The Dread That Was Sitting Beside Me Was Now Me: We Appear Like Two So We Can Be One

It finally caught me and then my wife. A thing we have dreaded; a thing that has pursued all of us for over 3 years and has touched everyone in one way or another in multiple times and ways. That has caught most of us. That we hoped and might have imagined was over. COVID.

 

In 2022, the CDC did a study of Americans 16 and older and found 77.5% of us had antibodies from infection. Clearly more of us have been affected since 2022, at least two more, and all the people we all know who have been sick in 2023.

 

It was said, over and over, we’re all in this together. And that is the most fearful thing, and the most hopeful. That maybe we will wake from a collective sleep and realize our mutual relationship, or that it’s not even a relationship but a continuum, or web of interrelations.

 

In the most basic way, someone passes the illness to us. We may pass it to someone else. Which gets to another part of this I had nightmares about: getting others sick. My spouse as number one. I couldn’t stand the thought of her sick, especially from me. She tested negative Thursday. But this morning, Friday, a sniffle, a cough, and a positive test. And I was scared all over again, but for her. When we realized I was sick, we had started sleeping in separate rooms, wore masks, etc. But at home, with only one bathroom and kitchen, isolation proved impossible.

 

The symptoms started for me on Tuesday. My wife and I were in New York City, on one of our few vacations since COVID. I was climbing the steps to go into The Museum of Natural History, a museum I knew well in my youth but not in recent years. And I tripped. One foot seemed to fall asleep on me. Then it happened again when we took stairs down from the fourth-floor dinosaur wing. And again, descending from the third floor. I realized something was off. I feared a stroke, but everything else in me was working perfectly⎼ or so it seemed.

 

Then at night, after a wonderful dinner, we returned to our hotel. And my head started feeling too heavy to sit on my shoulders and was spinning from the weight. My throat was absurdly dry and scratchy. My stomach a bit queasy. Most of you know the signs. And now I knew.

 

When I turned out the light, I realized that lying with me in bed was something so big it had become myth sized. Larger than any one human. Darker than night. A myth that felt very modern but in one form or another has been with humans forever, or maybe more so once we moved from grassy plains to enclosed spaces. To big groups instead of small ones. A possibly deadly illness that we could catch and pass on from one person to the next.

 

And I was frightened. Here it was. And I knew not what would happen to me or to us. Suddenly, I was not in my own hands. I realized we were never totally in our own hands.

 

And just as I fell asleep, someone knocked on the door of our room, The noise woke us up, and was repeated again and again. I yelled out in response, “Who is it?” “Me,” they answered. Was this a puzzle posed by the universe? “Who?”

 

I got up and went to the door. I looked through the peephole. A young woman was standing there, apparently alone, but my view was obstructed. I opened the door. Once she saw my face, she knew she was at the wrong door, apologized, and turned away.

 

It took a while, but finally peace and quiet replaced the knocking.

 

The next day, I tested positive….

 

*To read the whole post, please go to this link to The Good Men Project.

The GOP Attack on Medicare and All Health Care Remains in Place Even Now

Most of us unfortunately remember how, when DJT was in office, he and most of his GOP did all they could to undermine Medicare, and health coverage in general for most Americans. This effort to undermine healthcare continues.

 

One largely unknown aspect of this was proposed by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation. Medicare is administered either by the traditional government Medicare fee-for-service program or by a private Medicare Advantage plan. Under DJT, a new process for managing fee-for-service program benefits was started, called the Direct Contracting pilot program. Helaine Olen, writing in the Washington Post, said advocates of this program claimed it would lower the price the government paid for Medicare coverage while improving care.

 

But in fact, she showed it does the opposite. It increases what insurers get paid yet results in more limits of coverage for those enrolled. It increases bureaucracy and the financial burden on the Medicare trust fund. It protects the insurance companies over the insured. It increases the leverage that private equity firms have over Medicare. It can lead to more people being shifted from traditional Medicare to Advantage plans, to the privatization of Medicare and an enormous worsening of health care for seniors and eventually, everyone not a millionaire.

 

The Biden administration stopped the most egregious version of this, but only for a year. In certain areas of the country, it would have automatically enrolled seniors in a Direct Contracting fee-for-service program. But why haven’t they ended this for a longer period? The original Build Back Better bill would have improved prescription drug coverage and other aspects of Medicare. Is President Biden waiting to see what happens with this bill?

 

Recently, on 12/15, a New York state judge ordered New York City Mayor DeBlasio to hold up on switching the health insurance plan for retired city workers to an Advantage plan until April, 2022. Why? Aside from confusion about the plan, many retirees argued that the switch to private insurers would lead to inferior care. Also, that retirees should not be automatically switched but given the opportunity to opt out of the plan.

 

Medicare Advantage plans, first introduced in 1997, might sound good, at first. They combine Medicare Part A (hospitalization), Medicare Part B (medical insurance), and often Part D (prescription drug coverage) into one plan, and often add coverage not provided by traditional Medicare, such as vision, hearing, and dental.

 

However, as Investopedia argued, the problem is in the details. Sick people might find their costs skyrocketing due to copays, deductibles, and out-of-pocket expenses. The plans limit choice of providers and how they pay hospitals.

 

The local retired teachers plan is Medicare Advantage and is decidedly mixed. Fellow retirees have reported a variety of troubling problems: for example, prominent hospitals were unwilling to accept the insurance, coverage for physical therapy was not fully recognized as a treatment for Parkinson’s, it was difficult for some of us to get a prescribed medication covered, etc. A member of our group of retired teachers shared a government report stating “Medicare Advantage Plans have an incentive to deny preauthorization of services for beneficiaries, payments to providers, in order to increase profits.”

 

A universal healthcare plan or expanded Medicare would be the most comprehensive solution. But the opposition to it by the DJT GOP and others is so entrenched and malignant we can barely hold onto what we have….

 

*To read the whole post, please click on this link to The Good Men Project.

Remembering What It Is to Laugh: The Importance of Good, Honest Conversations

Being together this Thanksgiving with good friends reminded me of the importance of friendship, honest conversations, and laughter. It led to a powerful discussion about our fright and despair over climate change and new COVID variants⎼ and over our need to act politically to save democracy and our world. But I can’t say we totally agreed.

 

Many other people showed up in the discussion. New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, novelist Ben Okri, Buddhist teacher and author David Loy, environmentalists Joanna Macy and Paul Hawken, Gandhi, John Lewis, George Floyd, and others.

 

Michelle Goldberg wrote an opinion piece in the NYT on 11/22 called The Problem of Political Despair. She said “marinating in the news is part of my job, but doing so lately is a source of full-body horror.” She writes about obvious GOP efforts to undermine voting rights and end democracy, to lie and attack anyone who opposes their efforts at tyranny or who support anything that might make Democrats or democracy look good.

 

It’s natural, she says, that democrats pull back, take a break, after such a contentious election, the traumatic previous 4 years of DJT and almost 2 years of a pandemic. But there’s more going on. A burn-out, a sense that the relief from autocracy or tyranny that we now have is just temporary. We cannot assume that things will one day become ok. Things are not ok. And she worries that progressives and others will retreat from active participation in the fight for democracy.

 

In our discussion, I shared what I wrote in previous blogs about Joanna Macy and Paul Hawken’s  books, about the despair over the inability, so far, of this nation and our species to do what’s needed to slow down, or end global warming. To end global warming would mean each of us helping not only to save our world but convince others about what is needed to do so. This is not an exaggeration, not a doomsday fantasy, just reality.

 

Hawken said we need to digest the fact that passing voting rights protections, improving health care, promoting equity in law, education, and the economy, ending warfare is saving the earth. We must get Democrats to pass legislation that makes people’s lives better so the mass of people will support efforts to increase democracy and fight climate change.

 

Buddhist teacher David Loy introduced me to the writing of both Joanna Macy and Ben Okri. Okri recently wrote a piece for the Guardian about the need to find new forms of creativity and imagination to face the crisis we are in. He called for “existential creativity”, creativity at the end of time. We are facing the biggest crisis humanity has ever faced, and we must adjust our philosophy and way of life to fit these times. Artists must not waste a single breath or word or tube of paint but focus their work entirely on making people aware of what we face and of actions we can take.

 

We are not wired to grasp long-term changes and threats as easily as short term ones. And many of us live so much in our ideas, stories, personal dramas we don’t feel present in our bodies or at home in the natural world and so don’t digest deeply enough the threat of climate change….

 

**To read the whole article, please click on this link to The Good Men Project.

Are We the Masked Species? What Can Wearing a Mask Teach Us About Ourselves?

What can wearing a COVID-mask teach us about ourselves and how we look at others? After almost two years of living in a pandemic, we could benefit by thinking not only about how wearing a mask can protect others from us, or us from a deadly disease, but about what mask wearing can teach us about ourselves, and relating to others.

 

We use the word person to refer to what we are and say we have a personality. The root word here is Latin, persona, meaning a social role, image, or a theatrical mask or appearance we wear in public. Psychologist Carl Jung used the term to mean the social face we present to others, a mask or image we create, or way to hide elements of ourselves. So, in a way we were the masked species even before the pandemic.

 

From antiquity, masks have been an important element of possibly all cultures. Most staged dramas began with performers wearing masks. In Ancient Greece, for example, the legendary poet, Thespis, was supposedly the first to put an actor on a stage and turn choral recitation into drama. He created larger than life masks that also acted like a megaphone. The first written stories were myths with existential and religious themes, about creation, life and death, heroes, and heroines. The first dramas were enacted myths, so drama emerged from religious ceremonies. But what happens when we wear an actual medical mask in public while doing everyday tasks?

 

Of course, politics also enters the picture, as the right-wing in the US and elsewhere have turned a medical necessity into a political statement, thus undermining the effectiveness of masks as simply a practical way to prevent the spread of a deadly disease. This influences how we respond to masks and perceive those who wear them, as well as undermines the value of rational, factual based decision-making. It purposefully turns the social sphere, the public commons into a stage for enacting a political and possibly even a religious drama.

 

Other people are no longer perceived as persons very much like us, but as characters in a drama. And when political leaders of one party threaten and call for violence against another party or against anyone who disagrees with them, that drama can too easily become deadly.

 

According to a research article by Frontiers in Psychology, COVID masks cover about 60-70% of the area of the face responsible for emotional expression. This makes identification of others or any social interaction more difficult. It limits the ability of other people to read our emotions and hear what we say, as the sound of our words is usually augmented by the sight of our lips moving and changes in facing expression. Consciously reading subtle emotional cues as well as the trustworthiness or honesty of others can be difficult enough for many of us without a mask. A mask obviously diminishes this ability.

 

How much does a mask become a blank slate for us to project our own personal dramas? We all know how deeply important how our face looks is to most of us. Especially today, with so many suffering from anxiety and trauma, we can feel extremely sensitive, self-judgmental about how we look, afraid of the tiniest “imperfections.” …

 

**To read the whole article, please click on this link to The Good Men Project.