The End of a Long Illness

• I was supposed to visit my favorite cousin last evening, but he wasn't feeling well, so we cancelled.
• I was supposed to have dinner with a new friend on Saturday last weekend, but she wasn't feeling well, so we cancelled. My husband and I did go, later on, to a second party we'd been invited to, and left early.
• My husband and I haven't been out to eat, except under duress, in months.
• I have begun exercise classes, and dropped out after one session.
• My best friend is working four hours a day, six days a week--not a killer schedule--but we have postponed a lunch date half a dozen times.
• My stepdaughter reconfirms each time we have a lunch date: I do always make it to those, but sometimes leave out a few errands I had meant to do on the way home.
• I haven't been impelled to call or see my brother for months. He lives 24 miles away. He's a funny guy, always amusing, and my sister-in-law is a great baker who stocks the house with delicious cookies and pies at all times.
  

This morning, I began to wonder what all this was about. I admit to having been alternately horribly depressed and heart-achingly frightened until Mr. Obama won the presidential election. My relief at the outcome of the election was enormous. As far as I can tell, most of the nation (and most of the voting nation, after all, did vote for Mr. Obama) was as relieved as I, at least on that score. Certainly, we are all still concerned about the financial future, and many of us are licking our wounds from a recent financial drubbing; a few of us still, sometimes, uselessly gnash our teeth at having let the scoundrels have free rein with our future for so long. A very few of us are hoping against hope that one of Mr. Obama's first acts will be the beginning of the restoration of the Constitution.

However, none of these musings begins to explain the weakness in the most basic threads of our social fabric, that of our relationships and interactions with our closest non-domiciled friends and family.

I think I have an explanation. After the first euphoria of hearing that there might, indeed, be a cure for our illness--which one might label Bellicositii ignoramicus fiducii (OK, some garbled pseudo-Latin for ignorant costly war, and I invite a Latin student to send me something better)--I think we are in 'bed rest' mode.

When one has endured a long illness, but has been told, "Just rest another week, dear, and you'll be fine to go about your business once again," one does just that. One rests. One avoids new opportunities for stressing one's body and mind. One adds some custard to the beef tea and toast diet, to build up one's strength for the marketplace once again. One works on one's wardrobe a little, making sure the outfits for the first days out will be clean and mended and attractive. One adds a small bit of difficult reading to the 'beach novels' of the worst part of the illness to attempt to gain enough knowledge of current events to re-enter the working world, if not also the world of work.

I think that's where we are, complicated by the fact that we are also, after such a long siege, a little incredulous, afraid to believe that our deliverance from this malady is at hand. Wanting it so badly, not wanting to jinx it. I think we are experiencing that last week of being housebound before being released into the big, wide, wonderful, exciting, demanding world again.

I am taking my Obama stickers off the car today, because my stepdaughter needs to borrow the car, and they would embarrass her. Yes, she was a McCain supporter; one cannot control one's own children, never mind a stepchild over 21. But then, my parents were embarrassed by my political choices, and I by theirs. So we'll let that ride for a bit, until she's about 35 and has been grappling with reality for a while. I don't like it, but I also believe the St. Francis prayer, and this experience calls for wisdom to know the difference.

But despite all these musings on my stepdaughter's incomprehensible political stance, I have been afraid to remove those darn stickers. I'm afraid of a jinx. I'm symbolically afraid that if I eat too much custard and too little beef tea, the disease will return. And I'll die. I have literally had to argue myself out of it, and succeeded, but only because I've already ordered some "We Did It" stickers in celebration, and they should be here by the time I get my car back. That's my excuse, and my band-aid for the heebie jeebies, and I'm sticking to it!

We do that when we are getting over an illness, also. We fear to jinx things; if we have always brushed our teeth from left to right, we aren't going to change it now. If we always wear our brown shoes on Mondays, well, the red ones just won't cut it until Tuesday. We maintain a steady state so that we can be receptive to the benefits on offer. The benefits of fresh air, new sights, pleasing sensations, mastery of our own fate once again.

We want so very badly to go out again, in health, that we hoard our small store of hard-won health against the greater health to be had very, very soon...if only....If only we adhere to doctor's orders. If only we do not tax our recovering system too much. If only we are brave enough to interact with our God again in some way other than begging, "Please, please, please....take this curse from me!"

So I'm not going to worry about it, which would tax my personal recovering system in any case. Soon enough, perhaps on January 21, 2009, we will all doubtless engage with the world again, stop walking on the eggshells of a fragile promised deliverance, and begin to enjoy the bounty we once had and can have again, enough and to share, if only....

If only we take care of our spirits, and make them loving, generous and kind.

If only we take care of our bodies, and enable them to endure the work of putting a fractured world back together again.

If only we take care of our minds, and see that we don't lose them again into a black hole of greed, cynicism and ignorance.

If only we relax into the hand of our God, whatever God that might be, and know that It Is Done Unto Us as We Believe...and we believe in God, the Good.

Repeat three times, and three times three times, ad infinitum.

How can we be doing this?

It is just barely today, October 31. I have been surfing YouTube for a couple of hours, bringing up favorite songs to cheer myself up after the horrors of the day, by which I mean the completely irrational, spirit-negative religiosity of Liberty University students working against Barack Obama and calling down doom upon him.

Even if only half of what Mr. Obama says is true, even if only one-quarter of what Mr. Obama envisions gets done, it is a start. And even if he were the worst of scoundrels, he would not deserve the ill will being pointed his way. In fact, if only half of his words are true, then he must be seen as the most humanitarian of the current seekers for public office in America.

To deny his vision is to affirm greed, avarice, exclusionary politics, segregated culture and a rubric of us vs. them.

So I simply must ask, if you deny Obama's vision, how can you live with yourself if you vote to exclude the downtrodden, to deny any human in this country, on this planet, the basic necessities of life? How can you live complacently when so many lack clean water, food, basic health care, shelter...whether they are sane, crazy,white, black, yellow, American, Latvian, Bosnian, Darfurian...anyone? How can you possibly cast a vote for a man (and unfortunately a woman) who sees everything in terms of us and them? How can you? How can you deny your own humanity so completely?

Please watch the video of Phil Collins singing "Another Day in Paradise." If you can watch it without at least a tiny movement of your heart outward, if you can hear it without your inner self being tugged to remember that all are not fortunate, cared for and loved, then stop reading. Go and cast your vote for doom.

If it touches you in the least, then please read on.

***

I lived in New York City for a good portion of my life, and it is my birthplace. I rarely gave money to panhandlers, but sometimes I did. I had a hard time making my way between my heart and the dictates of the limousine liberals I hung around with, some of whom were Rolls Republicans, in fact. Mea culpa. I admit that I was diseased with a relative lack of compassion. But I could not ignore the demands of the planet and its humanity totally. I channeled it through tithing to my church, granted a very liberal Episcopalian church, but still...I avoided contact. I avoided being upset in a very earthy manner by the poverty and disease and distress that surrounds every block of New York City, even now, even years after Rudy Guiliani made it a Disneyland for the well-heeled. (I don't mean to dismiss Guiliani's accomplishments, which were many, and his finest hour, which was after 9-11. But the city was sanitized, making life easier for the middle class and above, putting true poverty beyond their field of vision.)

There is a solution on this planet. Perhaps it begins in this nation; it has certainly almost ended here. We have no money for ourselves at the moment, or so it seems. We have given no care to ourselves. We have denied health care to the poor and broke, we have watered down education until we are raising a nation of morons, much to the distress of dedicated teachers caught in the need to teach and to make a living, and the knowledge that they are unable, by government mandate, to educate those in their charge. We have closed our borders to the needy; we have richly rewarded the rapacious. We have heaped calumny upon the head of those some consider "other" in futile attempts to make people see truth as lies, lies as truth. We, by electing and accepting leaders a pack of wolves would have justly torn to shreds as useless at best, harmful to the pack at worse, have put ourselves in harm's way, and with us, the rest of the world.

If we cannot help ourselves, we cannot hope to help others, the others who have come to rely on American generosity and innovation. We cannot help those we owe assistance by virtue of our great natural gifts; our melting pot of fine minds and vibrant cultural expression, our vast land area full of wealth of every sort. We must help ourselves. We must help ourselves to leadership that pays more than lip service to the word compassionate; we must help ourselves by educating our children, providing minimal sustenance at least for the unfortunate, and holding to account those whose greed has brought us all to the brink of disaster.

Vote your conscience, but please take care to educate that conscience first in what a conscience is there to do--keep up from doing harm to others no matter what the cost to ourselves.

What would Jesus do....about Liberty University?

This morning, the Washington Post ran a front-page article titled "God, Country and McCain." It was about students at Liberty University working to defeat Barack Obama in Virginia. That is their right, of course. What is not their right is to issue veiled threats on the life of the candidate they oppose. Within the article and also next to her photo at the top of the jump page is a quote the author attributes to student Meghan Allen.

Allen says, as reported by the Washington Post, "If Obama wins, I'm gonna want someone to get in there and reverse it ASAP."

If you do not have chills of fear running down your spine right now, check yourself for the following:

• Intelligence
• Humanity
• Spirituality
• Common sense

If you cannot find one or more of these, then go enroll as a student at Liberty University, or, if you have finished your schooling, see if you can get hired to teach. Apparently, the only requirements for either status is blind devotion to fundamentalist principles that include invoking the ultimate earthly punishment for those who do not share the same skewed vision of what Jesus would do.

Jesus, I dare say--at least the one I was taught about--would rebuke that girl. He would forgive her, of course, because clearly, she is a Philistine. She may not know what she does, but arguably, her teachers do. Her parents do. Every person who has poisoned this young woman's mind and spirit until she spews the worst sort of venom in the name of God (and make no mistake, those students believe they are acting in the name of God) is culpable.

John McCain is culpable. In 2000, McCain called the late Rev. Jerry Falwell one of the nation's "agents of intolerance." By May 14, 2006, McCain was delivering the commencement address at Falwell's Liberty University. Apparently, a visit to McCain's D.C. office eight months earlier, followed by a dinner invitation and a little sweet talk was all Falwell needed to get McCain on board the train to the Rabid Right.

Now, Falwell's son, the Rev. Jerry Falwell Jr., who runs the school, has determined to see if his students (or you could use the term lab rats) can vote en masse (like so many little regimented pinko rats, one might almost think) to get McCain elected.

As detestable as it is in an institution that claims the title university to attempt to program student thought in that way, it is even more detestable that the programming has caused a young woman to spew such hatred, such ill-considered and ignorant wishes, in public. She must be very frightened. Remember, fear is the favored tactic of all despots, from Idi Amin to the Rev. Jerry Falwell, Jr. While Amin caused his constituents (loosely defined) to fear for life and limb, Falwell's constituents are tutored to fear for their souls. And if the election of Barack Obama, a thoughtful, sane, judicious and generous politician, is viewed as a danger to their souls, then their souls are in danger very certainly. But the danger is not from Obama; the danger is from the worms of hatred, prejudice, fear, cowardice and arrogance infecting their poor, abused hearts and souls, placed there by the very people entrusted by society with educating them in their humanity and their spirituality.

When confronted with bigotry, hatred, and foul thoughts from the unthinking tongues of a spiritually abused population, I simply ask:

What would Jesus do?

What would Jesus do? Rebuke her, I believe. And I do rebuke her. But not as Jesus would rebuke her: I'm not that pure. I'm angry that so young a person could carry such venom and cast it abroad.

From all I've been taught, I believe that Jesus would also forgive her. I fully admit, I'm not there yet. Pray for me that I might be able to forgive her--and her ill-intentioned elders--before too long for the sake of my immortal soul.

If you wish to read the Washington Post article containing the above quote, please see http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/30/AR2008103004757.html?hpid=topnews