“Let us not talk falsely now. The hour’s getting late.” Bob Dylan (All Along the Watchtower)

Note: Yours truly is taking a short much-needed vacation, so I’m leaving you with a post I wrote in March 2019. A post I believe is even more relevant today than it was when I first penned it. But as the French say, “La plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” The more things change, the more they remain the same.” See you next month with a new post.

Perhaps, with the title of this post, I’m setting the bar too high, implying that we are anywhere in the same galaxy, let alone neighborhood, of something approximating a true democracy, a swamp-less America. On the other hand, at this point almost any little uptick in our nation’s health, unprompted by greed or outright corruption, would be a step toward a better, if still far from perfect, union. It’s gotten so that when I hear some pundit put two coherent sentences together, I find myself thinking they could be president.

Well, if any clown can grow up to be president, as TheRUMP proves daily, then I feel it’s only fair that I get my 2¢ in and deliver my own State of the Union address here. Without the hyenas who applauded every syllable, garbled or not, out of the OrangeOne’s mouth. Without their annoying, puerile chant USA, USA, USA!

Actually, my SOTU is not so much about what is (sad, as our twittering POTUS likes to tweet), but more about what could be. Therefore, having established my right to blather on (isn’t that how things are done these days?), I’m delivering my 10-point plan for an America that represents the many rather than the few, a more humane and democratic nation and, by extension, a better world.

1. Number one, front and center, VOTERS RULE, and everyone gets to vote. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 will be fully restored, Citizens United will be dumped outright, and anyone caught gerrymandering districts or closing polling stations (as happened with Dodge City in the 2018 elections) or “tinkering” with voting machines will find themselves booked on a one-way trip to Deep Space. Byeee! The days when a thug like Brian Kemp could delete  some 800,000 voters from the rolls as Georgia’s Secretary of State, thereby stealing the governorship for himself, are OVER. In my America, Stacey Abrams is the rightful governor of the Peach State.

One person, one vote. No more electoral college (which, hilariously enough, was designed in part to prevent “unqualified” persons, like the one we have now, from becoming president). No more voter suppression: No impossible/ridiculous ID requirements. No lines out the door and around the block at polling stations. No intimidation tactics.

And I want to see a big, clear PAPER trail. No white-out.   

2.  We can achieve #1 because all citizens will be first-class citizens, and everyone will enjoy EQUAL RIGHTS and OPPORTUNITIES. Gay, black, brown, Muslim, female, Jew, atheist, transgender, teacher, garbage collector, unemployed steel worker, 7-11 counter person. We will stop this nonsense about a level playing field and officially recognize, and legislate for the fact that billionaires and their kids, jetting off from their private helipads to one of their many homes, don’t quite face the same hurdles in life that, say, a single mom working at Mickey D’s and her kids must navigate. We will do everything we can to knock the support props out from under the privileged few and level that damn field for the struggling many.

Equal rights for everyone also means that everyone enjoys EQUAL PROTECTION under the law. The next racist cop who shoots a black teen for looking at his cell phone funny, that cop is going to Sing-Sing for life. Without parole. [I do want to note that I have met many a decent cop, most touchingly, a couple of officers in New York’s Little Italy, who were very protective of and sympathetic to the poverty, addictions, and visible struggles of their peeps. If we want good community policing, we should use them as our model.]

3. FREE PUBLIC EDUCATION for everyone through college or trade school. If we throw up our hands at people so ignorant/uninformed that they continually vote against their own true interests, consider this: We are a country who puts up road blocks to a literate, thinking citizenry at every juncture of education. Underfunded public schools. Overcrowded classrooms staffed by underpaid teachers. Ridiculous college costs, which leave students staggering under debt for years, and prevent many more from even attending.

And it’s getting worse. The push for charter schools at the expense of public schools by the DeVos wing of TheRUMP regime has closed many of our public schools already, and tends to favor no separation of church and state. At least six states—Florida, Indiana, Missouri, North Dakota, Virginia, and West Virginia—have pending legislation that would make “Bible literacy classes” part of the public school curriculum.

An uninformed electorate may be easier to control through prejudice and baseless fears, but it doesn’t make for a strong, innovative society, and it doesn’t make for happiness either, if our high rates of depression and substance abuse are anything to go by.

4. We need to stop monkeying around and slap on MASSIVE MANDATORY ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTIONS NOW. Nothing else matters if we don’t do this. Without this, we might as well be ordering donuts for our last cup of coffee.

The Green New Deal outlines broadly how the U.S. should combat climate change over the next decade, but we need specifics today. Here’s a few:

Zero tax breaks for companies who 1) directly pollute our land, water, or air; 2) whose production methods harm the planet (think anything that uses palm oil, which is created by destroying large swaths of rain forest and animal habitats); 3) whose end products pose peril to the earth and its oceans—plastic bags or straws, for example.

All corporations must transition 20% of their total operation each year to green energy and green/sustainable practices, for a 100% transition within five years, or we SHUT THEM DOWN.  No more drilling, fracking, coal production, or factory farms. No more toxic chemicals used in the manufacture of so many products from foods to plastics to cosmetics. We need stuff we can eat, handle, and wear without fearing for our lives.

It’s insane that we’re not already doing these things, considering scientists are saying we have only a decade left to avert the worst climate disasters (our extinction being one of them), and the ice at both poles is melting like a DQ snow cone at the height of July.

What gives with these high-pollutin’ fossil fuel billionaire morons, anyway? They could have transitioned to solar and wind power and every other green thing forty years ago. Become leaders in the green-tech field, and still raked in the big $$$. (QED: Being rich does NOT equal being smart.)

But they (and many other corporate entities) seem to be stuck in the 1950s, when steel was “king” and coal was the leading fuel for generating electricity. Stuck in the time-warp of a fabled all-powerful America where (white men) ruled the roost while (white) women fixed their dinners and birthed their babies, and all people of color rode under the bus.

Wake up boys. The heyday of the steel mills that employed 700,000 workers in 1948 is over. Today, those mills are down to 83,000 people. Other countries, less afraid of introducing new, more efficient technology, got the jump years ago. And burning coal, besides being an environmental nightmare, is no longer economically feasible. In mid-February, against TheRUMP’s expressed wishes, the Tennessee Valley Authority voted to close a large coal-fired power plant, Paradise #3, in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky—a plant made famous by John Prine’s song “Where Paradise Lay.”

We need to be training coal miners and other displaced workers for the clean-energy jobs of the future. A future we must adopt NOW if we don’t want life on the planet to be just a memory tomorrow.

And no whining about how unaffordable it is to retool for a green planet. When Joy Reid asked Senator Ed Markey how the Green New Deal would be paid for, he reminded her that the cost of cleaning up from the rising number and worsening damage of climate-caused disasters will be in the trillions. And that doesn’t include the indefensible cost of lives lost. In short, we can’t afford not to go green.

I also don’t want to hear any lobbyist yammering about free enterprise or government interference in corporate rights. As far as I’m concerned, their rights end where endangering our lives begins. Clean energy. Clean water. Clean air.

5. UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE. I feel like I have been shouting this for 40 years (probably because I have been shouting this for 40 years) but AMERICA IS THE ONLY DEVELOPED COUNTRY IN THE WORLD THAT LACKS UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE.

Everyone else is free to sleep peacefully and go about their day joyfully in these other countries, at least when it comes to knowing that they won’t be dumped by the wayside and left to rot, or completely bankrupted and made homeless if they develop something more serious than, say, a cold.

The U.S. ranks the highest in healthcare spending among the developed nations. Universal healthcare will bring down the cost for everyone. I’m betting the increase in my tax bill wouldn’t begin to equal the increase in my healthcare premiums since TheRUMP’s monkeyed with the ACA.  And I’d rather pay taxes to fund healthcare than the slaughter of children in Yemen or building TheRUMP’s “mini-nukes.”

By the way, if you’ve ever wondered why our healthcare is so expensive, I have a little story a friend told me some 20 years ago. He was playing piano in a trio at a dinner bash for insurance company execs, who were merrily washing down their filet mignon with bottle after bottle of cognac—at $750 a pop. I’m guessing with inflation, those bottles now go for a grand-plus. 

So, no more Big Pharma billing us twice what we earn in a month for a drug they sell elsewhere in the world at a fraction of the price (nearly all countries except the U.S. have policies, price controls, and regulations limiting drug company profits). No more pushing drugs on us we don’t need, thus rendering half the country opioid addicts. (The US makes up 5 percent of the world’s population and consumes approximately 80 percent of the world’s prescription opioid drugs.)

Our reps and senators enjoy stellar healthcare and we foot the bill for it. The way I see it, what’s good enough for them is good enough for the rest of us.

6.  It’s beyond appalling how many two-faced GOP duffers, themselves the children and grandchildren of immigrants, are railing on about the (bogus) “threat at our southern border,” backing ICE, and denying people their legal right to apply for asylum. Way beyond appalling that thousands and thousands of children were ripped away from their families (with little or no record-keeping or a plan to reunite them). Unconscionable that ICE is dumping people in prison camps hastily erected by, and highly profitable for private company buddies of TheRUMP—an outright crime that has resulted in the deaths of several children.

So, listen up, we are having a total rededication to old Lady Liberty. In the words of Emma Lazarus:

“Give me your tired, your poor, 
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, 
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. 
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: 
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

As for anyone seeking asylum, if you can make a reasonably compelling statement, whether it’s in English, Spanish, Mayan, Garifuna or Ewokese—say, Because U.S. foreign policy and CIA knavery of the past 60 years have made my country a hellhole—well, as far as I’m concerned, you’re in. Welcome to America. Care to learn the skills for a new green-energy job? We need you.

7. The issue of immigration, as I suggested in #6, brings up the whole question of foreign policy. So listen up, mighty OrangeOne and Blackwater and Exxon: No, you can’t take another country’s oil, topple their elected officials, suppress their protests, or cut off their trade with other countries. You can’t bomb other nations so you can steal their wealth or install your own dictators. After a century of talking up the right of nations to self-determination, we will finally walk the walk, honor self-determination, and keep our hands to ourselves. And our hands will not sell bombs and guns to nations who suppress other nations, commit genocide, or behead journalists.  

8. “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” Well, begging the trigger-happy NRA’s pardon, the more than 1.5 million Americans who have died a gun-related death since 1968 might wish to differ, if only they could. One-point-five-million. That’s more Americans than have died in all the wars we’ve fought, including World War II.

There were 346 mass shootings in 2017—not 346 deaths, but 346 mass shootings. Another 340 occurred in 2018. Night clubs. Schools. Movie theaters. Concert venues. And then there’s those little domestic scenarios where the toddler shoots her mother, or the brother shoots his baby sister. Or Dad shoots the entire family. So, hear me good: No assault rifles. No handguns. No open carry. No concealed carry. No “stand your ground” laws. NO GUNS. AT ALL.

9. Total government TRANSPARENCY. No one we elect and/or pay the salary of hides from us what they spend our money on, or the findings of special investigations into, say, the corruption of the president, his cabinet cronies, fellow criminally-inclined congresspersons, and their various fixers. We are your constituents. We are your BOSSES. We elected you to represent us and to serve our best interests. We demand to know exactly what’s going on. And if you were appointed rather than elected, you were appointed to serve the interests of the country and uphold the Constitution, NOT to massage TheRUMP’s rump. Got that, William Barr?

One More Thing

Okay, I know what you’re thinking: Geeze, Ame, you sound like the Green New Deal on steroids. How many decades and decades of Congressional sessions would it take to write up, introduce, and vote on all these proposals, and would there be anyone left on Earth by the time we got all this done, even if Mitch McConnell only lasts another 200 years?

Good question. Of course, we could knock most of this into a hat if we just adopted my tenth proposal, and went global with it:

10. NO ONE gets more than a million dollars until EVERYONE on the planet has a decent home and full healthcare. Until EVERYONE receives as much education/job training as they care to pursue. Until EVERYONE has clean water to drink, clean air to breathe, and plenty of healthy food. Until EVERYONE has some fun money, time for regular vacations, and a secure retirement.

The main reason we are in such a huge mess domestically and globally is because a handful of billionaires are dictating the terms—no taxes for the rich, freedom to pollute the planet to death, low wages for workers, endless war—and choosing who gets into office and how they will vote. I guarantee you that if NO ONE is allowed to have more than a million dollars, our campaign finance problems—the Koch brothers/Shel Adelson/DeVos-family et al.—will be solved. You can’t donate $300 million or even $30 million if you have zero millions.

A couple of stats to underscore my point here:

• The 400 richest Americans now have more wealth than the bottom 61 percent of the nation.

• Globally, 42 people have as much wealth as the 3.7 billion poorest folks. Yes, 42 people have as much wealth as the poorest HALF of the WORLD.

So, I repeat. No one gets more than a million dollars until everyone has what they need. All income over $1 million will be taxed, retroactively, at 99.99%. So sell those extra dozen houses, private jets, helipads, and pay up, you billionaires. There will be no more off-shore accounts. No tax havens. No tax loopholes like the ones that gave Amazon a free pass for federal taxes this year, despite the $11.2 billion in profits the company reaped for 2018.  

The billions and billions and billions that we who work have made for the planet’s richest 42 people? That money comes back to us. Then we won’t have to worry about Social Security or Medicare or public school funding or the cost of infrastructure. The people in the world’s poorest countries will have running water and homes and schools and healthcare—a chance to live their lives rather than merely trying to survive starvation day to day.

Perhaps it is the Green New Deal on steroids. I make no apologies. Instead, I’ll sign off with the words of George Bernard Shaw, tweaked by Bobby Kennedy: “Some men see things as they are and say, why; I dream things that never were and say, why not?”

Why not, indeed?

The title of this month’s post comes from Thomas Jefferson’s Canons of Conduct in Life—ten rules for living he cultivated over his decades on the planet, sharing them with family and friends. I’ve had a copy hanging by my desk for years.

In these ten rules, Jefferson, the leading author of the Declaration of Independence and America’s third president, demonstrates a remarkable grasp of human foibles and offers us guidelines for living more happily, less stressfully, and more harmoniously with others. Alot of ageless wisdom packed in ten short sentences.

No doubt about it, we live in difficult times and none of us needs to make life more stressful than it already is. So, as we start the new year, I’ve been pondering what gets in our way of “taking things by the smooth handle” (Rule #9). After all, why would any of us wish to compound our anxiety? But several very human tendencies often make us do just that. Trust me, I know these tendencies all too well.

The Idée Fixe   

The Cambridge English Dictionary defines idée fixe as a “belief that someone refuses to change their mind about, even though it may be wrong” or in this instance, impractical. Just because we’ve always done something in a certain way does not mean we must continue to do so if circumstances prove it to be driving us bonkers.

Case in point: Every year, going back to the dawn of time—well, my time anyway—I have hung each and every one of my ornaments on the annual Christmas tree. As Ed and I purchase a new ornament each year, and have been gifted with new ornaments along the way, and have the collection of my childhood ornaments going back to my first Christmas—well, it adds up to an effing LOT of ornaments. Still, not one of them has ever been left in the box and there are now nine good-sized boxes. No matter, every December I crawl around the tree and under the tree and reach way atop, placing these decorations, then changing them and changing some more until every ornament has a spot. And not just any spot, but the perfect spot.   

Until this year.

Two days after Thanksgiving, we drove out to our favorite Christmas tree farm on a sunny mountainside just fifteen minutes down the road. As tree farms always are, this one is in a state of transition. The type of tree we usually buy had been pretty much picked over and the new ones needed another year to reach maturity. So, we bought a different pine, one nearly identical in appearance. A big, fat tree, sure to easily accommodate all our ornaments. Except it didn’t.

The branches, while plentiful, frequently bent under the weight of all but the lightest decorations. The medium and heavy ones proved challenging, as in extremely so. My youngest, home for the holidays, and I hung ornaments. And hung ornaments. Or tried to. The boxes were still half full.

The kids went home, but I continued my quest to find a spot for each and every ornament, switching one out for another, searching for the right branch. There had to be one. “You don’t have to hang them all,” Ed said gently. I nodded, smiled, and went right on trying. Three more days passed. Desperate, I sifted the remaining 57 ornaments for my “must-haves”. Found places for four of them, but at the cost of removing two others. Eventually, I had to concede. My idée fixe would have to be “unfixed.” There simply was NO…MORE…SPACE on the tree. No more branches that would take anything heavier than a butterfly. I boxed up the 45 ornaments still lying on the dining room table and carried them up to the attic, admitting defeat.

And guess what? I survived. The tree looked fine. Christmas still came. How much time and maddening effort might I have saved if I’d just accepted the truth on Day 1: They weren’t all gonna fit? The smooth handle. Just because one has always done something is not a good enough reason to keep doing it when circumstances change.

The Straitjacket of Perfectionism

Closely related to the idée fixe—dizygotic twins in fact—is perfectionism, “the refusal to accept any standard short of perfection” (thank you, Oxford Languages Dictionary).

As a writer, I fully appreciate the folly of perfectionism. You can’t revise what you haven’t written is my mantra. A less-than, sometimes far-from-perfect first draft? Totally to be expected. “Polishing” one’s writing is part of the trade. But not everything in life has to be polished, and rarely is there anything that merits the anguish perfectionism exacts upon its adherents. Striving to be perfect at everything will wear you out and drive you nuts. Trust me, I know. If I had a dollar (or even a dime—do they make those anymore?) for every routine task I’ve agonized over, I’d be able to buy a couple of left-leaning, Constitution-upholding justices for the Supreme Court to counteract the current far-right fascist judges Leonard Leo and his merry band of Federalist Society billionaires bought. But, alas, I just have the angst I too often spend on projects like this year’s “bake-a-thon.” 

For the past 44 years, I’ve baked, packaged, and sent tins of holiday cookies and candy to far-flung friends. It’s generally been an upbeat, lighthearted project. For three days in December, I bop to Christmas tunes while baking 20 dozen cookies and two batches of fudge. For 43 of those years, everything went swimmingly—cookies came out great, the fudge was melt-in-your-mouth fabulous. I thought of it as a fun time. A time when I blocked out everything else and baked! And then the 2025 holidays arrived…     

Squeezed between a late-in-the-calendar Thanksgiving and Christmas, with a dental appointment to boot on Day 3, I knew I would have to work from dawn to dusk to make my (self-imposed) deadline.  

Day 1 started off well enough. I prepared my ginger and sugar cookie doughs and put them in the fridge to chill. Then I made a pan of fudge. I was a tad concerned about how I was going to get six dozen sugar cookies frosted and roll out the 48 candy cane cookies by hand—both big time-consumers—in addition to prepping the dough for and baking five dozen shortbread cookies while whipping up a second batch of fudge, all before my appointment on Day 3. But, I decided to just plow ahead and see what happened. So, I popped a pan of ginger cookies into the oven, put “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” on the CD player, and took five to dance around the kitchen.

When I checked on the gingers ten minutes later, I was shocked to find that they had all bled into each other. No longer the lovely circular cookies from the perfectly-rolled balls of dough I’d prepared, but lopsided squares and rectangles with maybe one rounded edge! How could this happen? I had prepared them exactly as I had for decades, the same number of cookies per baking pan as always!

I was definitely not taking things by the smooth handle.

I can now see how silly my distress was. Despite their appearance, they tasted great. And I got my four dozen candy canes rolled just before the dentist. I even made my deadline for packing the tins and boxing up the goodies for the post office…by working until midnight when, exhausted, I surveyed the lot and said: Screw it, they’re fine just the way they are. THAT’s the attitude I should have taken from the start. And honestly, if I’d extended my deadline one day longer than usual, would the world have exploded?

Part of taking things by the smooth handle is being able to distinguish what truly matters from what doesn’t. I’ll give you a hint here: Most things are not worthy of the angst perfectionists spend on them.

The What-ifs…

I don’t need to tell you we live in trying times. As in, extremely trying times. Which gives rise to perhaps the most stressful—and utterly useless—attempts to prepare for disasters we fear may be impending. What if this goes wrong? What if that goes wrong? Not a smooth handle in the bunch as far as we can see.

Trying to get out in front of possible catastrophes before they materialize is impossible and exhausting. We must save our strength for that which is happening. Threats to immigrants, for example, are real. They require resistance and a firm response from us in the now. But trying to foresee every possible bump in the road ahead and prepare for it just zaps our energy—exactly what Jefferson meant when he warns us in Rule #8: How much pain the evils have cost us that have never happened.     

Case in point. My son flew in to spend Thanksgiving with us this past November. A long flight, requiring a change of planes halfway. Everything has to run on schedule to make it all work. Though the day he arrived was pleasant, I started looking well in advance at the weather forecast for his return home. Early December can harbor some nasty “surprises” in the Northeast. It wasn’t looking great 8-10 days out. Of course, there was nothing I could actually do. Nothing was at all certain. So I crossed my fingers and silently fretted. And checked the forecast daily. And fretted some more because it still wasn’t looking good. Major snowstorm beginning in the early morning.

The day of departure came. By 7:30 a.m., the morning train to the airport had been canceled. So had the Greyhound bus my son had booked as a back-up. I hurriedly dressed and, with visions of the car careening wildly off the highway or into the path of an eighteen-wheeler, I drove him the hour’s journey to the airport, trying to appear lighthearted while mentally rehearsing all my options should the road become impassable. There weren’t many. Basically, pull off the road at the nearest exit…and do what? Spend the day and maybe the night there? Where?

Just as I dropped my son off, the first flakes began. Lucky so far, but with each mile back, the snowfall picked up substantially. Eight miles from home, conditions were not good. Snow choked the road and the pavement was icy slick. Traffic was down to one lane and moving at a crawl. No one was driving over 20 miles an hour. I prepared myself for the hairpin exit turn and hoped everyone else was as familiar with that sharp curve as I was. Fortunately, the whole long line went into brake-pump mode. Gentle. Gentle. At last, I was off the highway.

The upshot? My son made his flight and the connecting flight. Obviously, I made it home. But how much less stressful it would have been to take things as they came. To not have fretted for days in advance. To have truly relaxed in the first part of the journey before the snow began falling. To have reminded myself on the return that each mile was bringing me closer to home. That I could, if necessary, exit the highway and then make a plan from there. Not everything needed to be settled in advance. I could have, should have taken the developing blizzard by the smooth handle.   

As I write this, my son’s home for Christmas. I have a medical appointment scheduled for the same day he leaves. I need the train to the airport to be running that day. I need the weather to be clear. But what if it isn’t? What if we have a repeat of his journey home after Thanksgiving and I miss my appointment? Mindful of Jefferson’s sage words, I searched for the “smooth handle.” It was this: Somehow, whatever happens, I’ll cope.

Jefferson nailed it. You get no extra points for driving yourself mad. Life is finite. Spend it on that which really matters. That which brings you joy.

Like most people, the holidays hold a very special place in my heart. For me, those holidays are Thanksgiving and Christmas. For you, the holidays might be Ramadan or Kwanzaa, Hanukkah or Diwali. As is true of so many, many things, the different holidays we celebrate speak much more to what we treasure, what we share in common—the decorating of homes, the lighting of candles or oil lamps, the exchange of gifts, the singing of songs, a time for reflection and charitable actions—than to what divides us. But number one among these things we share and celebrate—the most precious gift of all—is gathering with family and friends for a festive meal. Family and friends—nothing matters more than the people we love.

Reflecting on that, I started thinking about other things many of us hold dear in common. I hope you will find much of what you treasure among them. I welcome any additions you’d like to make in the comments section.          

Our Health and the Health of Those We Love

New York Times bestselling author Augusten Burroughs (Running with Scissors among others) famously said, “When you have your health, you have everything. When you do not have your health, nothing else matters at all.” 

Exercise is often touted as the best medicine. Running, biking, swimming, dancing the night away, traveling across the globe, which means lots of walking once you get off that plane. Ed and I regularly clock 10,000+ steps a day in cities like London and Copenhagen. Many of our friends enjoy hiking in the mountains. And one of my neighbors is big on white-water rafting. Did I neglect to mention we are all Boomers? I hope we can do these things for many years to come. These activities enrich our lives and by their very nature, strengthen our bodies, but no one is immune to injury or stroke or cancer. What’s needed to protect our health—the health of each of us and the people we hold dear—is quality healthcare. Affordable quality healthcare. We in the U.S. are now feeling the truth of this like never before.

Though America was a come-lately to government funding for any kind of healthcare, President Lyndon Johnson’s Social Security Amendments of 1965 gave health insurance through Medicare to Americans 65 and older, and sliding scale coverage through Medicaid for people under 65 with a limited income. I remember how grateful my grandmother was for Medicare. A woman who had lived in poverty all her life, working in a factory while raising five children, she knew what a great and sorely needed gift Medicare was to the American people.

Forty-five years later, President Barrack Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act into law. Prior to the passage of the ACA, commonly referred to as “Obamacare”, people with pre-existing conditions could be refused health coverage or charged a higher rate for their plan. Sometimes much higher. The ACA put an end to that. It also reduced the costs of healthcare for those eligible and established limits on out-of-pocket expenses. At one point, I was on the ACA and it was a significant help in time of need.

We all need healthcare, and in a country as wealthy as the U.S., that should not be an issue. Almost 70% of the world’s population has some kind of universal healthcare, including 27 European Union countries and the United Kingdom. For a brief moment, in 2023, when fourteen Democratic senators co-sponsored Bernie Sanders Medicare for All bill, it seemed we might get our own single-payer system, with the government providing healthcare for all Americans,. But the measure stalled in Congress and then the 2024 elections happened. Though 100 Democratic House members tried to revive it last spring, their efforts failed. Now, some states have cut Medicaid (more may follow) and ACA premiums are predicted to skyrocket. Our healthcare—and thus, our health—is under threat by the president, his GOP-dominated Congress and the billionaires who literally make a killing, perhaps many killings, from private healthcare.

The Natural World

“I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.” — John Burroughs, 19^th century naturalist (No relation to Augustin Burroughs quoted above.)

As I write this, I’ve just returned from my daily ramble through the streets of my town. It’s a grey November afternoon, but the Japanese maples are a lustrous red and from the high point of my wandering, I paused to look out across the valley to the mountains beyond. It’s a magnificent view, one I never tire of. I walk to savor such beauty as much as I do to keep my body strong and healthy.

But nature offers yet another benefit, one that often goes unremarked, and the J. Burroughs quote above captures it perfectly. In its vastness, the natural world tends to dwarf our human struggles, or at least put them in perspective. A balm for troubled thoughts or an aching heart. When you sit beneath a tree that’s centuries old, as Ed and I have done at London’s Kew Gardens, you remember that the human experience has been a long and varied road, far from smooth and sometimes downright horrifying, but also one of great learning and achievement, of astounding creativity and, at many moments, one of goodness and generosity to others. The Earth truly is our mother and we must protect her.

Literature

We have a card on our kitchen wall, a hunched-up geezer in a crumpled coat with an armload of books, captioned: Wear the old coat and buy the new book. Oddly enough, the quote is from Austin Phelps, an American clergyman born in 1820. I know nothing more about him, but I do know he nailed it on this one. Our house attests to the veracity of his words. Books fill every available space, even spaces that weren’t meant for books, e.g., next to chairs, piled on stairwells, spilling over dresser tops. It’s a lifetime love affair. For me, it began at age two when I got my first little Golden Books—nineteen cents apiece—each week at the grocery store for “being good.” Since I was always “good”, my Golden Books stacked up quickly. By age five, I was taking out books from the local library and reading them myself. Tell me a story—a request, a need, almost as old as language itself.

Indeed, storytelling has existed for thousands of years. Tens of thousands if we count the cave drawings discovered in France at Lascaux and Chauvet, some of which appear to represent visual narratives. In ancient Greece and Rome, people gathered by the hundreds on the hillsides to hear the adventures of Odysseus, Homer’s epic poem The Iliad, and the animal fables spun by Aesop himself.

Around 700 BCE, many of these stories and poems began to be written down. Though the first printing press was still two-thousand years away, recording the stories helped spread them to new audiences around the globe. The importance of this journey—storytelling to story writing to mass printing of stories—cannot be overstated. Literature allows us both to reflect on our own “odyssey” and to step beyond ourselves. To understand our place in the human condition—those most basic shared experiences and emotions that define what it is to be alive in this world: Birth, growth, joy, sorrow, fear, hope, disappointment, love, anger, death.

Now that books are increasingly featuring AI-generated content—the details on this are murky, and sources disagree over how much and in what manner—the future of literature feels uncertain. I can only say that AI books will not—cannot—give us the truth of the human condition. Humans: It takes one to know one.

Theatre

One of the greatest writers to ever capture the essence of human experience was William Shakespeare. His narratives were acted out on stage, but their veracity is proven by the audiences that continue to pack the Globe Theatre in London for every performance of his work more than four-hundred years later.

The power of theatre lies in its immediacy, its face-to-face connection between actors/story/audience. The story begins, building and building to its climax—wham!—before continuing to its resolution. With the exception of a brief interval for longer works, there is no “putting the play down” as we do multiple times when reading a book. At the close of an especially electrifying performance, an audible second of silence occurs before the house goes wild with applause.

There was some real concern that COVID would be the end of theatres. Thankfully, this has not turned out to be true.  There are some 240 theatres in London and more than 100 (including off-Broadway venues) in New York City. And great playwrights continue to emerge. Kate Hamill, Rajiv Joseph, Jeffrey Hatcher, Eboni Booth.

Music

“Music is the universal language of mankind.” — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I cannot remember a time when music was not core to my being, a state that only catapulted into the wild blue after my dad gave me a transistor radio with earphones when I was six. Suddenly, I could listen to music (clandestinely, tee-hee) until the local radio station went off the air at midnight. And I did, all the way into high school. The Beatles. Bob Dylan. The Supremes. The Temptations. The Byrds. Simon & Garfunkel. The Mamas and the Papas. Smokey Robinson. And about a zillion others. Has there ever been such an explosion of brilliant music before or since?      

When the Beatles released their “White Album” on Nov. 22, 1968, I hiked most of a mile in the late fall chill through a field of briars—in the fashion of the time, capri jeans and flats with no socks, which left my ankles to the mercy of the thorny plants—to get a copy from a local department store. A small price to pay, I thought as I placed the first record on the turntable, for having these 30 new songs by the rock group that flipped my world and defined a generation.                           

In college, I took a class in playwriting. The professor spoke of musical theatre as well and introduced us to opera. He played a recording of Puccini’s “O mio babbino caro” (“Oh, my dear Papa”) from the opera Gianni Schicchi. I. Was. Hooked. At just a hair over two minutes, it’s one of the most incredibly beautiful, emotional pieces of music I have ever encountered. After many decades, I still can’t hear it without tearing up.

And, altering Longfellow’s quote a tad, music also has charms to soothe the savage “beast.” When my dear kitty, Coosh (Mercutio), was alive, we had a nightly routine I dubbed “Music with Mommy.” This ritual occurred during what I call my “decompression time”—a half-hour at the end of the day when I sit on my bed and play solitaire, letting the pressures of life slide off me, while I listen to music—Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, Schubert and other classical masters, played by brilliant musicians like Joshua Bell. Cooshy always jumped up on the bed and rested beside me for the duration. If I was a little behind on getting started, Coosh would stand by the staircase until I got the message.

Art

When, as a college student, I first encountered several of the great art galleries of the world—the Louvre in Paris, the Tate Britain and the National Gallery in London, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence—I had to see everything (though even I could not cover all 35,000 artworks in the Louvre). And it wasn’t that I had never seen art before. My mother had trained as an artist, so we did the two-hour drive every few years to visit the fabled Art Institute of Chicago. But having stood spellbound before Van Gogh’s The Bedroom and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix and Toulouse-Lautrec’s At the Moulin Rouge, I craved more. Much more. So, even as I journeyed beyond that semester in Europe, beyond college, into the wide world, I continued to seek out the great art galleries both at home and abroad. I still do.

One might imagine being a writer, dealing in words rather than images, I would not be so deeply affected by paintings, but the best works of art speak as eloquently to the human condition as any work of literature or theatre. Writers, painters, dancers, musicians, actors—we all deal heavily in emotion because before we are artists we are human beings, and who among us has not known the majesty and the wonder expressed in van Gogh’s The Starry Night or experienced the utter despair portrayed so movingly in John William Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott?          

Democracy, Social Justice, Peace, Generosity

“Whatever happened to the idea…that we all do better when we all do better?” –Paul Wellstone, progressive senator from Minnesota (1991-2002), addressing a sheet metal workers’ union.

Our democracy has chugged along for 236 years, imperfectly—yes—but intact. And through the decades, now centuries, “we the people” have made progress toward that “more perfect union” outlined in the Constitution, though not infrequently in the style of a two-steps forward, one-step back foxtrot. For example, the 19^th Amendment gave women the right to vote in 1920, but Black and Indigenous women were restricted from exercising this right by a tangle of state laws that also prevented the men in these populations from voting. And Native Americans were not even recognized as full citizens until The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924!    

But despite the muddles—inherent in a true democracy where many voices contend—those of us who believe that all people are created equal have continued to press for the full realization of that highest of ideals. With the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Acts of 1965, it seemed we were finally getting somewhere. Even when Nixon’s role was revealed in the 1972 Watergate scandal, masterminding the cover-up for the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters by CREEP—that darkly comic and amazingly accurate acronym for Tricky Dick’s Committee to Re-Elect the President—even then, justice prevailed and Nixon resigned one step ahead of his certain impeachment.

And now, we who hold dear our Constitution, our First Amendment rights to freedom of speech, to “peaceably assemble and petition the Government for a redress of grievances”, we must continue to rise up and say NO! to what is, in fact, a dictatorship by the billionaires, for the billionaires and to hell with the rest of us. The millions of Americans who have come out to protest at the “No Kings” rallies this past year is heartening, but our system of checks and balances established by the founders remains in grave danger. The majority of the Supreme Court is in the pockets of the uber rich and there’s a president at the helm who believes no one can restrain his power—Congress be damned.

We must continue to stand together and stand up for each other, including our immigrants, for are we not—with the exception of the badly-treated Indigenous Americans—all immigrants?     

For all we hold dear, we cannot—must not—fail.

I love to travel but I’m always happy to return home. Back to my hood and my wonderful neighbors. Back to my town with its progressive vibe and happy inclusive sense of community. This past October, though, was different. It was difficult returning from Amsterdam, unsettling. Everything feels so uncertain in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Healthcare. Environmental protections. Social Security. Public funding for our schools and universities, for medical research and disaster relief. Our civil rights. Our voting rights. Democracy itself. All hanging by a very tenuous thread. All subject to a very real threat. A shadow dogging us even on the sunniest of days. How do we live within this shadow? Not just survive, but thrive?

Uncertainty. The very word makes us itch. I mean, we love surprise parties, but no one hosts an uncertainty celebration. No one says, oh, what a lovely uncertainty! In reality, though, uncertainty is all we ever have. From the moment of our birth anything can happen, but most of the time we don’t feel threatened so we don’t dwell on this truth. We tend to view life as something we can act upon and that, if carried out thoughtfully and with a clear purpose, our actions will steer the course of our future more or less in the direction we wish. We apply for college or a job. The outcome is uncertain, and we will likely be disappointed if we aren’t accepted, but we don’t perceive it as a threat. We just apply to another college, another job. Something will turn up. You can’t always get what you want, as the Rolling Stones reminded us in a song, but if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need. A great tune with a reassuring message. But what if the most basic things one needs are under threat? What if the land of one’s birth is being steered by the rich and the powerful toward fascism? How can one not be distressed, depressed?

Yes We CAN!

Uncertainty of the magnitude we now face can make us feel like bolting the doors and crawling under the covers until “everything’s okay” again, but that’s not living. It is hard to remain unscathed by the dark threats around us, but it is imperative to remember that uncertainty is just that: By its very definition, it is NOT certain. And acting as if the outcome we fear is a fait accompli only allows it to become so—the surest way to hand those who would destroy our democracy the victory they crave.

As a recent People Power United email I received reminds us: Fascism doesn’t arrive with fanfare or sudden violence. It creeps in quietly — through lies, fear, and apathy — eroding rights, silencing dissent, and consolidating power until resistance seems impossible. History has shown what happens when people wait too long to act. The cost of silence is always freedom. But, PPU adds: The courage of ordinary people stops fascism—and it starts with us.

The time for action is NOW. It’s a time for getting together with others—friends, neighbors, our community—and standing strong. A time for saying “Hell no, we won’t give up our country, our freedoms, our rights, our healthcare, the fight to save our planet. There’s 340 million of us and only a handful of you gluttonous greedsters who would destroy it all.”  

If six-year-old Ruby Bridges could face the hordes of angry, name-calling white bigots—yes, grown-ups, parents of young children themselves—when she became the first Black student to attend William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans in 1959, then we can all rise together and say a resounding NO WAY! to the dismantling of our government and our rights.

History buff that I am, I would like to note here that it was the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education that ruled (1954) separating children in public schools on the basis of race was unconstitutional. And it was a Republican president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who presided over the country when Ruby entered the all-white school. Oh, for a Supreme Court again like that one! Or a Republican president who valued civil rights.

As someone who grew up watching the Civil Rights marches of the 1960s and later marched to protest the Vietnam War, I can tell you there is nothing so powerful, so feel-good as joining with others to fight for what is right, what is just. If you participated in one of the more than 2,500 “No Kings” protests this past October 18, then you probably know what I mean. It was a celebration of love for justice, freedom and democracy, one of the largest single-day protests in American history. Even deep red Texas had its share of “No Kings” events, with more than 20,000 participating in the Austin protest alone. People are rising up, coming together, saying This is OUR country and we will not stand by silently while the billionaires and fascists destroy it. [For a list of the 281 organizations that worked to make the recent “No Kings” day a success, click here. They deserve our heartfelt thanks.]

Photo by Leo_Visions on Unsplash

Celebrate Life!

Defending our rights is crucial if we are to remain a free people, but enjoying our freedom is equally vital to our well-being. In the title up top, I chose to capitalize LIVING because I believe it to be the key word. Uncertainty, as I said, goes on forever. It is always with us. But life, the life of each of us is finite, precious. Carpe diem! Seize the day! Need a few suggestions? Try these.

Go out to enjoy live music with friends. Or make some music of your own. Ed and I love to play our guitars, while our neighbor J. likes to make some good noise on his drum kit.

Host a potluck for your neighbors—we do this frequently in my hood and it always boosts everyone’s spirits.  

Set aside at least one hour every day to pursue a project you love. An hour that is sacrosanct, meaning not for doing laundry or grocery shopping. Not for mopping the kitchen floor or raking leaves—unless you love raking leaves, in which case, please come to my house. We’ve got billions of them! No, during this special hour, you paint pictures, write stories, read those books you’ve been dying to get to, refinish that antique armoire you bought at a yard sale six years ago with the dream of giving it a new life, print and compile a scrapbook of your most cherished photos, learn to play an instrument—as long as you’re here, it’s never too late.  

And definitely let yourself get silly. It’s not just fun, it’s vital. The other day, needing a release from the omnipresent cloud of dark threats, I put Jerry Lee Lewis on the CD player and danced wildly around the kitchen, singing along—at top volume—to “Great Balls of Fire.” Which left me feeling lighter, happier, stronger. Not a bad outcome for a song that clocks at just 2 minutes and 34 seconds!  

Uncertainty. It’s the condition of life. It’s the road ahead. But it doesn’t always foreshadow disaster. Today, for example, was forecast to be cold and dark and rain-soaked, but three minutes ago the sun broke through the clouds, lighting up the autumn trees in their dazzling oranges and yellows, and the temp is mild. A perfect day for a walk, so I’m out the door. As singer/songwriter Jackson Browne said, “Don’t let the uncertainty turn you around. Go on and make a joyful sound.” 

(NOTE: As I’m due for another “sanity break,” I’m leaving you with a post I wrote in September 2022, when I thought I knew what disaster looked like. Apropos of the ideas expressed in this month’s blog, I still had more to learn. Lesson: Never ask what else could go wrong. But I’ll be back with a brand new post in November, refreshed and ready to resume the good fight.)

Many years ago, while reading Vanessa Redgrave: An Autobiography, I came across this arresting line: Never go to the theatre with your head full of what you don’t like. Words Redgrave attributed to her father, actor Michael Redgrave. I was reminded of this wise counsel recently while perusing the program notes for a dance performance—A.I.M by Kyle Abraham—at Jacob’s Pillow. Abraham’s troupe is noted for blending a wide range of dance styles in its repertoire, an approach that has made the company “one of the most consistently excellent troupes working today” (The New York Times).

But A.I.M’s notable achievement might never have come about. In an interview with LifeandTimes.com, Abraham recalled going to see the Joffrey Ballet at age 16. He did not go to see the ballet as a form—Abraham was a club dancer then—but to see some dances within the company’s piece Billboards because they were performed to a song cycle by pop superstar Prince. Yet that night, as they say, changed Kyle Abraham’s life. What he witnessed on that stage inspired him to step outside the narrow confines of his own experience in dance, to begin exploring and creating what he now calls his “postmodern gumbo…a hybrid of movement sensibilities inspired by a lot of postmodern, modern, contemporary, and ballet forms and even some social-dance vernaculars as well.”

But what if Abraham had gone to Billboards convinced there was nothing of value in ballet itself? If he had closed his mind, his sensibilities to everything but the Prince song cycle? How much in life do we miss because we “go to the theatre” with our minds made up? Or engage in discussions to talk but not to listen? Or simply close our eyes to what is inconvenient to see or disturbing to consider? And why do we do this? I mean, what risk is there in exploring a subject further or considering other takes on a topic?  It commits us to nothing. And it just might open up our life as it did Kyle Abraham’s.

If You’re Right, Then I’m Wrong

We tend to fear challenges to our beliefs. Psychology even has a name for this inclination: belief perseverance. Picture an Inquisition dude at Galileo’s trial in the 1630s—hands over ears, vigorously shaking his head—“No,no,no! The Earth does NOT revolve around the Sun. God’s greatest creation is the center of the universe!” Or Earl Landgrebe, GOP congressman from Indiana, famously defending Nixon in August 1974—just days after the Watergate tapes came to light. “Don’t confuse me with the facts,” Landgrebe said. “I’ve got a closed mind.”

Belief perseverance (also referred to as “conceptual conservatism”) prompts us to actively reject any and all information that contradicts or outright proves our convictions false or flimsy. And if we step back for a moment, it’s easy to understand why this not-infrequently annoying trait is so powerful. After all, our beliefs can feel like the glue that holds us together as we try to make sense of a constantly changing, complex world.

But that doesn’t alter the danger refusing to reconsider our beliefs can pose to ourselves and others (think of the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol and the movement to “Stop the Steal!” when there was no steal). Even in far less fraught circumstances, it’s still a losing strategy. A diminution of self. A blind eye that puts us at the mercy of anyone with a desire to pull the wool over it for their own ends.   

At some level, we all recognize this. I mean, what adult still believes in the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus? Growth is the result of challenges to our assumptions. It’s evidenced by a viewpoint that expands far beyond the narrow focus of early home life to encompass a panoramic vista of the human condition and the world in all its contradictions.

If we’re lucky, those challenges just keep on coming. If we’re wise, we embrace them. Allow them to enrich our understanding and, thus, our experiences throughout our lifetime.

Identity Crisis

We also fear losing our identity—how we see ourselves and wish to be seen by others. So we tend to seek out and embrace anything and anyone who affirms our picture of ourselves and the world around us. Psychologists call this confirmation bias.  As a concept, it’s the photo-negative of belief perseverance. In everyday speak, it’s called wishful thinking. It’s like the child who, wanting to go to the picnic her parents caution may be rained out, desperately searches a gray sky for signs of sunshine.

When I was 12, I wrote passionate poems about the evils of science. A child of my times, as we all are, I could only see science as the atomic bombs that wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as the Agent Orange that defoliated Vietnam—part of the “herbicidal warfare” waged there by the U.S., sickening and killing the Vietnamese and our soldiers in the process. As the napalm bombs that left huge areas of unquenchable fire in their wake. I loved the Byrd’s song “5D (Fifth Dimension)” with its line: And I saw the great blunder my teachers had made, scientific delirium madness.

I still love that song for its embrace of a loving universe, but I have learned a lot since then. Allowed a lot of facts in. Realized that my take on science in 1967 contained some truth, but ignored many, many other truths. Because along with weapons of mass destruction, science has created life-saving medicines and technologies—where would we be today without the COVID vaccines? Science created deadly herbicides like glyphosate, but science is also working to prevent further bio-diversity erosion and the poisoning of our earth, air and water. A team at MIT recently developed a portable desalination unit that removes particles and salts from ocean water to render it safe for drinking. The machine weighs just 22 pounds and requires less power to run than a cell phone charger. It can even be driven by a portable solar pane. Science has been destruction. It has also, and more often, been life and hope.

Asking questions, listening to others, testing their ideas—and yours—teaches you virtually everything is far more complex than it first appears. When I was young, I had clear-cut solutions to all of society’s many problems. Well, I’m still in the same fights I was then—the struggle for racial equality, for the rights of women and LGBTQ+ persons, for preserving the earth and all its creatures (great and small), for universal healthcare and high-quality public education. Yes, I’m still in those fights, but now I understand the solutions are more complicated than I first thought. And the questions not infrequently outnumber the answers. This can feel overwhelming at times but, as every good scientist knows, it’s the questions that drive the most significant, the most enduring solutions. Anyone can act, but to act intelligently—that’s a different, and far better, course.

I’ve Got It All Together (Not)

Admitting to ourselves and others that we don’t “have it all together”—that we harbor uncertainties, have gaps in our knowledge, or are totally clueless about the issue at hand—can make us feel very vulnerable. “I’ve got it all together” is the mantra of our age. Social media has made it possible for people to “package” their lives for public consumption: See me. I’m in my beautiful home, surrounded by my perfect family (the kids all spectacularly successful), dining at elegant places and traveling the world without a care. It’s a dream life!  

In most instances, I’m willing to bet, the only solid truth in that carefully-scripted presentation is the dream part. Which is ironic because a truly secure person can admit to screw-ups and uncertainty. A truly secure person knows that no one “has it all together.” A truly secure person is open to new ideas and different takes.

Like a self-described club dancer who goes to the ballet to see how they’re dancing to Prince and comes away profoundly changed.

Kyle Abraham could have gone to Billboards with a head full of what he didn’t like. He could have refused to be influenced by anything else, fearing it would weaken his identity as a club dancer. But instead, he opened his mind to the possibilities. And that opening up made him a stronger dancer, a magnificent choreographer, one able to draw from the rich diversity of dance the world offers.

Everyone can learn from others. Even my cats, Tibby and Coosh, understood this. One of their favorite treats was butter wrappers, especially on a warmish day when a rich layer of the good stuff stuck to the wax paper. But butter wrappers can be a real challenge, as Coosh discovered. With every lick, the wrapper slid along the tiled floor, making it hard for him to get a satisfying mouthful. His brother Tibby, however, quickly developed a strategy—place one paw on the wrapper to keep it from sliding. A couple of wrappers later, I noticed Coosh had adopted Tibby’s technique.

Cooshy didn’t defend his (unsatisfying) practice. He didn’t feel it made him “less of a cat” to copy his brother. He simply grasped that Tibby’s method resulted in MORE of the good stuff. You’d have to be stupid not to adopt it.

How sad it would be if we encountered every new experience, every new idea or piece of information with our mind already made up. If we never expanded our understanding or outlook. Never grew beyond the Tooth Fairy. Because growth is life.