Kneel

While watching my son at a weekend hockey game last weekend I overheard a conversation an older, wealthy-appearing woman was having with her companion.  I pretended to be reading (I’m the bad dad who only watches the game when his own son is out on a shift) while she orated (in a faux, poorly executed, Mid Atlantic English nasal accent) a story she had heard from “down in Texas” about how a righteous high school coach had kicked two  players off his team who had the gall and traitorous audacity to kneel during the pre-game rendering of the national anthem.  

“Whaaaaaat are they eeeeeven protesting?” the Hepburn knock off sing-songed.  To which her companion shrugged her shoulders.  Who knows?  It’s senseless…

Today after whacking out another Sunday appendix I went to update the 60ish husband.  He was grateful and nice and laid back and we stood there in the empty family waiting area shooting the breeze a bit.  He was a cool guy.  Seemed successful.  We talked Buckeye football a bit.  I told him he could watch a little NFL pre-game while his wife woke up from anesthesia and the nurses would grab him in an hour or so.  He looked at me shaking his head.  You know I’ve been a Browns fan 50 years, through thick and thin.  But the other week when they did that black power thing down on the field, I clicked the damn TV off.  Never again.   To which I just sort of stared in awkward silence.  Yeah, uh, so anyway, your wife will be just fine.

And then today, our Vice President pulled a little stunt where he flew back to Indiana from Las Vegas last night, went to the Colts-San Fran game, and then announced via Twiter that he was leaving the game immediately because some 49er players kneeled during the anthem.  Then he got on a plane and flew back to California.  

What the hell, man.

Enough ink has been spilled, enough bandwidth has been filled on the internets already with hot takes on the controversy over NFL players choosing to protest police brutality against African-Americans and so I apologize in advance for another tired self-righteous rant.  But this is an issue that nags at my conscience.  I can’t seem to  just move on to the next news cycle.  I have to break it down, understand it completely, see it from all the angles, all the perspectives.  All you can do is ask a bunch of annoying questions.  

Why do the the players kneel?  Well anyone asking that question, at this point, is either being willfully obtuse or is just the most incurious person on the planet.  The players, Kaepernick above all, have never been coy about what it is the kneeling protests are all about.  

When asked last year, this is what Kaepernick had to say:

“I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color," Kaepernick told NFL Media in an exclusive interview after the game. "To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder."

The players are protesting a very specific thing: police brutality and the unequal treatment black Americans receive at the hands of law enforcement in this country.  The numbers likewise seem to support the thrust of the protests: Blacks are killed 3 times as often as whites by law enforcement officers.  Blacks are subjected to physical violence by over zealous cops 3.5-4 times as often as whites.  And unarmed blacks are 5 times as likely to be shot by a police officer as an unarmed white person.  Now the numbers aren't huge.  (Per year, 200-300 African Americans are shot by police every year).  But it is a real and ominous threat.  There is a reason why African Americans fear interactions with police.  And layered on top on this ever present fear of sudden death at the hands of those empowered to "protect and serve" are the various micro-aggressions people of color must endure, i.e. stop and frisk harassment and being pulled over by a cop for "DWB" (driving while black). Further, in the era of cell phone cameras and YouTube, these incidents of arbitrary state executions are etched in our documented lore.  The names of Walter Scott and Eric Garner and Philando Castile and John Crawford and Michael Brown and Tanisha Anderson and Freddie Gray and Tamir Rice will not be forgotten as maybe their forebears were in the Jim Crow era.

So anyone who sits there scratching her head in befuddlement over why players are kneeling on the sideline is not articulating a stance in good faith.  There was never a question about the why.  Attempts to chalk this up as an juvenile attention seeking stunt by "rich ungrateful blacks" is end-stage, pathological disingenuousness.

What about the way the players are going about it?  Is their protest overly disrespectful or disruptive?  And should that even matter?  Who says that political or social justice protests have to be done in a way that is deemed proper and acceptable by the very same people at whom the gist of the protest is directed?  Change and civil disobedience is always disruptive and discomforting.  It's not supposed to be a warm and fuzzy communal event.  It's supposed to make the targets of the protest uncomfortable.  Social justice protest never is popular "in the polls".  The Freedom Riders and MLK were roundly denounced by the majority of Americans.  Marches on Washington to protest the unlawful Vietnam War were overwhelmingly unpopular.  Even marches to draw attention to the AIDS epidemic and gay rights hovered around 20% in the national polls.  Civil protest movements are never going to be popular.  By definition, it is an attempt by the minority to alter the perceptions of the oppressor majority.  The initial instinct of the status quo majority is to shrink from the inconvenient demand for change.  Remember, just 9 years ago, the 2 Democratic candidates for President were both on record stating that marriage ought to be restricted to a man and woman.  Life moves fast. Things can change quickly.  

But is the protest really disruptive?  Are any of the players ripping down the flag or running over to tackle the singer of the anthem?  No.  Initially Kaepernick sat on the bench during the anthem but, after consultation with former Green Beret Seahawks safety Nate Boyer, he henceforth carried out his protest by kneeling.  Respectful, quiet, solemn.  Boyer stood beside him in support as he kneeled.  And the majority of white America is losing its collective mind over it.  Even our very dumb, very self absorbed president can't stop tweeting about it.  

Another thing I keep hearing from the "Defenders of the Flag" contingent is that, by kneeling, one is disrespecting and dishonoring the sacrifice of soldiers and military officers who gave their lives to provide the very country and laws and rights that allows these "entitled, disgruntled players" to complain.  This rebuke has to be taken a bit more seriously.  But one finds that many actual military veterans, both active and retired, are supportive of the players' right to protest as they see fit.  Many veterans interpret the sacrifices of their brethren not as selfless acts carried out merely to ensure that all Americans dutifully, mechanistically stand when the Star Spangled Banner rings out but to guarantee that an American may choose to stand or sit, to choose to sing along with hand over heart or raise a fist in the air.  The "military"is not a monolithic bloc.  It is, like any large organization, comprised of heterogeneous personalities with variegated opinions.  Some find the protests inappropriate or even despicable. But many have surprisingly gone on record supporting the players' right to kneel.  Like this guy.  And this guy. And these guys.  And this terrific 97 year old vet.  And hell, just spend some time following #VeteransForKaepernick.

More commonly, the kinds of people most strident in their condemnation of the kneelers as "dishonoring soldiers and the military" are people who never served themselves and who have backed foreign policy decisions that have unnecessarily risked the lives of the tens of thousands of young men and women who had the courage to enlist.  It's as if this hyper-nationalistic patriotism acts as a thin veneer to baldly cover up the rot of Vietnam and the Iraq debacle, of widening wealth and income inequality, of a nation that spends more on military adventurism than the next ten countries in the world combined while remaining the only advanced Western democracy without universal health coverage.  One wonders: Where was this outrage when our government sent young men and women across the world to fight unjustifiable, illegal wars of conquest and domination for no discernible national security reason other than the enrichment of the military-industrial complex?   Are many of them overcompensating for a guilty conscience?  Is it really about concern for "military respect" or is it more a demand for racially charged compliance?  Either way, the ladies doth protest too much, methinks.

And what function does the playing of the anthem and the displaying of the flag serve?  Isn't that the essential thing we need to get at?  What is it really all about?  What is this place called America?  The flag calls forth a notion of collective being.  It's supposed to unite us in some sort of shared purpose and identity.  That's why we have symbols.  We need those occasional visual reminders.  I carry a stethoscope and wear a white coat mainly for the symbolism, the ritual act of performing the duties of doctor.

If you feel the need to stand and doff your cap for the national anthem then, by all means, stand!  If the initial martial strains of the Star Spangled banner rouse you to rise, hand over heart, go for it.  It's ok.  No one is going to look askance at you.  (Patriotism being one of the last bastions of earnestness immune to irony and all.)  If, for you, the anthem blaring as the Stars and Stripes ripple in the breeze represents something crucial, something that brings you to a full stop---- pause, set down your beer, cut off that inane conversation to reverently spend two and a half minutes of your day focusing on something other than the banal humdrum of existence filtering through your head then DO IT.  If it symbolizes for you the sacrifice of dead soldiers and American military might, and you feel obligated to physically enact a ritual of public honor, then for god's sake get on your feet and sing those damn verses as loud as you can (just be careful of the third verse of Francis Scott Key's ode to American power, the one about offing rebel slaves).

But know that as soon as you admit symbolism into the conversation you've crossed a rhetorical Rubicon.  Subjectivity is always a multi-edged sword.  Once it enters the equation you open up a wide gate for the hordes to invade.  And invade they rightfully will.

That flag and that impossible to sing on key national anthem you love so much doesn't necessarily mean the same damn thing to everyone on main street. This shouldn't be that hard to internalize.   That visually pleasing, damn fine, cool ass looking flag doesn't symbolize goodness and honor and human exceptionalism to the extent you think it does.  Don't believe me?  Ask the Native American descendant, the elderly African American red-lined out of good neighborhoods and schools as a younger man, the alcoholic Vietnam veteran limping on a prosthetic, the PTSD ravaged Operation Iraqi Freedom infantryman beckoned back to the desert on a stop-loss order, the young black male racially profiled by cops on his way to the 7-11, the down-sized, off shored middle aged male now working appliances for $10/hr at Home Depot, the young millennial living at home trying to figure out how to manage payments on student loans of $150,000 while still budgeting enough cash for a chintz engagement ring for the love of his life.  Those folk may have a different perspective.  Instead of wide-eyed, militant enthusiasm with the first bars of Oh say can you see... maybe there is instead a mournful bittersweet pause.  Which isn't necessarily any less patriotic. Blind allegiance to an idea of America that doesn't exist is far more detrimental than a quiet melancholic awareness of the ways we fall short of our ideals.  

Oscar Wilde called patriotism the virtue of the vicious.  Samuel Johnson described it as the last refuge of the scoundrel.  Patriotism needn't always be seen so cynically.  It is good to acknowledge the slow incremental progress of our homeland, the struggles of our ancestors; to be thankful for the blessings and privileges we were merely born into.  Patriotism is gratitude, yes.  But it also requires a concomitant honest moral reckoning.  Malcolm X said: "You're not supposed to be so blind with  patriotism that you can't face reality.  Wrong is wrong, no matter who says it".  The sports figures we see kneeling for the anthem are doing so because they seek equal protection under the law.  They recognize that the fundamental principles of this nation---- life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness--- have not always been guaranteed equally to all Americans. 

Colin Kaepernick basically sacrificed his career for this act of civil disobedience.  Like John Carlos and Tommie Smith, who were tossed from the 1968 Olympics for raising fists on the medal stand, Kaepernick's actions have resulted in deleterious consequences for his own material well being.  Colin Kaepernick is the best kind of American patriot.  Like Carlos and Smith and MLK and Cassius Clay before him, he has put righteousness over personal advancement.  It is the kind of patriotic example that can help make America good again.  

Birth Control is Essential

Listen, birth control was never "free". This is a fucking lie.  Since Obamacare became law, no one with standard employer-based health insurance got their monthly oral contraceptive prescription for free.  If you have health insurance, that means you pay a premium every month.  You pay money.  Actual real live currency.  In fact, you don't even get a chance to decide; it just comes directly out of your paycheck before the federal government can tax it.  That's employer-sponsored health insurance.  It has been that way since WWII.

What changed with Obamacare was the creation of the concept of "Essential Health Benefits".  EHB's are a list of ten categories detailing basic, essential services that all health insurance policies (employer, individual and small group plans) now have to offer.  By law, the category of EHB's deemed to be "preventive care services" have to be offered free at the point of delivery, i.e. without an additional co-pay.  All American adults get 15 preventive care services.  Women get 22 and children 26.

And what are these services?  Basic medical shit: colorectal cancer screening, cholesterol blood work, tobacco and alcohol abuse screening.  You goddam yearly mammogram.  Your kids' freaking vaccines.  And, holy mother of god, contraception prescriptions for all women.  Because contraceptives are actual medications.  Not just some proxy signaling  device in the wider culture war.  Being able to determine when one wants to have children in an era when it costs $250,00 to send your kid to goddam state school is a critical advance in modern medicine.  And some women use contraceptive for non-procreative reasons.  Conditions like Poly Cystic Ovarian Syndrome, PMS, heavy and irregular cyclic uterine bleeding are managed solely with oral contraceptives.

The benefit of preventive care is such that you make up on the back end any lost revenue from forcing patients to pony up with a co-pay.  Catching a breast or colon cancer early in the game is a lot cheaper than surgery and expensive adjuvant chemotherapy.  Not to mention opportunity costs of early deaths of working age Americans.

This is obvious and intuitively good medicine and reasonable public health policy.  People who argue the moral side?  That companies should be able to pick and choose which medicines they want to pay for based on some phony, archaic religious rationalization?  Fuck them.  Hobby Lobby can go to hell.  These women have paid for the right to get these medications via exorbitant monthly premiums.  Taking that away is an unnecessary and vindictive kick in the crotch.

This is infuriating.  Allowing this benefit to lapse would be self defeating and, in the long term, more costly.

Sunday Poem II

Grace

Grace is when you get something good

you don’t deserve;

An unexpected kindness,

A blindside forgiveness.

Growing up, this was a lesson I never fully learned.

All the love I ever got,

I thought it had to be earned.

Grace is the way that fate saves face.

When your number comes up,

When you draw an inside straight.

When the roulette ball lands on black

Or the night you never threw a craps.

But you can’t even roll the dice

If you haven’t paid a price.

It’s too late now.

I, a middle-aged mediocre man,

Am tired, too tired to play.

I’ve been played and plied

By pale-faced, black-vested croupiers

On every corner, in every town.

I’ve lost all verve

Almost effortlessly on the verge

         of losing my nerve.

They bring my dinner.

The steam rises from the plate.

Rice and beef and sautéed onions.

Everyone bows their heads

And whispers the husked words

While I tabulate how many surgeries

Reaped this desultory abundance.

I can’t help it, it makes everyone irate:

Numbers tell you scores and sums and years.

I’m always counting up the arrears.

If only someone would have mercy.

Waive all intentions of vengeance,

Instruct me in the ways of penance:

No matter how tersely

9/24/17

Sunday Poem

Oceans of Space

They say you shouldn't ever begin a story with a suicide:

Where would you go then?

A story loses interest when the major players have all died.

If inevitable, it belongs at the end,

Like Hamlet, his reckless lunge into a doomed tip;

When Fortinbras arrives, everyone gives the stage the slip

And so I’ll start with a suicide averted.

In the ocean of space

Between all my raging pretensions

And the banal ink I’ve etched onto the page

Are two tiny islands pinned to a map

I’ve unfurled across my wall

And beyond the blue vastness is the edge of a continent,

A massive expanse of the solidity I’ve wished to be:

I’ll never get there;

Get me to my rapier

Stranded in the middle of the sea

Drifting west or perhaps east

(You never learned to read the sun)

Clinging to waterlogged flotsam

Fighting not to sink to the bottom.

But you get tired of kicking toward

A false varnish of seeming.

Nor is it palatable to accept returning

To the bland island of actual being

And so you drift in the current

Until your arms tire, go numb;

Just let go---- it’s no longer any fun

9/24/17

Weekend Poem

Hurricane

The storm wasn’t as bad as originally feared---

When the feral purple spiral bruise

Swirled slowly north on video maps on the TV news.

The Gold Coast of the Gulf side was relatively spared.

The affluent had all fled to landlocked luxury hotels

(and drank vodka cranberry cocktails)

(and Facebooked pictures of their travails)

While the “less fortunate” bailed water from mobile homes.

Waded dazed where streets used to be, clutching dead flip phones

Certain people always describe these things as a “blessing”

The way it all “works out in the end”

Anointing dumb luck

With God’s personal touch

While all the rest are just plain fucked

As if God chooses when to tilt

The odds in your favor,

Load the dice and become your savior.

Send down the wind and rain

Flood the plains, wash away your guilt.

It dawns on the privileged

Just before the roast duck is served

(The uncorked wine a rare vintage).

The Patriarch reframes the gilded opulence

As a gift from God, a gentle reminder

To bow our heads, to accept material prominence

Let us pray:

We are all blessed, the patriarch will say

Bless our beautiful beachside home

Bless our talents and skills, our collective health

Bless you all, bless our long sought wealth

And no one deigns to query (like an asshole):

Where was this god when a child was blown to bits in Yemen,

When another was orphaned by the events of 9/11?

The storm will pass, retreat from bayside mansions

(For the rest, the seas remain ever high)

They make a tally of the damage done:

A couple of window screens smashed

Palm fronds scattered across the lush Bermuda grass

Protective canvas torn from the boat lolling in the sun

But the dock itself unharmed, steadied by stanchions.

Let’s post a picture of old dad on a ladder;

Look at him, how cute with his hammer,

Everything again made right.

Scrolling through, I can't help but click “like”

9/15/17

Work History

I always find myself asking a new patient what they do or, for the elderly, what they did for work.  All this stuff about heart caths and gallstones and knee scopes and the gout acting up is numbing and disconnecting. Abstract collections of fact.  Case studies in a stack of medical journals.  Where am I?  What is this place?  Why are we in this room together?  Why are we sharing this space?

If you aren't a doctor you wouldn't know exactly what I mean.

The contrived forced intimacy.  One on one, the one way sharing of embarrassing secrets and frailties. Enough of the unmentionables.  Let's discuss something else.  What kind of work did you do when you were younger?  As if knowing Stan ran a hair salon or Sue was a third grade reading teacher would somehow bridge the gap of absurdity that brought us together here in this small room.  Remind me I'm not alone in here, brightly lit, all the gauze and tape, antiseptic steel. Something to interrupt the piercing gaze, to start again to feel.

The old woman snoozed during the initial interview.  A daughter answered all the pertinent questions.  The colitis.  Bedridden.  Recurrent urinary infections.  Confined.  Early dementia. But what did she used to do?  And the old woman heretofore ignored, sprung to life, as if plugged in, visage brightened.  I used to teach Sunday school.  You know my granddaughter says I have squishy skin.  She likes to pinch the skin on my arms between her fingers like this and she says I have squishy skin and I tell everyone I am an old woman with squishy skin.

And just like that her smile faded.  Her eyes went dull and she turned away toward another blank wall.  That was it.  The lady with "decreased skin turgor".  I put my hand on her forearm.  I didn't pinch, just a light gathering of loosening elastic flesh.  I could see what her granddaughter meant.

Sunday Poem

Pressure

The elderly woman lie frail and skeletal on the bed

Blankets tented over legs bent like snapped sticks.

All you could see was the top of her head

A neck kinked sideways, mouth agape, transfixed.

Eyes only half closed, but she didn’t seem awake.

A daughter, I presumed, sat pensive in the chair

Unread book in her lap, sudden stirring from a long stare.

The TV was on but without any sound.

They wanted me to have a look at that wound

The daughter nodded, shrugged, she didn’t care,

Resigned, beyond all doubt

Another new shore.

I asked if she wanted to step out

She paused--- no, I’ve seen it all before

We rolled the old woman right side down

Gurgling groaning moans

Burbled up from the layered covers.

Just to be moved----

To be disturbed----

When all you want is to lie interred,

Insentient, to fade into darkness,

Is an intolerable insult, a cosmic injustice.

Movement can be catastrophic

When you’ve found a good position

Just where you are, a grateful attrition,

A mind become un-philosophic.

Her body was withered and light and taut

Like an old mitt left out all winter---  frozen stiff.

Tight, husked, inelastic----

Like molded hard plastic.

She used to speak with her hands, the daughter thought,

A choreographed undulating gestural flow,

Mapping the route of butterflies through a meadow

It was an unstageable sacral ulcer,

A swirl of soft blackish tan like crusted brown mustard

Left uncapped on the counter.    

It squished when probed

Like veering off trail through a bog.

Boots sinking into a tarry muck.

It would all have to be cut.

She felt nothing though;

The flesh sloughing, deadened

Losing ourselves in layers.

There are no prayers.

Our bodies just shed, are surreptitiously lessened.  

Her odor lingered as an epilogue.

The nurse had to turn her head

We breathed through our mouths.

This hole eroding into a body

Boring deeper, into the muscle, into the joints

Death seeping into us here

At our pressure points.

We associate injury with violent impact

Shearing forces, savage speed

Bones break, you bleed

(Crashes are never abstract)

Fateful moments when things collide.

But a pressure sore is an injury gained

From motionless consistency, a heaviness sustained.

There is only so much a body can abide

Time and pressure

Flesh against surface

Soft tissue sandwiched between bed and bony prominence.

The only option becomes acquiescence

A body cannot attain perpetual motion

Cannot forever stay aloft.

Our forward, hopeful inertia always gets spent.

We run out of steam,

We decline, become senescent,

End up supine, we cease to dream.

At the contact points are the stirrings of a long rot.

Flesh pressed, the seconds add up

Maybe an hour before the stressed cells start to fail

You can’t tell at first, a blanching, a light breeze against a sail

At a certain time, we should all be able to float,

To set sail, to just be---

Buoyant, to glide---

To slip into a warm river and drift with the current

A long untroubled easing toward an open sea,

A weightless leisurely ride,

Along an infinite frictionless asymptote

I remember Marco Island after college

Long days at the beach and then, after a nap,

Gathering at a dive called the Tides, for the sunset.

It was happy and good, the young and old,

Live music, people chattering, laughing

Plates clattering, stories being told.

The sun behind us a hot cigarette tip

Starting its ineluctable, imperceptibly slow dip,

The ocean calm and placid, a beckoning blue trap.

I liked best the reckoning just before fusion

A thin sliver of ghostly light between sun and ocean.

Almost daring something (or someone) to slide through.

If I hustled to the horizon I’d just fit

A reckless dive through a closing slit,

For once the inferior arc of the full orb fuses

The vanishing accelerates, but it leaves no bruises

The sun just sinks, loses itself into the deep indigo gloom.

It melts into the vastness, liquefied, subsumed.

Many times I missed the disappearance altogether

Turning away a few minutes to talk or laugh

Or maybe I just had to run to the john.

When I returned and looked west it was gone.

I had missed it,

Time extinguished it,

Vestiges of light faintly holding on

A hint of the glow of another world’s dawn.  

We used to believe the world was flat.

Primitive superstitions

Gods, black cats

Prophetic visions.

We know better now.

We don’t dissolve into One,

Like our perpetually sinking sun

Always to rise on the morrow

At a certain time, may we all drift to this last ledge,

The mass of us floating with ease

Nudged by a warm Gulf breeze.

To fall at the end over the edge,

To leave behind this solid edifice,

And on the precipice,

Our hands begin to unfold, a final rhythmic gesture,

Before the pull of gravity none can resist

And we fall terminally into a deep abyss;

A hurtling escape from time, from pressure.

9/3/17