Didn’t Expect to See That

Front page story in a newspaper the other week:

In America the average life expectancy is going down, while in other first world countries people are living longer.

Actual causes of earlier deaths in the United States: opioid overdoses, suicide, illnesses brought on by lack of self-care, or bad diet, or bad diet because a good diet is unaffordable or unavailable, or illness left untreated because medical care is unaffordable or unavailable.

The person speaking in the article said that what this trend toward early death came down to was despair and hopelessness, not being able to see a future in which life could be improved with a job, a home, reliable food availability, reliable healthcare.

It was a grim assessment of how tough it is for so many American people now, and how many of them cannot find the resources to prevail against the odds.

On page three of the same newspaper was an article about our President pardoning a Thanksgiving turkey. He joked about impeachment and finished up by saying he was so happy about the new prosperity in the country and the new spirit blowing across the land.

After reading these two pieces, one after the other, I thought, there it is in a nutshell, the dichotomy between what we see - people dying from despair - and what we’re told to see – prosperity! A new spirit!

You know, there have been a lot of things I did not expect to see in my lifetime. I did not expect to see the Berlin Wall come down, and the Soviet Union to collapse. I did not expect to see marijuana become legal. I did not expect to see us have a black president. I did not expect to see us have a woman president.

Oh, wait.

Seriously, folks, I did not expect to see my country go down the road that Germany went down in the twentieth century. I grew up being taught, and believing, that we were better than that. We were the good guys who fought to defeat that.

In 2007, the last year of George W. Bush’s second term, I read that Germans who had fled Germany in the 1930s and 40s were saying that it was already too late to flee the United States. They saw what was coming. They had seen it before.

A young population has grown up without knowing survivors of World War II, or survivors of the death camps, or people whose families in Europe were wiped out. Young people have not grown up hearing those stories, or stories from their fathers or uncles or grandfathers, the vets who liberated the camps – not that those vets wanted to talk about it. They wanted their nightmares to go away: the sights, the smells, the discovery of what one group of human beings did to other human beings.

So now we have a country where we have people who think Hitler was a pretty cool guy, and white racial purity is a thing much to be desired, and they cheer for a guy who is incapable of putting together a simple declarative sentence.

Now we have thugs in the military who have no respect for the rules of engagement. Oh, there has always been rape and murder and torture and pillage in war, but there hasn’t always been a President who gave it his blessing.

Don’t forget, though, Donald Trump is not the cause of what is happening. He is an end stage symptom of a disease which has been building in this country for a long time. Since the founding of the nation, really, but in this virulent form since the nineteen-seventies.

Millions of Americans think he is ducking peachy, and that the Republicans are doing a great job of running the country, channeling all the wealth to a few people and not caring much about the rest of us.

One could despair, and many people do.

And yet – I see our native people rising and speaking out, demanding to be recognized as human beings with rights and dignity, more than ever before.

I see our children saying they are fed up with being gunned down in their classrooms, and it must stop.

I see people responding to hate crimes with grace and righteousness, and people surrounding them with love and support.

I see people devoting their lives working to prevent mass extinction on our planet from climate change, even if they suspect their work might be hopeless because it is too late.

Yeah, climate change might make everything else fade into irrelevance. Didn’t expect to see that in my lifetime, either.

Sometimes it takes something like that to make everyone realize we’re all in this together.

Or not.

We’ll see.

Radiation and Hallmark Movies

Radiation treatments are done. Four weeks, five days a week.

I got off easy, as far as cancer treatment goes. Still, stuff happens.

My radiation therapist, Angus, told me that skin damage from the radiation would become worse after the radiation stopped. He did not lie.

Radiation has left me fatigued, and with “radiation brain,” like I needed more brain fog.

The burns look like sunburn, angry red, but they are coming from within, not without. A nurse told me that the burns might heal in four weeks.

So. Fatigued, burned, and a little radiation brained. A person could feel a little less than fully functional.

Here is how bad it gets sometimes: last Sunday I watched movies on the Hallmark Channel.

In case you don’t know, Hallmark movies are pure romantic escapism.

I say movies, but there is basically one Hallmark movie: girl meets boy, conflict arises, conflict resolves, and at the last possible minute girl and boy realize that he/she was The One all along.

Happy ending.

The protagonists are always youngish – thirties, say – and always white, and always model attractive.

The movies are set in a small town, which the girl left in order to go to college and then to the big city to have her busy, shiny, career. She has a city boyfriend who is Mr. Wrong. She also has a female bff, or business partner, or personal assistant, who is sometimes not white. This is Hallmark’s nod to diversity.

This female sidekick is either telling Our Heroine to dump the chucklehead she’s dating, or at least bff knows the guy’s a chucklehead and hopes Our Heroine will come to her senses.

One day Our Heroine gets a call from home: someone has died or needs her help, or some darn thing.

She drops everything and goes back to her hometown.

Once there, she runs into The Guy.

Maybe her old high school boyfriend. Maybe a new guy in town.

The Guy is a bachelor who has taken over raising his sister’s children because she and her husband died in a plane crash. Or he’s a widower raising his own child alone. Or maybe he has a stick up his butt which he loses over the course of the movie as he falls for Our Heroine, or maybe he’s just gosh darn shucks country decent and has been helping her folks in her absence.

Whatever. By the end of the movie she has broken up with the city boyfriend and realized that her city life was a sham and delusion. She opens a cupcake store, or takes over running the ranch, or starts giving napkin folding lessons. Whatever she decides to do will provide her with a good living, because this is Hallmark land. Oh, and she finds true love with the Guy.

Sometimes one of the characters is a prince or princess. Sometimes Our Heroine is the one in the small town, and it’s The Guy who realizes his city life is all wrong. Slightly different conflicts, same ending.

On Sunday I was looking for something completely undemanding on television. It doesn’t get much less demanding than a Hallmark movie.

I watched two movies, and both movies annoyed me.

In the first one, Our Heroine’s job was to give violin lessons, and at night she and her sister played violin and piano duets as background music at a restaurant. At the end when the Guy realized he loved her, he ran to the restaurant where she was playing and took her in his arms to make his declaration. She set her violin down – where? Stage right out of sight. Then after the big kiss and embrace the two of them joined hands and ran out of the restaurant together, and I’m yelling, “The violin! The violin! What about the violin?” No musician would set their instrument down and run off without it. So I’m ready to write Hallmark a scorching letter about that.

Then the next movie began. First scene begins with a big title telling us the location: Bainbridge Island, Washington.

Hah.

It was a snowy Midwest movie set if anything – five inches of snow on the ground the whole movie, quaint little gingerbread trimmed houses with not a Craftsman or a Victorian or Northwest modern in sight, and flat, straight streets. No hills, no forest, no curving roads.

Bainbridge Island, my left hind leg.

Oh well. At least while watching Hallmark movies I wasn’t thinking about physical pain or impeachment hearings or how the heck I’m going to get the house together for Thanksgiving. So those movies took me out of myself for a few hours.

By the way, I laugh, but if you think it would be easy to write a formulaic screenplay, or any screenplay, that would make it to production, I’d like to see you try it.