Message from the Chair

This will be my first of several messages written from an infusion chair in my rheumatologist’s office. As I sit here during another four-hour session, with an I.V. of mouse DNA dripping into my arm, forced to contemplate my own mortality, I cannot help but think about what an idiot I have been, to let myself get so continually upset about the recent political goings-on in my country.

It’s not that I just sit around griping. Okay, I am sitting now, but usually I am out and about trying to help. I have always tried to help. I was a public defender for 23 years. Right now, I am volunteering for the Obama campaign from day to day, to the extent that I am able. I have always believed that each individual should properly both understand the bases as well as own the results of their own decisions. Too many of us abdicate, to avoid those responsibilities. Too many of us opt out completely or at most, pull the lever without bothering to vet the flood of offal that swept us into the voting booth. 2012 has already kept its promise to be a banner year for offal, thanks to a couple of buddies of the Koch Brothers on the U.S. Supreme Court. But now I digress.

I pay attention. A lot of attention. Too much attention. And so, when someone I know (or usually someone I don’t) opines, based upon nothing but fear-n-smear, poppycock propaganda, I feel an immediate and uncontrollable need to set them straight about the latest “big lie.” How stupid is that? And how useless.

I already know that most people simply cannot tolerate the discomfort of learning that their long-held beliefs are based upon absolute crap, and that most also take issue with me pointing this out to them for some reason. And that bothers me too.

But the fact that I cannot sit idly by while someone, anyone, takes a ritualized, steaming, dog-poop-bath in ignorance, says more about my own psychological state, than that of my mentally-challenged target. No, the country will not blow up overnight, if the over-privileged, amoral, vulture capitalist is elected. America has been in a steady nosedive since we elected Bonzo in 1980. That was when the corporations started jumping ship and the rest of us quit paying attention. By my accounting, if the insane win and start running the asylum, a Hunger Games scenario will not develop for at least another 20 years. We have all kinds of time.

Even if enough of us start paying attention, and the good guys win this election, the bad guys still have already wired things in Washington to go to s#!t by the end of the year in what can only be characterized as a congressionally engineered economic apocalypse. The Tea/GOP has set several fiscal time-bombs to explode at about the same time as the lame duck session convenes. And can you imagine the spirit of cooperation between the parties once all those injured fowl are armed with one-way tickets to a gig at Fox News/MSNBC? The fact that this will happen and that I can’t help stressing over it is yet another part of my pathological penchant for paying too much attention. Why do I have to know this crap and feel crappy no matter who wins the election? Not fair. Not fair at all. And I digress again.

Of course, I have legitimate, personal, practical reasons to worry about who wins the next election which are directly related to my present incarceration in this infusion chair. If the bad guys win, my health insurance gets canceled and the war between my overactive immune system and the rest of me results in my untimely demise. Okay, we all gotta go sometime, but, in a glass-half-empty state of mind, instead of feeling good about my contribution to capping the current population explosion, I’m worried about pushing daisies before I can meet my grandchildren. Some may view this angst as neurotic and selfish. I don’t know that I agree.

And so, I get my panties in a bunch and start ranting about the whole GOP/corporate-elite-SOB- hegemony thingy again and perpetuate the vicious cycle. Those bastards act like the greedy amoral sociopaths they were raised to be, and then I take it personally when other people defend the SOBs (like being a sociopath is a good thing) and smile through the tears as they are being screwed sideways with a wire brush by said SOBs.   

Practically speaking, for me it is really quite simple. If the bad guys take this one, I and 40 or 50 million other Americans get kicked to the curb to croak. And before we can croak with dignity, our pensions will be cut, and our taxes will increase, and our government services (into which we have been paying since we were teenagers) will be reduced to a tattered not-so-safety net with a rip down the middle, just big enough for me and the rest of the middle class to fall through and hit the asphalt at top speed. And there is so little that I or any one person alone can do to reduce the road-rash those bastards intend to inflict on the same folks that bought their stuff and/or their promises and made them rich. Makes a fella feel kinda helpless. So I volunteer. It helps me to feel not so helpless.

It is hard for this worry wart to just fuggedaboudit and get on with things, knowing what a personal stake I have in what happens in the next six months. Serenity simply refuses to course through my veins. I asked the Doctor to slip some in my drip, but he just laughed.

J. Brandeis Sperandeo