CURRENT EVENTS

TWO MOVIES

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Friends tend to express surprise that we still receive DVDs from Netflix. Perhaps “surprise” is not the word I mean. Shocked? Dismayed?

Nevertheless (a favorite word), we enjoy movies, the local theater is chilly and has sticky floors, and some films never get here. And then we find them on DVD, sometimes long after they were released. Wonderful, surprising, important films no one we know is talking about. They are not nominated for Oscars, their stars were not the thing that year, and yet, these are the ones we loved, these odd films we find entirely outside the general rush.

Last year we found Wind River (2017). Last night it was The Bookshop (also 2017).

Wind River is not an easy film to watch but it’s beautiful. I might wish this were not another film starring a white person but really about people of color. Even so, there is respect. There is a great story here. There is genuine honor.

During a winter season in Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming, expert tracker and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agent Cory Lambert discovers the frozen body of 18-year-old Natalie Hanson who was barefoot, without proper winter attire, miles from any building, and had a blood-stained groin. FBI special agent Jane Banner arrives to investigate a possible homicide. The next day, Jane learns from Natalie’s father, Martin, that his daughter was dating a new boyfriend, but he does not know the man’s name or whereabouts. The autopsy shows blunt trauma and sexual violence and confirms Cory’s deduction that the girl died from exposure, specifically pulmonary hemorrhage caused by rapid inhalation of sub-zero air.  …statistics are kept for every group of missing people except native American women. Nobody knows how many are missing.—IMDB, rated R

The Bookshop is a sweeter, sadder film. Have patience for this one. I got a kiss from my husband for this movie filmed in Northern Ireland (outside) and Catalonia (inside).

England, 1959. Free-spirited widow Florence Green (Emily Mortimer) risks everything to open a bookshop in a conservative East Anglian coastal town. While bringing about a surprising cultural awakening through works by Ray Bradbury and Vladimir Nabokov, she earns the polite but ruthless opposition of a local grand dame (Patricia Clarkson) and the support and affection of a reclusive book loving widower (Bill Nighy). As Florence’s obstacles amass and bear suspicious signs of a local power struggle, she is forced to ask: is there a place for a bookshop in a town that may not want one? Based on Penelope Fitzgerald’s acclaimed novel and directed by Isabel Coixet (Learning to Drive), The Bookshop is an elegant yet incisive rendering of personal resolve, tested in the battle for the soul of a community.—IMDB, rated PG

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“Weak as women’s magic”

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The spring after my mother’s death, I remained deep in grief and P.C. asked me if I had anything I did with or for my mother that I might do to continue that sense of connection. Her suggestion was wise. I began picking pussywillows for my mother when I was no more than 6. I still do.

I am a feminist deep down into my gut. I inherited my respect for women from both of my parents and from self-respect, and from my own experience that men and woman are more alike than different and equally deserving of respect as human beings.

When I began seriously reading fantasy and science fiction as a teenager and in college, I specifically looked for novels where gender was no longer the most critical fact about characters. This was the late 60s and early 70s, Ms magazine was new of the shelves and I read The Feminine Mystique. My father, a research librarian, complained about women who changed their professional name, scattering their scientific work all over the shelves.

Science fiction and fantasy offered the possibility of riveting stories involving characters interacting in a post-sexist universe. I was there for space travel or fairy princesses. I wanted a future I could live with.  I found novels with powerful men and women, with weak men and women. I found novels with characters.

When I read the line above in Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, I put the book down on my lap and thought for a long time about whether I wanted to keep reading. I did. Le Guin got so many things right, I figured she was allowed to have a character speaking from his culture. And she more than repaid my patience in her later work. Further, I admired her ability to change her mind—such a rare thing—and to discuss a change of her view publicly rather than trying to cover it up.

I cannot say the same for other books. I have read or reread a great many children’s and young adult classics as well as the new hits. I worked with teenagers for a long time and wanted to know what my students were reading. I had never read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn as a girl, and I was shocked at what I found there.

From A Tree Grows in Brooklyn:

“Remember Joanna. Remember Joanna. Francie could never forget her. From that time on, remembering the stoning women, she hated women. She feared them for their devious ways, she mistrusted their instincts. She began to hate them for this disloyalty and their cruelty to each other. Of all the stone-throwers, not one had dared to speak a word for the girl for fear that she would be tarred with Joanna’s brush. The passing man had been the only one who spoke with kindness in his voice.”

“Most women had the one thing in common: they had great pain when they gave birth to their children. This should make a bond that held them all together; it should make them love and protect each other against the man-world. But it was not so. It seemed like their great birth pains shrank their hearts and their souls. They stuck together for only one thing: to trample on some other woman … whether it was by throwing stones or by mean gossip. It was the only kind of loyalty they seemed to have.”

“Men were different. They might hate each other but they stuck together against the world and against any woman who would ensnare one of them.”

At one point Francie and her mother discover that they can bond only over their mutual distrust of women.  I found a drunken father beloved by her daughter, and a mother who scrubbed floors on her knees and was blamed. I never felt that was fully redeemed, though she later says she will make an exception for her mother. I still find the lines quoted above misogynistic. There is the child molester, there is undeniable antisemitism. I could not understand how an Irish woman could write a book so hostile toward Catholics (she prefers the protestant Bible?) and the Irish until I researched the author. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was written by a German-American Protestant about Irish American Catholics and is heavily invested in the prejudices and bigotry of the period.

Yes, other authors are racist. The Jungle Book comes immediately to mind, but most stories in that book are not about race or even people. I had to ignore the racism in Normal McLean’s A River Runs Through It. I grieved for McLean’s remorse. I often find I must overlook bigotry of various kinds, even in books I love. Even when I was young, I noticed that while most of the human heroes in the Oz books were girls, nearly all the non-human ones were male. (The glass cat and Patchwork girl were notable exceptions.)

Lately many children’s books and YA books of the past have come under scrutiny. The Little House series, and Anne of Green Gables. I didn’t read them as a child, but sexism and racism and other forms of bigotry were common in the novels I read as a child. Today, handing books to my grandchildren, I must be more cautious. I have made mistakes and regret them deeply.

I wonder now how I would have handled the bigotry that is so clear to me had I read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn as a child? Would I have noticed and objected or would I have accepted her judgement? I like to think I would have objected. Even though, I was as susceptible as any child to such effectively written messages about the evils and necessary inferiority of myself as a girl. I like to think I would have judged Francie was a fool to side continually with her drunken father against her mother. I like to think I would have objected t that word “ensnare”, that I would been offended at the depiction of racial and religious minorities had I read the book when I was nine yers old.

I would like to think that.

SAFE

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Friday, on my drive to work, I listened to an NPR interview with a high school senior whose sister was shot and killed last year. Asked if the death of his sister had altered his beliefs, he responded that his “support for the 2nd amendment” had not changed.

This led me to wondered about that capacity for changing my own mind. My personal experience with guns suggests that people are foolish to place faith in guns to protect themselves. Everyone’s experience is different. Mine tells me that a lot of entirely untrustworthy people have way too many guns, that hiding a gun in a place no one will ever find it is a doomed fantasy, and that expecting even good people to consistently handle weapons with care and accuracy is a pipe dream. 

I need a license to drive a car. There’s nothing in the Constitution guaranteeing my right to do that. Our founders did not anticipate cars, and they did not anticipate a weapon capable of firing a dozen rounds in seconds. No ordinary citizen needs such a weapon. I am not entirely happy that our military has them.

About once a week an American toddler finds a gun and shoots someone, usually themselves, and about half the time that little boy or girl dies. Forty thousand Americans died last year from guns, usually shooting themselves on purpose. But even more telling is the risk to bystanders. Even highly trained police most often miss their target. This doesn’t happen at a target range, of course, but out in public when faced with an emergency, most police officers miss.

In my adult life, knowing local people who fill their freezers, as a vegetarian, I changed my mind about hunters.

I am continually amazed at how frightened some otherwise reasonable men become if they think they might have to walk around unarmed. 

I have walked around unarmed all my life without injury. I walked in the middle of the night in my suburban neighborhood where I grew up and walked through the University District at all times of the day and night while Ted Bundy was killing young women who looked exactly like me. I have been harassed and taunted and experienced all sorts of visual and verbal abuse, but I never needed a gun to be stay safe. No one hit me or assaulted me or shot or knifed or otherwise attacked me.

And I was unarmed.

Woman up.

WELLNESS

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Early in the first episode of season 14 of Silent Witness, a hospital doctor completely loses it as he observes patients in an outdoor lounge smoking dope and cigarettes and drinking beer and soda. He knocks smokes and cans out of their hands, shrieking: “What is the point?!” They will not regain health if they continue their unhealthy behavior.

There are all sorts of magical diets and pills available for people looking to live healthier lives. In the mean time, they avoid addressing the obvious: sleep, diet, exercise, focus. Someone I know ate a restaurant salad, had an “allergic reaction,” and concluded she was responding to tiny bits of cheese she ate by mistake. Maybe it was the lettuce? About 20% of E.coli infections come from leafy greens. Most of us cannot be troubled to change our behavior unless we are offered that change as a near-magical cure for what ails us.

Sometimes we are depressed because our lives are depressing. We can’t always do anything about that. Sometimes only time will heal us—everyone is depressed when a loved one dies. Taking a pill might not help at all, though we have faith in pills.

Improved health for most of us is simpler than medication. It might come down to getting enough sleep, eating better, avoiding soft drinks and alcohol, taking regular walks, and stilling our minds.

Until there were anti-depressants and an irrational percentage of Americans making Big Pharma billions, nearly everyone with clinical depression recovered with or without treatment within a few months. Medication today has its role, but most anti-depressants need a couple of weeks or months to become effective. While we wait, we might try taking better care of ourselves. This might not be the only answer, but it is a good place to start. And for most of us, it is exactly what we need.

A minimum of eight hours of sleep a night was considered normal for at least a hundred years. That recommendation has dropped to a range of seven to ten hours, and may continue to drop in response to the amount of time we actually sleep. We want to believe our sleep patterns are “normal” and theories seem to evolve in order to support our desires. Is it natural for anyone to “need” only a few hours of sleep? Perhaps not.

A hundred years ago and more, we slept more because it was dark at night. Today we sleep less because we are on our devices with electric lighting. For a long time the belief about sleep was that it kept human beings out of trouble. Except for our intelligence, the reasoning went, we are a harmless and relatively defenseless species. We do not see well in the dark compared to most predators. Curling up someplace safe and sleeping, biologists assumed, kept us out of trouble. They were wrong.

Some medications, advancing age, and brain damage all impact sleep. But sleep does a great deal more than keep us out of trouble. Research into Daylight Savings Time revealed a connection between that one lost hour of sleep and an uptick in heart attacks. We now know that the various stages of sleep allow us to sort and save information (remember), cope with daytime concerns, repair the synapses in the brain, and heal. Lack of deep sleep contributes to dementia. Lack of REM sleep makes us fractious. Lack of sleep can lead to weight gain by making us hungrier, but also has an impact on depression, anxiety, and suicidality. “Add the above physical and mental health consequences up, and a scientifically validated link becomes easier to accept: the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life.” (The Guardian)

Get your sleep. Stop eating a few hours before bed. Turn off devices. Avoid caffeine and other stimulants. Make the room dark and go to sleep at a decent hour.

What we eat makes a difference too. It is amazing to me sometimes how readily people accept that sugar impacts the behavior of small children, but how resistant these same people often are to the impact of what they eat and drink on their own mental state. Sugar, too much meat, refined grains, alcohol and other drugs—all these impact mood.

“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly vegetables.” advised Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. He’s right about that. Though Pollan does not have the formal training to be considered an expert in nutrition, he has earned his prestige. Because I am largely vegetarian, people like to call themselves “carnivores” when we eat together. No. No, we clearly are not. Look in the mouth of a cat, research the structure of their digestive system. Cats are carnivores. Humans do not have the mouth, teeth, digestive chemistry, or other physiogomy to survive on a meat-based diet. Peoples in the far north such as the Inuit can because 98% of them have a genetic mutation allowing them to exist on fish and mammal flesh. They are genetically adapted to the cold and a meat-centered diet.  For most human beings, nothing about us is adapted to eating that way, though many of us have one of the several genetic mutations allowing us to consume milk after childhood.

Wheat has been part of the human diet for at least ten thousand years. We have been cooking foods for at least hundred thousand years. (There is no physical proof yet, but many anthropologists and evolutionary biologists believe that cooking foods, especially foods that are easier to digest such as legumes, is the reason humans became the smarter, smaller-toothed species we are today.) The wheat found today is somewhat genetically different from what our very distant ancestors consumed. The animals we consume today are also very different genetically, far removed from what our distant ancestors consumed. They are also fed and raised differently. There is nothing remotely Paleolithic about today’s beef, pork, or chicken.

Of more significance is that most of our food (not to mention our water and air) is contaminated. All foods, domesticated plants and animals, are weighted down with chemicals our ancestors could not have known. Pesticides, herbicides, and broad-spectrum poisons that were invented only in the last century. Our drinking water in major cities has trace amount of antibiotics, anti-depressants, and other chemicals as well. You already know about the lead.

Eat better. Save sugar for a rare special occasion. Avoid alcohol and refined foods, packaged foods, “foods” containing chemicals, most meats and conventionally raised food.

There is overwhelming evidence that regular exercise results in improved physical and mental health, less disease and longer life. Fifteen minutes a day could do it.

Meditation or even just sitting quietly for a few minutes each day lowers blood pressure and relieves all sorts of symptoms. The mental rest disconnects us from day-to-day stresses. Turn off social media and stop stewing over things we cannot control. “Relax!” they tell us.  We hear it all the time, and it is excellent advice.

Social interaction is healthy and so is reading a cheerful book. Maybe turn off the news, social media, the gloomy or horrific Netflix movie. Watch something funny. Read a hopeful novel (honest, it’s a proven-effective therapy), and refuse to discuss politics with your raging-reactionary uncle.

Getting enough sleep, eating a healthy diet, moderate exercise, and giving our emotions a clear break from day-to-day stresses and demands absolutely result in improved mental and physical health. Seriously. No doubt about this at all. Trusting that making such healthy changes also triggers hope and hope is another essential. It is likely the primary benefit of most anti-depressants. Taking that little pill each day triggers hope that we might feel better tomorrow. That impact will wear off if the problem is actually untreated mental or physical exhaustion, or if the underlying problem is grief. Everyone feels depression and reveals the symptoms of clinical depression after a beloved family member dies. Such grief mostly needs time for a cure.

SLEEP. DIET. EXERCISE. REST. TIME.

All this is hard if we are depressed. I get that. Depression means it is hard to care much about anything. It’s hard to get out of bed. But if we can care enough to take ourselves to a doctor, perhaps we can care enough to listen to soothing music or take a walk, eat a little better or have a conversation with a friend.

“Dorian Deshauer, a psychiatrist and historian at the University of Toronto, has written that the chemical-imbalance theory, popularized in the eighties and nineties, ‘created the perception that the long term, even life-long use of psychiatric drugs made sense as a logical step.’ But psychiatric drugs are brought to market in clinical trials that typically last less than twelve weeks. Few studies follow patients who take the medications for more than a year. Allen Frances, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Duke, who chaired the task force for the fourth edition of the DSM, in 1994, told me that the field has neglected questions about how to take patients off drugs—a practice known as ‘de-prescribing.’ He said that ‘de-prescribing requires a great deal more skill, time, commitment, and knowledge of the patient than prescribing does.’ He emphasizes what he called a ‘cruel paradox: there’s a large population on the severe end of the spectrum who really need the medicine’ and either don’t have access to treatment or avoid it because it is stigmatized in their community. At the same time, many others are ‘being overprescribed and then stay on the medications for years.’ There are almost no studies on how or when to go off psychiatric medications, a situation that has created what he calls a ‘national public-health experiment.’ ”—“Bitter Pill” The New Yorker

We have survived as a species for 200,000 years, and we’ve had anti-depressants for only the past few decades. Today, one American in five is taking medication for something no one had access to until recently. Suicide rates have been going up instead of down ever since the introduction of anti-depressants. Let that sink in.

Toward the end of the episode, Nikki is exhibiting symptoms, which a doctor diagnoses as depression: “My soul has the flu.” As it turns out, her brain is not sick nor is her chemistry out of order. Something in her life causes the problem. She experiences anxiety and sadness, and even depression as part of the normal range of emotions every human experiences in life. She does not need medication. Mostly Nikki needs some sleep, a better diet, regular exercise, some mental rest and decompression, and a little time to recover.

We all do.

 

 

LOVING JONI

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As a child I hated green olives and blue cheese. Today these two foods are among my favorites. Coffee. And napping—once resisted absolutely. Brushing my teeth. Boredom. I have changed my mind many times and about a lot of things.

Sometimes what we love and who we are seem to be at odds. There is a disconnect that might last for an instant. Perhaps for a lifetime. Sometimes that relationship between aspiration and daily life shifts and our point of view shifts with it.

Zadie Smith has written of this in an article in The Guardian, with an unfortunate title that uses the words “political correctness.” (I have been at pains to explain to students that the term “politically correct” is a pejorative.) Smith insists that change is inevitable and desirable.

“In an essay in her collection, Feel Free, she investigated one such change in herself, when she fell in love with the music of Joni Mitchell, a singer she had despised when she was a mixed-race teenager growing up on a London housing estate. ‘The reason for hating Joni Mitchell was that I didn’t listen to classical or “white” music,’ said Smith.

“ ‘Then I had an epiphany, and suddenly realised that her voice was beautiful. It’s a responsibility to be as open as you possibly can to the world as an aesthetic object.’ ”—The Guardian

Smith speaks about risking characters in her novels who are dissimilar to herself, and the risk of “collective identity.” That last is a new term to me, but Gary immediately recognized it as a term used in social psychology, also known as “referent group.” That is the term I learned.

“Polletta and Jasper defined collective identity as ‘an individual’s cognitive, moral, and emotional connections with a broader community, category, practice, or institution.’ ”—Wikipedia

The term has changed, the existence of identity has not gone away.

Joni Mitchell is Canadian, famous, a musician, a visual artist, and very ill. She is still alive and I am deeply grateful for her music. No one in my college writing class had ever heard of her. I played “A Case of You” for them and they were unmoved, blank and staring.

Maybe later.

I knew I should have played one of the early ones they were more likely to know. Instead I played the song from Blue because I heard her debut that album in Seattle back in the day. And because although I do not like change any more than anyone, I immediately fell in love with that particular reinvention of Joni Mitchell. “Michael from Mountains” is still stunning, but I moved on to new sounds right with Joni Mitchell.

We change our minds. We reinvent ourselves, and we sometimes do this over and over as experience and people around us push us along. Such changes are not always desirable. PTSD might inspire unwarranted responses to previously harmless situations or people. But growth is a complicated thing. We might need to twist with the wind or bend around obstacles in search of the light.

We are allowed. We are allowed to be ourselves and for that self to be re-framed throughout a long life as many people, as Chicana and then Latina, as artist and then song-writer, as woman, citizen, ally, professional, parent, sister, daughter, as elder, crone, as they, and ancient. Our referent group is not stable throughout our life because we ourselves change and find connections, we shift, slide, and reform.

We are allowed.

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CREDIBLITY

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Normal human beings want to take care of the people they love. Poor children, asked to imagine what they most want, most often want to buy their mother a house. Normal people, given more money than they need, share. If their best friend is hungry, they offer half their sandwich. If they see them hitchhiking on the road, they offer a ride. If an old person falls in the crosswalk, they lift them up. If I child falls in the lake, they jump in after. If a person is unconscious on the floor, they carry them out of the burning building.

Normal people care.

But human dragons . . .

RUN LIKE A GIRL

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We had an unusual snowfall, about 4 inches. This ambitious woman skied on the narrow strip of snow-covered sand.

I always want to coach them. Relax your hands and use your arms to reinforce the work of your body. Step light as you can, without tensing anywhere. Chin level to keep your airway wide open. Walking breaks are fine. Find a better sport bra, better shoes, better gear all around.

Instead I walk on. They have not asked, these runners on my beach. I do not know them; they are visitors. Only once a novice runner took a puffing break and greeted me. We talked and I asked if she was new to running. [I knew she was.] I asked if she would welcome advice. She did.

Most often, a hundred times, I mutter to myself and wave a greeting.

For a few years I was a cross-country coach. I began running myself because my older son was running with the high school team. I admired the team’s camaraderie. I began running on April Fool’s Day, a bare half mile, and needing walking breaks even so. I built my distance through spring and summer until I could run the six miles north to Cannon Beach. By fall, I ran with the team and then for years after, I ran with them and coached.

The male coaches were most concerned with the boys and I often was left alone to coach the girls. They deserved better. One year I chewed out my team, “You’re running like girls!”

They laughed, of course.

But here is what I mean: hands fisted in front of their breasts, no use of arms which should swing easily with hands relaxed and back nearly to the hip and then forward with each stride.

There is more. Only the muscles necessary to the work are tense. The jaw relaxed, the hands relaxed. A head tipped too far forward or back compresses the throat, the jaw should be level to the ground. “Quiet feet are happy feet,” one varsity runner liked to quip. He was right. Reach out with every stride.

But I keep this to myself.

The runners I see may need my advice but they likely do not want it.

The writers I work with are not so different. I am not so different. What we all want to hear is that we are doing splendidly. Perfect. Powerful.

We also want that to be true. My writing students are like young runners. They need a long period of training and of coaching to reach their potential.

Instead of flabby muscles, their sentences are flabby. They do not proceed with powerful, purposeful strides. They waste energy clenching words they should not be using at all. They do not relax into their pace and look for ways to improve efficiency.

They do not often actually want my coaching at all. They do not all have faith they can carry on faster or stronger. They think they have already reached their potential. But like the un-coached runners on the beach, they have the potential to be infinitely stronger.

Like an athlete, they become stronger by both working and forcing themselves to work beyond themselves. Not to hurt but to stretch beyond themselves.

My young writers need to sweat.

MEASLES

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There is currently a measles outbreak, mostly among people about 80 miles east of me. I wonder about being revaccinated. If I liked my new doctor better, I would go in and have my titer tested to find out if I am protected. I probably should do that anyway. Despite having had both kinds of measles as a child, serious cases, and more recent vaccination as an adult, it is possible that I have no immunity.

Immune systems do not respond identically to vaccines and some fail to respond to some vaccines. By vaccinating everyone the so-called “herd immunity” offers protection to those too young (under 1 year) or otherwise unprotected.

The immune system responds to disease, but a vaccination gives it an essential nudge in advance—the vaccine tells the immune system: here is a disease, recognize it as dangerous and prepare now to fight it off.

Sometimes this alert lasts in the body for a lifetime, but sometimes only temporarily. Sometimes the immune system forgets. This is not the fault of the vaccine, but simple variation in ourselves. Sometimes the body fails to retain protection against a disease despite vaccination or previous illness. Titer falls to zero over time. 

That happened to me with measles. I had very bad cases as a child, but by my 20s my immune system had “forgotten” and lost all antibodies to fight the disease. I was asked if I had had measles as a child the first time I was pregnant. I remembered being sick, but I called my mother to confirm. “Oh, yes, you were terribly sick for a long time.” I told my doctor I was certain I’d had measles. As a result, my immunity was not tested. My doctor and I assumed that my childhood illness meant I was safe from the disease, and we were wrong.

When my blood was later tasted despite my assurance, I was pregnant with my second child. I had no protection from measles at all! I did not know this until it was too late to do anything preventative. It meant that I could have contracted the disease while I was pregnant, and it also meant that my baby Ian had no immunity inherited from me during his crucial first year until he could be vaccinated.

We were lucky not to be exposed, but then I was careful and we lived in an area where nearly all people do vaccinate.

Of the dozens of new cases of measles in the Vancouver, WA/Portland, OR area, only one was an vaccinated person. The remaining cases are all unvaccinated people.

Too many people are now making decisions about vaccinations without any understanding of the dangers of these diseases. Everyone of my generation and before knew of someone crippled or dead from polio, perhaps a cousin blinded by measles, an uncle people whispered was sterile from mumps. I experienced most of these diseases. I knew a girl who had missed her polio immunization and had survived, but had 17 surgeries by her late teens, merely to allow her to walk with braces and canes. My husband had a school friend.

I had a severe case at age 7—almost lost my vision. My younger sister was able to get the new vax and was spared. During the same “epidemic” our neighbor’s grandson was born deaf from complications of a different strain. The anti-vaxxers need to understand all of this. Just because MTV or your yoga teacher ‘feels’ it might cause autism is not really an adequate health plan.—Nina Gaby, on my Facebook page (posted here with permission)

Vaccines work.

Some understanding of “vaccination” dates back hundreds of years. We have known for a very long time, for example, that exposure to cow pox might make a child sick, but that illness offered protection from smallpox. And smallpox would kill them in agony. People chose a short illness over death.

Some generally less lethal diseases are trickier still. Influenza, for example, is always around and it mutates so that every season there is a new version, or an old version returned. Vaccines must be developed well in advance of “flu season” based on the best guess of what the disease will be like when it arrives. Sometimes the guesswork is spot on, sometimes it misses. The vaccine may protect me against the flu by accurately stirring my immune system to create the antibodies to prevent disease or merely shove them in a likely direction. At worst, the vaccine reminds my body to prepare and I likely have a milder case than I would otherwise.

I recall being told that, yes, we do develop antibodies to protect us from colds and flu. These antibodies may even stick around (the body remembers), but there are so very many variations and mutations of these pathogens that immunity to one does not protect a person much or at all from the next. The first year I taught grades 6-12, I suffered from 17 separate colds, each lasting a very short time. The next year I had none.

These days, if I fail to have a flu vaccine, I not only catch the flu but also develop a complication such as pneumonia. In 2014 I missed my flu shot and I was sick literally for months over the following school year. The flu shot sometimes gives me a sore arm for a day or so, and it has meant that I have regularly been exposed to flu in the past five years without contracting the disease. For me a vaccination means that even if the influenza vaccine is not very effective and I got the flu, I would not get as sick as I would have without it. It also means I do not develop complications.

That means I get my shots.

 

the SHOULDs

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These vacationers should not stand on the beach during an incoming tide in mid-winter. Note the recent foam in the rocks to their right. I watched this family until they picked up their children and went back inside. (Yes, they briefly put them down on the rocks.)

I have worried about my weight since I was 13 years old and weighed 117 pounds. All my girlfriends felt, as I did, that we should lose weight. I was thin. I did not understand that. I still receive the message that I should lose weight. More often I am told I should not worry about my weight.

I should smile more.

I should not make a fuss.

I should get more rest.

I should see my doctor about that.

I should trust the process to play out.

I should say less, not everything I know.

I should not let things bother me.

I should not allow unkind people to get under my skin.

Unkind people bother me. This is especially true when I am afraid the unkind person is me.

I should wear colors.

I should dye my hair.

I should put on some lipstick.

I should not take things too seriously.

I should not care about people I do not even know.

I should use the trash I find on the beach to make art.

I should read this book, or another book, or watch a video, or attend this event.

I should stay safe.

I should. I should. I should.

It was my mother who was forever after me to put on lipstick. The “you-shoulds” began early in my life and they never seem to stop. My husband and I pick up trash on the beach most mornings. Most people ignore us. None offer to help. Instead they describe seeing “art” made from beach trash. “You should see what this guy made with beach litter!” They think I should do that.

There are times when I feel completely at a loss for what I should do. Should I revise this manuscript again? Should I do more research about that one? Should I abandon the goal of publication and save myself enormous disappointment? Should I?  Should I finish the warp on my loom and warp a new one? Will I ever reread most of my books? Should I let most of those books go?

Should I sell my family home and move someplace safer? Where is that safety?

These days I find I appreciate the marvelous diversity of lives. The couple who work and perhaps raise a family, perhaps pay off a mortgage, take a vacation to Hawaii just once, and slip silently into death without making leaving behind much more than a few fond memories. Should they have done something differently? The couple who spent their lives striving toward wealth and then discover late on that it doesn’t make their lives meaningful, or perhaps they fail to achieve that understanding. Have they wasted talent? The couple who sacrifice and demand sacrifice from others in pursuit of artistic, cultural, social, or personal goals. Was their sacrifice worthwhile? Was the sacrifice of others worthwhile? Which couple would I rather have for parents?

For more than two weeks I was ill. I am only just now feeling healthy. I coughed a bit last night and woke, but no meds, no coughing today so far, no body aches, no fever is a week. I missed my beach walks, I stayed in the house most days. I could not read for more than a few minutes at a time. I could write only in tiny fits and starts. I ate most of two bags of honey-dijon chips—not the individual serving size. I deliberately forced myself to eat three full meals a day but managed to lose two pounds during the week. I responded promptly to student emails, but I have not been able to score their essays—the necessary sustained energy is still beyond me.

My sense of obligation never entirely leaves me. I know plenty of people, even many teachers, who are able to turn off their concern long enough to get healthy. I wish I could. I should be able to do that. But like a lot of other “shoulds” I can not turn them off.

I should score my students’ papers by Wednesday.

I should eat healthy and not worry.

I should get off my computer.

I am 66, walk most every day, and today I weigh 145 pounds.

I should lose weight.

unAMERICAN

/ janpriddyoregon / 2 Comments

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We have been enjoying the BBC production of Victoria. At the same time, I am mystified by Americans’ obsession with royalty.

The radical Chartist Movement is featured in the current Victoria series. It is well to appreciate that what these people asked for should not sound radical to Americans. They were asking for what seems perfectly rational and reasonable today. They asked for rights we should take for granted. That anyone would dispute these demands sounds about as outdated and absurd as arguing whether women have souls. (Yes, this happened repeatedly, and even in America.)

The Chartists’ six main demands were:
• votes for all men;
• equal electoral districts;
• abolition of the requirement that Members of Parliament be property owners;
• payment for M.P.s;
• annual general elections; and.
• the secret ballot.

It’s all taken for granted today. (Payment for M.P.s would have allowed ordinary working men to run for office without starving. Wealthy men who then held these positions could afford to attend Parliament because they had no job; they were rich.) At that time, rich men had complete control beyond the Crown. This was considered right and proper because they believed a person’s position in society was ordained by God. If you were born a tenant farmer, God meant for you to work hard all your life and to do as you were told. If you were born to an aristrocratic family, you were supposed to be respected, bowed to, and to be the ones doing the telling.

This is not an American value. We’re not supposed to believe that some people matter more than others at birth. The Declaration’s insistence that “all men are created equal” was a radical departure from Old World God-ordained dogma. Americans are not supposed to believe that some people are born inherently more important or privileged  than the rest of us.

And yet, according to a recent headline, America’s favorite redhead is a British prince?

Why do we care?

It is unAmerican.

Is it a harmless fantasy? I refuse to believe that such assumption of inherited entitlement is “harmless.” Indeed this belief undermines the very ideals of every modern democratic society. Yet we cling to this pretty story, especially for girls, this notion that the story of a pretty princess, born to power matters.

The princess stories, even the more empowered princess stories are unAmerican. Why feed this propaganda to our daughters? The “princess” is a woman who, by accident of birth alone, matters more, is valued more, who possesses greater power and influence and personal importance.

Did you miss it?

That’s unAmerican.

Americans are not supposed to stand for such nonsense. We’re not supposed to believe that some people are born to rank and privilege. Our nation is founded on the belief that we are all equal at birth. Our destiny is not infinite, but neither is it defined by our birth. Someone, please, inform Disney.

True, our founders, most of them, even the ones who wrote the words, believed some people mattered more than others, and those founders had been born to superior rank and actively perpetuated their own privilege. But still . . . in theory, they recognized a better world. They recognized ideals beyond their current existence.

And in that better world they imagined, a Queen is merely a wealthy woman, poorly educated, and participating in an archaic system of privilege and posturing. Princes are mere men who have done nothing personally noteworthy other than being born.

And the “princesses” in those stories? However decorated and enlightened, however brave or capable, however dressed or redressed, whatever their race or ethnicity—they are mere girls, never even women, just pretty female children born to rank.

It is a subtle indoctrination. It is propaganda.

And that, my dears, is unAmerican.

It is fundamentally wrong.