance to the people and the economy, we break under the non-responses. Our elected leaders have to take the lead, and the sitting U.S presidents during the start of the AIDS crises and the Covid pandemic did not lead.

             When we don’t embrace the fact that we have a societal obligation to one another and that no person is an island unto themselves, we’ll keep fucking up our responses to major epidemics and pandemics. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Reagan and Trump both took the wrong page out of the playbook. I only hope future administrations that deal with the next pandemic (and there will be another one) burn that page and that people start seeing this country as a collective of people whose behaviors impact one another and not separate islands of “my rights.”

 

As of this writing there have been 513,821 U.S Covid deaths, and still counting...

My Country 'Tis of Thee

 

This day is a new start for me and my country, Americans and non-Americans alike. A day of renewed hope, a day to repair the many principles and norms that were broken over the past four years, a day to reassess, to rededicate ourselves to the principles of what it means to be an American, what it means to be a country, a democracy. After four years of being dragged daily through hate, uncertainty, and temper tantrums, today couldn’t come soon enough. We are bruised and battered, but we are not down and out. 45 did not destroy us. What he did was expose white supremacy and hate in all its forms. He showed us what lurks in the souls of men (and women) and now as we move forward it is not our job to excuse or ignore that white supremacy and hate, but to defeat it with common sense love, compassion and strength. There can be no healing without justice and accountability.

             Like roaches that scuttled out of the dark crevices during 45’s administration, we must squash the hate and division with our boot heel and make certain that never again are they allowed to threaten our democracy and our forefathers’ vision for this country. We must be better. We must not ever again allow division of our country based on color, race, religion, sexual orientation, or sexual identity. Every one of us, rather we live on the shores of Oregon,  the rich lands of California, the sprawling Midwest plains, the heat and music drenched south, or in our glittering cities on the hills, is an American, and as such it is our responsibility to safeguard what we have been gifted and never ever allow another four years to happen like we just lived through.

            It is time to break the chains that corporate America has on working Americans because those Americans: the truck drivers, the military, the teachers, the fast food workers, the nurses, the lawn care crews, the factory workers are what keep this country functioning. This nation was not founded for corporations, but for the people. By the people, for the people. And right now people are struggling to keep a roof over their heads, access healthcare, and buy food. People are losing their homes. Climate change is a world emergency. Covid has decimated the foundations of our economy. The United States has more homeless children than any other developed nation on earth. The house is on fire and if we don’t put out that fire right now, this nation will fall to ash. But today I have a renewed hope. We can do better. We must do better.

            Education costs, housing, health care, food, have all outstripped wages. My hope is that a Biden administration will address these economic issues and more. I know that the problems can’t be fixed in four years, but we now have a spring board to create legislation and laws that will benefit the working class and not just the ones who hold the power and the money. Climate change, inequality, injustices for people of color, low wages, for-profit healthcare, and Covid-19 response are issues that won’t just go away on their own. WE have to help fix them. And we can’t become complacent again. WE cannot ever again say that our one vote doesn’t matter, because each and every vote DOES matter.  Stay involved, continue to hold our elected officials accountable, be the voice you want to hear. We came far too close to our voices being silenced by the voices of hate and division. Stay alert, but be compassionate. As President Biden said today, “Our better angels have always prevailed.” Let them prevail now.

Goodbye 2020, It's Been Real.

 In 2020 we saw the theatre of a mock impeachment for a sitting president, we witnessed a president downplay a virus and berate scientists who warned that a pandemic was ensuing, and then we watched in horror as Covid-19 put a stranglehold on NYC. And still our president did little other than pontificate and bluster and make excuses and hand out false promises. But we felt relatively safe in rural America. We weren’t New York City. It wouldn’t touch us. There’s no way the virus would move in on the rest of America in the same way as it did in New York City where bodies were stored in refrigerated trucks because the morgues were full.  Except it did touch us with its rotting death fingertip and now almost 350,000 Americans are dead.

 In my little rural Georgia county of 12,838, we rank as the 59^th worst county in the nation out of a total of 3,143 counties to be hit by Covid-19 cases. In the United States 98% of the counties are faring better at containing Covid-19 than my county is. Every time I walk into a local store and see people unmasked I have to stop myself from screaming at them. Three weeks ago I went into a local popular butcher shop and as I got to the cash register there was a cashier with her mask under her chin. I asked that she please put her mask on because I was on my way to pick up my mom from breast cancer surgery. I shouldn’t have felt that I even had to explain that, but I did anyway. She looked at me as if I had just asked her to show me her tits. She pulled her mask up over her mouth, not her nose, mind you. Before I even finished checking out, she had pulled the mask back down under her chin. I got to my car and phoned the manager and complained, all the while feeling that I was somehow in the wrong. Of course, nothing will be done to the cashier and I will have to make a decision if I want to risk exposure by going back into that place of business, but there are several restaurants and stores in my town that I’ve had to make that same choice about because they refuse to follow any sort of Georgia Dept of Health Guidelines. (Private email me and I will let you know the names of these businesses). My experience at the butcher shop is just one example why my region of Georgia has no ICU beds left. And why 2020 sucks donkey balls.

This year has been defined by listening to a president deny the danger of a new virus as thousands of people kept coming down with Covid and thousands died, Tiger King binge sessions (WTF was that???), making sure I have my mask whenever I leave the house, forgoing travel to visit my sons, making sure my can of Lysol and hand sanitizer is in my car at all times, and not getting together with friends or family for holidays.  On a grander scale I have watched in horror as the social fabric has been ripped by our president and white supremacist groups like the Proud Boy, a president who denies the democratic election process, economic destruction for too many middle class American families (the super wealthy are doing just fine, thankyouverymuch), and an ugly division among Americans not seen since the Civil War.  History will judge this time and find us lacking in common sense and compassion. 2020 will be remembered as one long Purge movie come to life.  Through a dark lens our perplexed ancestors will study us, much the same as I’ve tried to study how the world could have stood by as Hilter murdered 6 million Jews with impunity.

 I’m holding on to the promise of 2021. I’m holding on for a president who can effectively run our infrastructure to get the vaccine into the arms of Americans so we can conquer this virus, for a re-formation of a National Pandemic Unit so we can be better prepared when another novel virus happens again (and it will), for a serious evaluation of how many Americans are merely living paycheck-to-paycheck in the richest nation on earth, a raise in the minimum wage and increased worker protections, a complete overhaul of our for-profit health care system into a system where every American will have access to healthcare, water and air protections so my great-grandchildren will have a clean planet, climate change action on a national level and a budget that stands behind the exploration of alternate power sources (sorry, big oil, your time is up), and lastly for people to reach inside themselves to try and find that part where compassion resides.

 2021, I will not jinx you by saying that things can’t get worse than 2020, because I know that they can. I only hope, 2021, that you will be more forgiving of our human fragilities and defects and that you give us the time and space to try and set things right.

A Letter to Trump Supporters After the AP called the election for Biden

 Trump supporters, please. Let me put your mind at ease about a Biden/Harris presidency.

 You don't make $400,000 a year so your taxes won't increase.

 Oil prices might go up a bit, but that money will be invested in renewable resources so maybe my grandchildren will still have planet to live on when they're my age.

 There isn’t going to be a flood of immigrants coming to take your jobs (immigrants do everything from picking your strawberries to operating on your duodenal ulcers- our strength has ALWAYS been our immigrants), but the Dreamers who have contributed so much to this country will finally be able to say, “I’m a United States citizen!!"

 Education will not suffer. In fact, more monies will be appropriated for public education and hopefully that money will be divided fairly so that majority minority Title I schools can have actual working a/c, new text books, band equipment, computer technology, and after school programs.

And your health insurance? Please. If you're paying $600.00 or more a month for private health insurance, how is paying the same amount through an exchange so EVERYONE can have health care going to hurt you? It won’t, and costs and will go down. The only ones that universal healthcare will hurt is YOUR private health insurance company and MY private health insurance company who are helping to drive up costs as I type this. They're the ones lobbying HARD against a healthcare exchange for all. They know their profits will shrink. Healthcare should NEVER be tied to profits.

 And then there’s the word “Socialism.” Settle down, it won’t bite you. You’re so scared of the boogeyman word "socialism" that you fail to look at the way socialism impacts your daily life for the better: 

 Public roads and highways

Law enforcement

Public libraries

Public schools

Social security

Medicare

Earned Income Tax Credit

Section 8 Housing

Housing for Persons with Disabilities (HUD)

Worker protection laws, including child labor laws

Fire departments

Pell Grants

Public water

Job Corps

Family Planning

Legal Aid Services

Headstart

The electricity that comes into rural homes

The Hoover Dam

National Parks

The military

Garbage pickup

Public transportation

 So, sniff up your tears and calm the fuck down. You’re going to be okay. I’m going to be okay.  But you know who will throw a temper tantrum? The uber wealthy in this country (like Zuckerberg, Bezos, the Walmart family, and 50 Cent), that for some insane reason you keep defending.  The tax increase is not going to hurt them except they might not be able to buy a fifth extra mansion or another yacht. Their turn is over. They've reaped disproportionate profits while the lower and middle class have lost substantial ground. It's time that the lower class and the middle class - the backbone of this country -have policies enacted to help THEM. 

 And that science stuff? It’s real. I don’t care if you read some Facebook post about how a virus was made in a lab and unleashed upon an unsuspecting world (it wasn’t)  or watched a YouTube made by some dubiously educated doctor saying masks cause illness (they don’t).  I’M listening to the doctors who have spent their lives furthering their education and who have dedicated years to gaining knowledge through actual research: doctors who have published in prestigious medical journals and have won numerous awards in their fields, doctors who have worked in their fields, who have started at point A to get to Point R and not worked backwards from Point R to prove Point A (because that’s not how science works). 

Oh, yeah, and Climate Change? That shit is real too and human actions have sped it up exponentially.

 Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon who I referred to earlier, saw his wealth rise by $48 BILLION dollars during the pandemic, a sum that is unfathomable to most people. Meanwhile in a Center for Budget and Policy Priorities report, that was updated on November 2, 2020, it was found that due to Covid-19, 1 in 7 adults with children lacked sufficient food in the last seven days. Nearly 1 in 6 renters are not caught up on their rent and are risking homelessness. This is the greatest nation on earth?

 Meanwhile, the virus continues to ravage not only our economy but our citizens and our country. The virus spreads unchecked under a current president who has decided to effectively ignore the virus. Biden won’t ignore it.  His virus task force (who by the way believes in science) will hit the ground running on day one.

 The rich are growing vastly richer and average Americans are sliding into poverty at dizzying rates. The virus is running unchecked. Unemployment is mounting. The disparities in income have become a huge chasm. We have to start building bridges over that chasm or we will collapse into that oblivion.

Joe can start the bridge building process. WE can start that process, but it’s going to take everyone being informed about what is really going on. Read books. For God’s sake, just read some freaking books.

 I recommend the following list as a jumping off point:

 Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich

 The Working Poor: Invisible in America by David K. Shipler,

 The American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take it Back by Elisabeth Rosenthal

 The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America’s Broken Education System and How to Fix It by Natalie Wexler

 Hand to Mouth; Living in Bootstrap America by Linda Tirado

 White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin Diangelo

 The Warmth of Other Suns:  The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson

Dark Money by Jan Mayer

With Biden as president, you won't be subjected to late night rage tweeting, watching a president suck up to dictators, sitting by as a president makes millions of personal dollars off taxpayers, hearing a president refer to people with childish schoolyard nicknames, or being slammed with headlines where a president has blasted an allied foreign head of state out of pettiness. 

The wealthy will pay their fair share, minimum wage increases will mean you don't have to scrape to buy food or get a new pair of glasses, and renewable energy sources will mean JOBS!  Our national forests and parks and wildlife, the shining diamonds of our country, will again be protected.

 So, how's that looking for you? 

Turn off Fox News and OAN and start reading/listening to award winning journalism like Associated Press and Reuters. Facebook memes aren't news. Twitter isn't news. Learn to practice discernment. Learn to shift the bullshit from the truth, even if you don't like the truth. What’s the old saying? The truth shall set you free. However, you must first be willing to look at the truth and not flinch. Do you have the courage to do that?

I’m betting on America. Are you? 

We're still here, baby!!

 

 

Why I Vote. Tuesday, Nov 3 , 2020 1:56 p.m

 

One June 10, 1963, President John F. Kennedy signed into law The Equal Pay Act of 1963. I was almost five months old.

 

On August 28, when I was one year and seven months old, The March on Washington occurred with the keynote speaker, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. giving his now famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

 

I was one year and ten months old when President Kennedy was killed in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

 

 I was three years old when in 1965, President Johnson signed The Voting Rights Act that halted efforts to keep minorities from voting. That same year the Supreme Court ruled on Griswold v. Connecticut, that struck down a law restricting access to contraception for married couples.

 

In 1967, when I was five-years-old, President Johnson amended Executive Order 11246, which dealt with affirmative action, to include sex discrimination on the list of prohibited employment discrimination.

 

 On April 4, 1968 Rev Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in Memphis at The Lorraine Hotel.

 

On June 28, 1968 when police tried to arrest gay patrons in New York City at the Stonewall Inn for simply being gay, the patrons rioted for three days.

 

In late summer 1968 I came to Georgia school for first grade while my dad went to Vietnam. I saw school and other social racial segregations for the first time in my life.

 

On November 22, 1971 when I was nine-years-old, the Supreme Court case Reed v. Reed declared sex discrimination a violation of the 14th Amendment.

 

When I was ten-years old in 1972, the senate approved the Equal Rights Amendment and it was sent to the states for ratification (to this day, it has not passed). That same year, the American Psychiatric Association finally agreed to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders.

 

In 1973 the Supreme Court ruled on Roe Vs Wade, giving women, for the first time, the legal right to reproductive choice. I was eleven-years-old.

 

I was a senior in high school on October 14, 1979, when 75,000 people descended on Washington for a National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights.

 

In 1980, the year I graduated high school, Paula Hawkins of Florida, a Republican, became the first woman to be elected to the U.S. Senate without following her husband or father in the job.

When I was nineteen-years-old in 1981, the first woman Supreme Court Justice was confirmed. 

On June 26, 2015, when I was fifty-three years old, the United States Supreme Court ruled same sex marriage legal in all 50 states.

 

In 2017 when I was fifty-five-years-old, thousands of immigrant children, including infants, were separated from their parents by our government. To date, over 500 children have not been reunited with their families.  

 

I was fifty-eight-years-old when George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were murdered by law enforcement officers.

I was fifty-eight-years-old when 231,477 Americans had been reported dead from Covid-19, a virus that our leadership failed to address. 

 

I vote so that we might protect the rights that women, blacks, and the LGBTQ community have fought so hard to obtain.

I vote for all Americans no matter the race, creed, age, sexual orientation, sexual identity, or religion.

I vote so that all Americans will have equal protection under the law.

I vote on the right side of history.

 I vote for unity and not division.

I vote for social justice.

I vote so that all Americans might have healthcare.

I vote so that education is equally funded for every child.

 

I vote Joe Biden because our country will not survive another four years of Donald J. Trump. We are standing on the precipice. This is our moment.

See you on the other side.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Road to Being a Humanist (Or "You're Going to Hell, Lady!")

When I was a little girl my mom and dad taught me this bedtime prayer:

Now I lay me down to sleep

I pray the Lord my soul to keep

If I should die before I wake

I pray the Lord my soul to take.

            Parents for generations have taught their children this prayer, and maybe for some of those children the prayer was a comfort. But for me, the overactive imagination child who created fictional characters in blank notebooks and would kneel over ant mounds for hours and watch the ants as they went about their little ant business, this prayer was disturbing, and perhaps my first hint that organized religion and a belief in an invisible man in the sky might not be for me. “If I should die before I wake”? Wait, hold the prayer. I mean, what the hell? Every night after I fell asleep was a chance that I, through no fault of my own, might never wake up? That blew my little child mind to smithereens. Might be why I have always dreaded going to sleep. Even today, I have to be utterly exhausted to give into sleep.

            Then there was Vacation Bible School, Baptist style, the summer my dad left for Vietnam. I was six-years-old, impressionable, and wanted so much to please the adults and be a good girl, so for a solid week in the summer of 1968, at 9 a.m, I dutifully walked down the road from my grandmother’s house to attend a little white clapboard church where I was indoctrinated by adults, some of who probably had never even finished eighth grade. There were Popsicle stick crosses to glue together and colored macaroni bead necklaces to string interspersed with tales of God drowning people in a great flood, the death of babies if their parents forgot to put a red X over the door, and a burning bush that talked. None of it made any sense to my pragmatic mind, but I was just a kid and all the adults seemed to believe what they were telling me, no matter how preposterous it all sounded, so who was I to question? Then after all the stories and the crafts, we’d sing as loudly as we could:

Jesus loves the little children.

All the children of the world.

Red and yellow, black and white,

they are precious in his sight,

Jesus loves the little children of the world.

That fall I started first grade in deep south rural Georgia and there were no black children anywhere in the entire school. I knew blacks lived in the town because I had seen them. I had also seen black children. On the first day of first grade, I registered that I was awash in nothing but a sea of white faces, but I couldn’t quite put two and two together. I just knew something wasn’t right and I didn’t possess the vocabulary to enable me to express what I was feeling. One day not long after while my mom drove- we were probably going to put flowers on my grandfather’s grave- my grandmother pointed out a run-down red brick building and she informed me the building was where the black kids went to school. My school building was new and crisp and fresh with new text books about Dick and Jane and a grass carpeted playground with all the latest play equipment. The black children's school looked as if it was slowly crumbling along the edges and the playground consisted of a weed-choked, dusty dirt plot with rusty, broken swings and slides. Jesus loves the little children?  I knew something was wrong but I couldn’t put my finger on it. So it got buried like a seed.

           

            We moved the Crete when I was in third grade and we lived downtown for a year. The upstairs Greek lady was very nice to me and would invite me to her apartment for grape preserves. She had a different looking cross in her house hanging on the wall and every time I rode the bus and it passed a church all the Greeks on the bus would cross themselves, and I learned to do it by watching them. I can still do it expertly enough to fool any Greek Orthodox Bishop. I didn’t equate the hand movement with religion; I just thought it was a polite way to say hello to the church as we passed by.

           

            Fast forward to Texas a few years later. Sixth grade. The school bus didn’t come past my house so Mom paid a lady a small weekly sum to take me to and from school in her fifteen passenger van. I wasn’t the only kid on that van, because driving it was how the lady supplemented her retirement income so the van was packed with kids. Some even sat in the aisles on the floor. When we’d get to school the Van Lady wouldn’t let us off the van until we had prayed to Jesus, then every afternoon when she picked us up, we were again led in prayer. Then one day she introduced us kids to a young, long haired, hippy looking man and his equally hippy looking young wife who started telling us kids about “being saved” and how we were living in the last days, and one day soon a rapture was going to happen where all the righteous in God would be caught up in the clouds to return to him before God unleashed a multitude of evils upon the world. They explained that the only way we could return to God was to “be saved” and that entailed saying a prayer in which we asked for forgiveness and invited Jesus into our hearts. Poof! That’s it. Magically we would be transformed and have a one way golden ticket into the clouds for the rapture. I pictured the saved people flying up into the sky while a lot of confused people left on earth watched as the saved floated away like helium balloons.

           

            The poor Jews, Hindus, atheist, all those people who had lived before Jesus or lived in remote parts of the world and were never “saved” would be tossed into a fiery pit of eternal fire and damnation.  Once again, maybe the adults knew what they were talking about and I was just a dumb kid. The Van Lady gave me little Bible tracts to insert in doorways and hand out to my neighbors. The tracts were always cartoons depicting how one evil person, who not only smoked and drank and did drugs, but also fornicated (I wasn’t really sure what that was, but it sounded pretty bad). By the end of the cartoon booklet the evil person knelt to accept Jesus as his/her savior and he/she was  transformed in the blink of an eye into a shiny new person who had Jesus in their heart. And that made Satan pretty angry.

           

            Since my dad was in the military and we moved so often, I was desperate to fit in somewhere and I began to respond to the Van Lady and the Hippy couple and feel a “burning in my bosom” (admittedly a still flat bosom). By the time the Van Lady invited me and some other kids on a weekend retreat with the young hippy couple, I was ecstatic. Why my mother ever let me attend that weekend is beyond me. She didn’t really know those people. Today it would be unthinkable for a parent to allow a child to go off for a weekend with people they barely know. At the retreat we sang songs, sat around a bonfire and roasted hot dogs while the hippy guy talked about Jesus and played guitar, and I got saved. But the doubts lingered and I thought that since I had doubts I just wasn’t being a true believer. It must be my fault. It couldn’t be God’s fault because God was perfect. So I struggled with my child faith and passed out more tracts and even built a fort and tried to convert the neighborhood kids. But no one seemed really interested. After about a year we moved, and since my new house was closer to the school, I could walk. Van Lady and my conversion became a distant memory.

           

            A few months later Mom and Dad decided we’d go to church and they started taking us to a church building that in a previous life had been a fried chicken restaurant. I could almost feel a thin coating of leftover cooked grease lingering in the air and on the pages of the hymnals. Everything was okay until one Sunday about three months later when a woman proceeded to fling herself on the floor in the middle of the service and started babbling nonsense. Mom later told me that the woman was “speaking in tongues.” We never went back.  And that was the end of my limited childhood exposure to religion.

           

            Later, after I grown up and married and had two children, my then husband became interested in the Mormon church and I felt an attraction to their family values, especially since my own marriage was rapidly disintegrating. Maybe they could help me save my marriage. Here, I must digress, because I still have friends who are members of the church. I am not trying to make fun of or undermine their faith. It just didn’t work for me, but I’m glad it works for them. I’m just as skeptical of Baptist, Catholic, or Islamic fables, so don’t feel singled out.

           

            I was baptized into the Mormon church, my ex was baptized, and when my oldest son was eight, he was baptized. The more I learned, the more the old doubts from my childhood roared back to life. Golden plates that were translated in a hat? An angel? Underwear that was supposed to protect me? Secret ceremonies? Different levels of heaven that I could only get into with the help of a husband?  Maybe I just needed more faith. So I became very active in the church, teaching teen classes, and giving my testimony openly, while my then-husband graced the church doors sporadically due to his work hours.  One month after I gave birth to my third baby, I decided to have my tubes tied to prevent any more pregnancies. The patriarch of the church found out and berated me for my decision. That was the first crack. It was my body. Who was this old man to tell me what to do with MY body?

            It slowly fell apart from there over the next three years. I found myself divorced with three children to take care of and a nagging sense of a God who had turned his back on me mostly because I was just a lowly female.  I was angry for years. Desperately angry but I didn’t know who I was angry with. Until one day I decided not to be angry anymore. I started calling myself agnostic because I didn’t have any answers and I knew I didn’t have any answers. But I also knew that other humans, some not as intelligent as me, didn’t have any answers either. From my experience it seemed that most of them were just pretending they had answers. For some reason, my acknowledging this calmed my internal voices a little for a few years.  The final straw came when a Baptist preacher refused to marry me and my now husband in his church. It stung a little but I now thank that preacher for what he did for me. He allowed me to truly question what it was that I believed. Not what the Baptist preacher believed or what the Vacation Bible School lady believed or what the hippy preacher believed or what the Van Lady believed or what the Greek lady believed or what the Mormon patriarch believed, but what I, Teri, believed. It was a process, but one day I woke to find that I didn’t believe in any god with a capital G, and an internal peace washed over me.  One I had been searching for my entire life.

           

            People ask me how I can NOT believe. They are incredulous because my not believing causes them discomfort.  I don’t understand how what I believe should matter to them or even be any of their business. They ask me if my life is empty. They ask me if I’m scared to die. I answer by saying that THIS is what makes life works for ME. My life is full and peaceful.  I receive comfort from kindness, openly questioning, and from continual learning. I’m not scared to die, well, not any more than the next person, because I know that I won’t know that I’m dead, just as I didn’t know that I didn’t exist before I existed. This is the only Merry-Go-Round I’ll ever ride, so I try to squeeze every single drop of wonder and happiness and meaning out of every single rotation before I’m returned to cosmic stardust. I search for beauty in newly bloomed flowers, in cotton wisp white clouds, in bright stars against an ink jet night, in a fire reddened sunset, or the loving touch of another human being. I cry, I rejoice, I hurt, I long, I create, and I live. Every single day I understand more and more how interconnected we all are across time and space. We are each a ripple that contributes either positively or negatively with our thoughts and our actions to the chain that is life itself. We are here to learn and apply what we have learned and that’s about it. If we don’t learn and contribute positively, then we have wasted a precious and rare gift from the unexplainable ever-expanding universe, and that is the only fiery pit of eternal fire and damnation that exists

Signed,

Your Friendly Neighborhood Humanist

           

             

Days of Covid-19. Help Me Out, People

Life in the face of Covid-19.

Well, to be more specific: life of a high risk person in the face of Covid-19. My poor body has fought against autoimmune issues since April 6, 2001. One day I was healthy, the next I wasn’t. I’ve been diagnosed with psoriatic arthritis, Lyme disease, and now doctors think I might actually have Lupus (the hits just keep on coming). My last two tests for Lupus markers were positive, so off I go to a teaching hospital in Augusta, GA soon. My rib cage and sternum feel like I have a small elephant named Louie sleeping on my chest all the time. Louie is not cute. He's a demonic, lazy ass elephant with razor sharp teeth and no sense of humor. 

             

In 2005 I tested positive for TB exposure and went on year long treatments through my local health department. Also that year I was hospitalized for cytomeglovirus, which normally doesn’t make people noticeably ill, but it took me out of commission for three weeks.  In 2013 I was bitten by a tick and came down with a nasty case of Lyme that went undiagnosed for way too long. In the past three years I have battled sinus issues that have not been resolved through surgery and I’ve had surgery for Freiberg’s disease on my right foot. The foot surgery didn’t work out and I sometimes limp like a drunk wounded pirate on a rolling ship, so it looks like I’m headed down the foot surgery road again shortly.

Growing up I easily had three bouts of strep throat almost every single year and was hospitalized for a severe case of double pneumonia when I was fifteen (I missed Black Sabbath over that- something I will never forgive my body for).  I’m not giving you my medical history so you can gloat over what I hope is your own fantastic, wondrous, untarnished health (oh, go ahead- gloat away. I'll wait), but to show that there are reasons that people like me are just a tab bit more concerned about being exposed to Covid-19 than maybe you are. I’m 58 years old and I’m high risk. I don’t relish the idea of getting Covid-19 because I know it won’t go easy on me. A virus like that would spiral into my body and my lungs and proceed to knock the last vestiges of my fragile immune system out of the ballpark. 

 So, if you staying home for a few weeks is going to help people like me, and there are A LOT of people like me, then damn it, stay the hell home. Listen to the medical experts. Do it for your next door neighbor who has heart issues. Do it for your cousin who is taking chemo for cancer. Do it for your child's teacher who has M.S. Do it for the choir director at your church who has rheumatoid arthritis. Do it for the cashier at Walmart who has the beginning stages of COPD. Do it for your best friend who has Type 1 diabetes.

The libs aren’t trying to destroy your churches by asking you not to go to services for a few weeks. Yes, I’ve heard this is part of Satan’s plan, but I assure that Satan has nothing to do with this (he told me he didn't). The libs aren’t trying to dismantle this country by using the virus to do our evil handwork. We aren’t trying to politicize it against a totally incompetent president who didn’t take appropriate measures back in January when he had the opportunity (You know I had to go there, right? I’m pissed). The virus will not discriminate based on social standing, race, religion, or if you prefer Coke over Pepsi. Covid-19 isn’t going to ask your political affiliation before it latches onto you or your grandmother or your beloved uncle who keeps peppermints in his pockets just for the neighborhood kids.

Social distancing, which is what the CDC is asking people to do, is just plain common sense, just like washing your hands is. Social distancing is an effort to try and slow down the spread of the virus. There is no vaccine. There is no treatment. When cities across the nation are closing down bars and restaurants, when Disney takes off the mouse ears, when schools are shuttered, when Canada has bolted its border to the United States, when the stock market is in free fall, when stores like Nike have either cut their hours or locked their doors completely, when the world famous Metropolitan Museum of Art pulls in the welcome mat, when we have absolutely no idea how many people in the U.S might have Covid-19 because there aren’t enough test kits and people are contagious before they even show symptoms, then the situation just might be more than “hyped up” and “fake news.”  

On Monday the number of people in Georgia who were affected by Covid-19 was about 20. A week later that number is over 100. That number is going to keep climbing.

           

Stay home, people. Don’t go to bars. Don’t go on nonessential plane trips. Don’t go to family reunions. Don’t take your kids for play dates. Don’t go visit Aunt Thelma in the nursing home. Don’t go to church. Don’t go spend the day at the local Barnes & Nobles. Don’t go the E.R for your hurt pinkie. These measures are all temporary, but if you decide to ignore the CDC warnings about social distancing, then you just might make it permanent for someone like me or for someone that you dearly love. And I’d really like to hang around for a few more years, and I’m sure your loved ones would too.

P.S Wash your damn hands. 

(map: New York Times)