Don't Get Me Started with Linda Sharp

Cutting The Line

Yes, another COVID piece.  Deal with it, read it, or move on.  My hope is simple - share enough stories, enough outrage, that perhaps you will share these pieces with people in your own life who are still waffling over the vaccine, clinging to the most outrageous of bullshit, or simply just keep putting it off.

As for the bullshit factory of the right? Today's offering is delicious.  Former National Security Advisor and now lowest of the iQ anonsensers is out claiming the Deep state is planning on putting the vaccines in salad dressing.  I shit you not.  This man, who had access to the highest levels of government, believes we are mounting some kind of Hidden Vaccine Ranch attack on them, their liberties, and their all-you-can-eat salad bars at the Golden Corral buffet.

Seriously - anyone who actively listens to this hilarious garbage and believes it is probably a lost cause, but still... How stupid can a person be?

Rhetorical question - we all know the answer.  We read their obituaries and GoFundMes daily.

Today's figures are as dire as ever.  In the past 24 hours we have added 128,575 cases, lost 2,411 more lives, added 7 to the deaths per million - now at 2,096 - and the additional global death toll of 8,518?  We own 23% of that.

2,411 more dead.  Bright side?  I guess that opens up more ICU beds, ventilators, and ECMO machines? 

And that deaths per million number?  Ahhhhh, remember the halcyon days when it was only 2,000 per million?  Sweet, sweet memories of ... ONLY SIXTEEN DAYS AGO. 

So, what lit your powder today, Linda, you ask?  Wasn't yesterday's death of compassion stinging enough?

No.  No, it was not.

Today's story has to do with the number of people who have willingly gone unvaxxed, contracted the virus, had their lungs trashed to the point that they are basically useless garbage bags in their chests, and who now need double lung transplants if they are to survive.

Meet Houston firefighter Wayne Davis.  He contracted COVID and has been hospitalized for a month now.  Wayne, despite having seen four colleagues perish from COVID and despite his (vaccinated) wife's nagging to get it done, was not vaccinated.  According to Caitlin, "I was vaccinated and I just kept getting on him to go do it. He would say, 'I'll go do it,' and kept putting it off. He just never did it."

Again, FOUR firefighting buddies dead, three beautiful little children counting on him, and he just never got around to it.

Now he needs not one, but two lungs if he is to have a shot at surviving.  And because of how dire is his case, he will be jumping the queue ahead of people who have been on the transplant list, doing all the right things to stay ready and worthy should the call come.

Yes, worthy.  Our daughter is currently working in an oncology department as she moves through her PhD program - she has been part of assessments for people who are in need of organs.  And if you are not committed to doing everything you can to be as physically and mentally healthy as possible, you do not go on the list.  That means no drugs, no junk food diet, able to afford it, mentally strong enough for what lies ahead after transplant surgery, vaccinated (if possible) - everything to have your body in as good of shape as is possible should you move up into position #1 on the list.

Yet now comes Wayne, like many other COVID unvaxxed before him, swooping into the pole position.  It is just not fair.  Leave alone that a relatively healthy (lungwise) human being has to DIE for lungs to become available, there are people across the country who have been living (and often dying) by their phones for a very long time waiting for it to ring.

I am so very sorry for his wife who has to watch her husband wither and possibly now die.  She did what she could, but in the end he's a grown ass man, and it's not her job to drag him into a Walgreens and roll his sleeve up, hold his hand, and give him a lollipop.  I feel so much for his three children  - two sons and a daughter - who can only see him through plate glass at this point.  He missed his little girl's first day of kindergarten.  Think of how much more he is going to miss if those stolen lungs don't come through in time.  Three more kids who may have to grow up knowing that their father is gone because he was capricious and stupid.

He has already been in two hospitals in the past six weeks.  This was a healthy, young man, a firefighter - and he has been brought low by something that could have been prevented by ten minutes and a couple needle pokes.

This story enrages me not just because of the line jumping, but because this was not even a man who listened to salad dressing conspiracies or thought the vaccine would make him magnetic or have swollen balls.  He was just lazy.  And that, to me, is simply unforgiveable. 

We will break 700,000 dead by tomorrow night.  You do not need to be one of them.  Get the vaccine before we really do resort to hiding it in your Hidden Valley.   (And beware the chocolate fountain at the buffet - that is an even easier target...)

Blather, Rinse, Repeat

One of the biggest internal crises to come about because of COVID has to be the one being experienced by truly decent people who find themselves feeling less than charitably towards our fellow travelers.

Yes, we have all grappled with the isolation of quarantine, the sleepless nights over jobs that disappeared and the financial stressors that come with.  Parents have lost endless hours to worry about their child's schooling and now their safety as schools are opening everywhere with little to no precautions for their unvaccinated offspring.  Many of us have railed against the fates as friends contracted COVID in 2020, pre-vaccine, some coming perilously close to death's door, some passing through it.  And we have all been living through a collective trauma we never envisioned we would share.

But what has been happening internally to so many, myself included, is an erosion of compassion, a famine of patience, a literal shoulder shrug as we see the brazen unvaccinated contracting COVID and passing away.  I am literally out of fucks to give, my fuck field, she is barren.

And I make no apologies for it.

At this point, it is very difficult to feel any sort of sorrow for someone who played Russian Roulette with a deadly virus, all but daring it to infect them, and then * SHOCK  * they got infected, took up precious hospital resources, and then died.

Their stories are not exceptions.  Their stories have sadly become norms.  Every day we read of another talk radio blowhard who mocked the rest of us getting vaccinated; preachers who encouraged prayer, not true medical precaution from their pulpits; and John and Jane Does galore who made spreading disinformation their lifeblood right up to the moment their lifeblood stopped coursing through their veins.

Children are being orphaned daily - that is not an exaggeration.  So many stories in the news of both a mother and a father dying in separate hospital rooms, leaving behind young children who will grow up to wonder why they were not precious enough to stick around for.  Children who will grow into teens who read the history of this pandemic, the news stories of their parents' blatant ignorance and hubris, and be forever scarred by knowing they were not worth common sense and a couple needle jabs in the arm.

The latest story is of a mother of four.  Kristin Lowery of California, a woman who boasted about her unvaxxed status - 'Unmasked, unmuzzled, unvaccinated, unafraid. Together we win' -  died September 15th of COVID-19.  While her sister tried to downplay what happened, other relatives revealed on social media that it was indeed coronavirus.  Kristin's aunt posted the expected type of thing people tell themselves when something takes a loved one far too soon:

"So many people need her here, but God must have special plans for her in heaven."  

Again, I get it - it's a much better thought than the reality that they just died because they were stupid.  Console yourself as needed in your worst moments of pandemic delivered grief, but maybe, just maybe, your GOD did supply the miracle, the answer to prayers, the way to stay put here on Earth where "so many people need her" through doctors, researchers, experts, and vaccines.

So Kristin spent her time blathering on about whatever horseshit she bought from Tucker Carlson and the plethora of Mark Zuckerburg approved Facebook cesspools of lies.  And so she, like so many just like her, has died.  Now comes the also predictable step:  the GoFundMe page to cover the expenses associated with her flagrant courting of death.

I take special issue with the part on her page where a loved one wrote:

"Kristen was a beautiful and amazing woman but more than that she was a phenomenal mother who always, ALWAYS put her children first.  She lived for her children (Tayden, McKenna, Ella, and Ryenn) and loved being their mother more than anything in her life." 

Um, no, no she did not put her children first.  In fact it's pretty fucking clear she did not.  A mother who put her children first would have done everything, every.fucking.thing possible to stay healthy, to stay around, to protect them, to BE HERE.  And that means getting the vaccine.  But she was far more into her memes and signs and groups than she was into actually educating herself, and now her children have no mother.

SHE. CHOSE. THIS.

Am I being unkind?  Call it what you want, but the mother in me is infuriated each time I read another story of a parent or parents who chose their fealty to Trump, their love of FOX, their feeling like one of the cool gang in a Facebook group over the actual business of parenting.  The rock bottom, most paramount piece of it - that of doing every possible thing to stay alive on this rock to raise and protect your child(ren). 

Another mother of four passed away in North Carolina - Amee Hager was admitted to the hospital on the same day as her husband Jeff.   He passed away from COVID a week ago, she succumbed over the weekend.  (Look at that beautiful family, now decimated.)  The inevitable GoFundMe is up and raising money to help in final expenses and for the relatives who will now be tasked with raising four children - 14, 13, 7 and 6.  In a post from the family after Amee's passing, they beseeched everyone to get vaccinated, having now learned a horrific lesson with this double loss of two unvaccinated people.

 “If you are not vaccinated…..please go and get it. You cannot be replaced! Don’t leave your families behind to deal with this kind of pain and grief!”

Story after story like these are reported daily.  And while I do have compassion, it is solely for the innocent children of these reckless, feckless, careless people who left them.

For the adults?  None.  I just don't have anything anymore but a shrug, another sigh, a throwing up of my hands at the absolute senselessness of it all.  I know I am not alone in feeling an emptiness, a void where unqualified, unconditional compassion used to reside.  And I don't like it, but there it is.

Because. It. Does. Not. Have. To. Be. This. Way.

We are two days away from crossing 700,000 deaths in this country - our dead, if laid end to end, now stretch from Cleveland to Atlanta.  And that number is waaaay conservative because it in no way reflects the excess deaths per year that have been recorded.  Since 2pm yesterday (24 hours), we have lost 3,473 lives.  We have added nearly 200,000 new cases.  Globally the world lost 10,256 more people meaning we account for 34% of the deaths.  Because of people like the Hagers and Kristin Lowery, and the talk radio braggarts who are now pushing daisies alongside the preachers and political blowhards who thought they were smarter than the experts.

YOU'RE NOT SMARTER.

Smart people don't eschew facts.  Smart people don't play chicken with a deadly pandemic.  Smart people get their medical information from real doctors and epidemiologists, not fully vaccinated dude bros like Carlson who make their millions by ginning up fear and instilling distrust in the system that is trying to save their lives.  Smart people don't ingest horse paste or smear it on their tampons because they read about it in a Facebook group.

But go ahead, keep blathering your "inside information", your secrets known only to Q adherents, your stupidity and hubris.  None of it will protect you when your lungs begin to fill, when your organs begin to shut down due to lack of oxygen, or when the hospital chooses you to die because someone else has a better shot at surviving.

Your deaths, short of additional cautionary tales, will be meaningless.  

To every unvaccinated parent out there bitching about masks, lying about the vaccines, I ask you - take a good long look at your child, your children.  Think of how they are helpless in this world, how they rely upon you for EVERYTHING.  Look into their eyes and think about their futures, the moments that excite you for them - soccer goals, homecomings, first loves, vacations, their laughter, graduations, weddings, babies of their own - the moments you can't wait to see.  Then go back up and read about Kristin and Amee and Jeff again, look at the faces of those orphaned kids.  Their eight children will move through this world without them.  They will have those life moments and catch themselves turning to see their mom and dad in the crowd before the crushing reality again hits them, as it will over and over for the rest of their lives:  my parents are dead and they did not have to be.  

Personally, as a parent, I could not live with that.  And I sure as hell am not going to die with it.  Get vaccinated.

We Doomed Ourselves To Repeat It

It was George Santayana, in his 1905 tome The Life of Reason, who originally wrote the words, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

A good quote.  A great thought transferred in few words.  A cautionary tale wound up in a sentence.  

It is so good that Winston Churchill borrowed from it, editorializing it to the more oft quoted, "Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

History is nothing if not a cautionary tale.  Vivid stories of war, famine, plague, strife, and all of man's bloody inhumanity to man.  We have a rich history from which to learn, lessons we should be able to synthesize into our own global experiences and move forward with better plans, better actions, much better outcomes.

We should be...

Yet here we are, equipped with a roadmap paved with the bodies of those who perished of the Spanish Flu back in 1918-1919, and we have learned nothing.  (Literal bodies - as recent as 2015 a construction worker in Pennsylvania discovered a mass grave from the 1918 Spanish flu.  Too many dying too fast that casket makers could not keep up so bodies were buried in holes, covered with lime, and mounded over.)

Seriously, congratulations.  Due to our populace being crippled by the back row, idiot class clowns, we have now eclipsed the death toll from the last pandemic to take this country to its knees.

The Spanish Flu is estimated to have killed 675,000 people in this country.  COVID-19 has now claimed 692,785.  1,223 in the past 24 hours alone.

(Note - I am often asked where I pull my numbers from as they differ slightly from the numbers used on TV.  WorldOMeters

Their numbers are updated constantly, are global, and for the United States numbers include the cases, deaths, etc for every state and US territory.)

There really is little left to say at this point.  We have three vaccines available.  They are free.  They are demonstrably good at what they are supposed to do - keep us from dying.  Yet here we are, coming up on time periods in which, if approved, millions of us will qualify for booster shots, but still more millions sit around belly aching about masks and their freedumbs.  Whole ass adults, fully vaccinated against everything from polio to tetanus to measles, mumps, and rubella - because those vaccines were/are MANDATED - yet they sit pissing their shorts like babies and filling up hospital ICUs and dying. 

Yes, dying.  That's right you MAGA hat wearing, Q anonsense spouting, election lie spreading, barely-passed-high-school-basic-science, toxic MASKulinity laden, horse paste ingesting, hydroxycholorqueens - YOU ARE THE ONES DOING THE VAST MAJORITY OF THE DYING.

And all you deserve to be remembered for is how blindingly stupid you are.  How you chose suicide over society.  How you decided your right to spew your gob droplets everywhere superseded the greater good.   How you laughed at the immunocompromised, like my sister who is in the fight of her life against cancer and coming up on infusion #16.  Her immune system is like an iPhone you send back to Sprint for a credit against your new iPhone - WIPED.  But you don't care.  So we don't care.

You will be but a skidmark in this country's history.  Part of the massive cautionary skidmark of humanity left behind for future generations to look at, read about, and make their choice - learn from history or repeat it.

Idiots just like you stamped their feet and sputtered and grandstanded about their freedumbs back in 1918, too.  You're not exactly making history here.  They even had a name - Mask Slackers - after the Red Cross referred to them as such, “the man or woman or child who will not wear a mask now is a dangerous slacker.”   They disrupted meetings.  They threatened and carried out violence.

They died, too. 

Too selfish to listen to doctors and  scientists because those experts were advocating for  *GASP! * inconvenience.  They, too, were begged, cajoled, reasoned with to wear masks, to stay indoors, to help quell the spread.  Their photos are easy to find, as will be yours with your misspelled signs and hubris.  History will remember you as the dirt dumb, diaper load, crybaby motherfuckers you are, not as the patriots and liberty champions you believe yourselves to be.  There is nothing patriotic about endangering your fellow citizens, and liberty is about the whole, not about the YOU.

Hospitals are overflowing.  We have asked so much already from our healthcare workers and they are breaking under the strain of your abject stupidity and belligerence.  Insurance companies have decided time's up for covering COVID costs.  Unvaccinated and in the hospital?  Expect a big bill.  One you deserve.  Morgues are again filled and people are being stacked like cordwood in refrigerator trucks in the parking lots.  Children are being orphaned every single day as their careless, reckless, my-ego-is-bigger-than-COVID parents die.  More than 1 in 500 have already died.  Go into Walmart on Saturday at noon.  Look around.  1+ of you will die.  Like your odds?

You bleat about things needing to get back to normal.  JFC, that is your anthem.  Yet you cannot see how getting vaccinated is the key piece of that puzzle.  Well, strike that.  You can see, you just refuse to because Nicki Minaj has now got you believing her cousin's friend got dumped at the altar because the vaccine made his balls swell up.

Christ you're a really ignorant bunch. 

And speaking of Christ, stop with the ridiculous "God will protect me" "I am covered in the blood of Jesus" garbage.  How many of your pulpit pounding preachers and fellow pew occupants do you need to see die from COVID before you get it?  Whoever or whatever runs the game of this universe is not protecting you from a virus.  Prayer is no defense against a pandemic.  The ICUs are filled with God fearing people, people who pray, attend church, send their money every week to fund Joel's latest Breitling watch.  And did it ever cross your mushy gray matter that if there is a God, that perhaps he answered your prayers with doctors and scientists who have given their lives to research and study to help protect the populace and MAKE VACCINES?

We have a roadmap.  We know what happened in 1918-1919 and how many died.  We are light years ahead of them in terms of science and communication and capabilities to help protect us all.  But because so many refuse to even acquaint themselves with reality, let alone history, we are doomed, we are repeating. 

And we will continue to watch our own generation's MASK SLACKERS die.

The End - When COVID Claims Another Body

This morning I received a link from a friend.  One click and I was consumed, drawn in, could feel every word written by a critical care nurse - one who has lived this end-of-life scenario far too many times.

 

In this age of COVID we have learned some heartbreaking lessons about those with whom we share our cul-de-sacs, grocery stores, places of business, states, nation.  We knew of the abject stupidity that was out there - Trump cultism revealed that.  We were reconciled to the blatant racism that had been given wide berth and open highways by his ascendency to their White House.  But combined with an unrelenting pandemic, we have seen just what damage the most baser instincts of millions can do.  We have learned how blindingly selfish are so many of our fellow travelers. 

 

That last one is still the hardest to digest.  The complete abdication of any responsibility for their part in the health and well being, hell, SURVIVAL of others.  They just do not care.  A piece of cloth on their faces is a burden so great that they melt down in public like toddlers denied another sticky handful of Goldfish.  Emboldened by their leaders, they threaten those who would take steps to protect them and their children.  Jesus, they offer up their unvaccinated children as some sort of ghoulish dare, a way to prove COVID isn't real, or not that bad.

 

And you know what?  For many who contract it, they get lucky and it is not that bad.  But I stress the lucky part.  Because even if you traverse the virus with nothing more than cold symptoms, millions of others have not been so lucky.  They will live with long COVID symptoms, compromised lungs, brain fog that won't dissipate, aches, pains that go on and on.  And for many others, they will join the 688,737 people who have now died from this virus.  

 

Since yesterday morning, 161,021 more people have tested positive.  3,495 more people have died.  And between 9/2 and 9/9, 500,000 children tested positive for COVID.  And that 1 in 500 number we learned a couple days ago?  Well, adjust that to 1 in 479.  

 

The following piece of writing should be mandatory reading. Especially for every unvaccinated idiot who thinks they are too young or too strong to succumb; who thinks their Facebook group has a secret "in" to stave off COVID; who thinks it is all just a big conspiracy; who believes themselves to be SO important in this world that they cannot risk being "chipped" by a government sponsored vaccine (leave alone the FACT that no chip is being delivered through a needle so laughably teensy - seriously, get a clue - no one gives a flying fuck when you go to Chipotle or order through Doordash); and finally, who is just too blindingly selfish to understand we are all in this together.

 

COVID does not care who you are, what bullshit you believe, how old you are, when you ran your last marathon, how many kids you have depending on you, or how uncomfortable you find wearing a mask in Walmart. It only cares that you are a convenient, easy-to-access host in which it can rape and pillage your systems until they no longer function at all. At that point, you are the person being written about by this nurse. And you truly do not deserve her care, her tears, or to live on in the memories you have inflicted upon her.

 

READ:  The End, Through The Eyes Of A Critical Care Nurse

 

 

In This Numbers Game There Are No Winners

It was March 29, 2020 when I first began pulling the numbers.  My first three days I only charted cases and deaths.  On March 29, we officially had 141,781 cases of COVID, and 2,471 deaths.  For something that had been casually written off by the Apricot A-hole a month earlier - “And again, when you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done" - COVID was making dramatic strides.

A week after I started, I began adding the cases per million and deaths per million to the information I pulled.  That put us at 1,444 cases per million and 54 deaths per million.  At the time, I felt if I shared the numbers in such a way, people would have a better feel as the COVID noose was beginning to tighten. 

And tighten it did.  (Multiply that first photo of all my papers by 2 as those sheets are covered front and back.)

By the end of April we had jumped to 193 deaths per million citizens.  That meant 63,856 people had died.  I then began trying to transfer what that meant into pictures to better illustrate for a complacent, willfully ignorant populace what those numbers looked like.  I used full sports stadiums.  It took less than a month to burn through what we have to offer in this country and I had to move onto the behemoth stadiums found in countries around the globe.

Fast forward to today, we need 4 1/2 May Day stadiums to hold our COVID dead.  2,048 of every million citizens has died from the hoax conspiracy China virus pandemic.

2,048 of every million.  You would think in this numbers game that would get the attention of even the dullardliest of the dullards.  No such luck.  They continue to eschew the science, laugh at the stats, and get their medical advice from Qaren's latest Facebook update.  Their latest attempts to thwart the virus they don't think is real?  Ivermectin?  Puh-leez, that is so last week.  Catch up, gentle reader.  They have moved on to gargling and snorting Betadine - yes, that's right, if iodine scrub is good enough to clean a wound on the outside, it must be good enough to wash out the nasal passages and throats of the I'll-ingest-anything-but-I-won't-get-the-free-vaccine-now-administered-BILLIONS-OF-TIMES.  (Note - yes, Betadine does make a diluted mouthwash/gargle for minor sore throat/mouth sore issues, but these brain trusts are heading to the scrub portion of the first aid aisle, enough so that the makers of Betadine released a statement warning people off.)

I am at the point now where I just laugh at their newest brain sponge storms.  Go ahead, put a schmear of horse paste on your bagels, and women, slather it on your tampons (yes, they are sharing that tip in Facebook groups).  And clear out the bad taste with a big gargle of Iodine.  Add some to your Afrin bottle, too, and take a big snort.  Those hoaxy COVID germs love to hide in your finger caves.

What I don't laugh at is how they deny science right up to the point they need it, running to the ERs when their lungs won't work, when their intestines have practically slid out, or when their kidneys begin to shut down from their homemade medicine.  It's amazing how Docdurrr Homer Buttfuck begs science to save him when his lips have turned blue.  And the doctors he mocked and threatened just days earlier step up to try.  Not that Homer deserves the ICU bed or the ventilator or the round the clock care.  (I will say he does deserve to be naked, face down, with tubes in every hole he owns.)

Last night a new number entered the game.  As MAGAts, low iQanoners, hoaxers, and antimaskers of all ilk were getting their asses handed to them via their California recall attempt, new stats emerged.  And I am just naïve enough to think maybe, just maybe, this one may catch their eyes.

1 in 500.

That's right.  We have now lost 1 in every 500 citizens in this country to COVID-19.  And that is based on the reported numbers, numbers that every expert says is woefully low and inaccurate.  If you based the number on what has been reported by states and added in the excess deaths we have charted since the beginning of the pandemic, it is more in the range of 1 in 333.

Feeling that noose a little tighter now?  Makes a mask seem positively loosey-goosey, huh?

OK, yes, I am making fun of them.  But the reality is this is deadly serious, just as it has been from the very beginning. Sadly, from the very beginning we were saddled with a morally repugnant, proudly stupid gasbag instead of a President.  Trump made it political.  His lackeys made it political.  They thought they could game a virus - make it a blue state vs red state thing - all of them too ignorant to understand the common cold let alone a global pandemic.  So they played to their equally dim crowd.  Told them it was no big deal, that it would "disappear one day like a miracle."

On May 8, 2020 he told them, “This is going to go away without a vaccine. It is going to go away.  We are not going to see it again.”  This is why we saw crowds of people on Memorial Day weekend - why not?  He said it was going to go away.  Vaccine shmaxxine!

Voting him out was as much a repudiation of him as the horrific human he has always been as it was an act of survival by 81 million people who understood we needed adults at the wheel of this country and in charge of the pandemic response.  We could not afford to continue on with an administration who thought that if we just stopped testing there would be no more virus. So we voted and we won.  But...   

The problem was, and is, that the cry babies who got shown the door continue to get TV time, and the idiot hordes that support them continue to mock the efforts, the vaccines, the pleas of scientists and doctors, even ignoring the deathbed come-to-Jesus-vaccine epiphanies their relatives, clergy, talk radio blowhards have as they take their final assisted breaths.

So here we sit.  Still mired in a pandemic despite having vaccines readily and freely available.  Still accosted by juvenile anti-maskers in stores and school board meetings.  Still suffering under red state governors whose only game is the long one they are playing that they hope ends in the Oval office.

In the past 24 hours, we have added 152,483 cases.  We have lost an additional 2,123 people.  We account for 19% of the global increase since yesterday morning.  And 1 in every 500 of our neighbors is dead.

1 in 500.  If this were Vegas, those are great odds at the sportsbook.  But this is no game.  And the winners?  Well, there are no winners.  Just a nation of rapidly dwindling losers.  

 

20 Years On, A Country In Free Fall

I started this morning as I have every year since that fateful day in 2001 - reading, remembering, and looking.  Reading old stories of 9/11 victims, stories I have read so many times already; reading new stories as journalists seek out survivors and victims' families for fresh angles and offerings each year; remembering where I was, what I was doing when the planes hit; remembering the looks on my children's faces as they saw the second plane hit; and looking at photos, so many photos.  

I have written for years that part of how I honor the victims is to not look away.  Because, in my personal and deeply held belief, to look away is privilege.  A privilege those people, caught in the wrong place at the absolute wrong time, will never know.  I look to remember, to never forget the faces in the broken windows of the towers - struggling to breathe, desperate for rescue.  I look to honor those who plummeted to their deaths from those towers - whether blinded by smoke and pushed forward by the intense heat of fires - accidentally falling out and to their deaths, or having made the final choice they could ever make, to intentionally choose how they perished. I look because they deserve to be seen, to have their trauma and impossible choices honored.  And in looking, each year I offer them my humanity as I imagine their plight as their lives ended in such unimaginable ways.

9/11/2001 - we all saw it happen.  We all know where we were, what we were doing.  We all knew that in those awful moments, hours, days, and weeks that followed, we were changed. 

As I do each year on this day, I also go back to read the words I have written about September 11.  So many words.  This morning I reread the piece I wrote 9/11/2019.  So very much of it stands to this day, so I offer it up again here, adding to it the traumas in which we now find ourselves mired - a complete fracture in the bonds of our society, a pandemic taking more each week than we lost on that day in 2001 (in the past 24 hours alone, we have come close, losing another 2,303 people to COVID), and an increasing rise in domestic terrorism as citizens prove themselves ready to attack their neighbors.

It has been 20 years since that nightmare unfolded in front of our eyes.  And for a brief shining moment, we stood as one - one heart, one nation, united in the humanity we saw extinguished, in the raw humanity we saw exposed in one one another.  And then that died.  We are now a country in serious free fall.  Those who fell from the towers that day had no choice.  We do.  And change must come before we hit the ground as they did, obliterated forever.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It was the Kennedy Assassination of my children's generation - the touchstone moment they will always share with their peers. 

I remember where I was when...

It was a touchstone moment for us all.  A morning that tested our psyches, pushing images in that surely must have been ripped out of a big screen thriller.

Only it wasn't thrilling.

It pushed we parents into conversations we never envisioned having with our children.  At least not on a current events level.  Man's inhumanity to man from a World History class perspective, sure.  But not as an unfolding, clock ticking, while they're eating their Pop Tarts discussion.

I remember actually being comforted by my youngest child.  Shaken to the core at what we had all witnessed on the TVs that morning (my children walked downstairs to eat breakfast just as the second plane hit - they saw us frozen, staring at the TV, and in that moment they saw, too), caught in that slo-mo feeling of shock where your answers come too slow - your mind short circuiting over questions as simple as "Mom, where are my orange socks?"

Toby provided the first step towards healing.  At 5, the magnitude was not lost on him, but he distilled the most horrible part - the loss of life - down to the most basic thought, "The people who died are OK.  They are not hurting at all."

He drew pictures for us, showing where they were, how they were.  And a child shall lead them...

As the months rolled on, I remember how the people of this country were in a lockstep of fear, anxiety, and trying to regain normalcy, all the while knowing "normal" had taken on a whole new meaning.

Yet despite the rolls of duct tape and plastic sheeting that became staples in so many homes, I remember the feeling of unity.  This country, at least in my memory, had never felt more together.   We had been sorely tested, our souls bruised, our faces stained with gallons of tears, yet we were determined to embrace what makes this country great - our freedoms, our love of liberty, our belief that we are a nation where anything is possible.

We held each other up.

Fast forward 7 years to 2008.

An election in which 7 years of governmental lies, abuses, debt, and sadly, division came home to roost.

Suddenly, there were "real Americans", "real America" - and many of us apparently didn't qualify.  While one candidate touched the spirit of millions weary from the past, yet hopeful for the future, the other played to the baser instincts of millions, feeding them lies, hypocrisy flowing like cheap champagne on New Year's Eve, fomenting anger not answers, playing to fear, not fact.

Those "real Americans" didn't win.  Sure, millions of them voted, but they did not win, and so has ensued the worst devolving of this nation in my memory.

Is it because a half black man dared to be in the White House?  For some, absolutely.  Racism was, and is, alive and unwell in this country, and every person who is poisoned by it should be ashamed of themselves.

Is it because power was taken away?  For some, absolutely.  Losing doesn't feel good - whether it's student council, captain of the football team, or the Presidency.  But kicking and screaming is not going to change the ballot results.

Is it because change was coming and change is scary?  For some, absolutely.  No one likes change.  Dick with the status quo and people get twitchy.  But you have to take risks to effect change.  It is that simple.  If those who have gone before us had not been brave enough, we would still have slavery.  Hell, we would still be a bunch of colonies beholding to a land across the sea.  Women would not be allowed to vote.  And on and on...

Is it because we had given our brains and ability to reason over to a bunch of screaming entertainers?  For some, absolutely.  If your only information then was what Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck distilled for you, then you were guilty of getting drunk on the cheap Boone's Farm of misinformation and spin.  If you had abdicated your responsibility to think, research, learn, and care - then you simply needed to then, and need to now, get out of the way and should not act shocked when you are ignored.

Finally, was it because we had forgotten?  For most, absolutely.  But life is like that.  It moves forward despite the worst things that happen to us individually or collectively.  The sun continues to come up and go down, our days are taken over by the minutia that constitute a life, and we become bogged down in our own dramas.

That was only SEVEN YEARS after 9/11/01.

Which leads us to where we are today - TWENTY YEARS ON.  Shouting, screaming, misinformed, filled with righteous indignation because we are told we should be, not because we actually know why.  Hating "them" because they are not like "us."  "Them" hating "us" because we are not like them. 

A former "potus" who topped 30,000+ lies from his inauguration to his ouster.  Mass shootings with no legislative spine or morality to protect us.  A planet fed up with our selfish disregard slowly destroying us as we quickly destroy it (spoiler:  It will win.).  Millions of MAGAts cheering and jeering in the face of a global pandemic, all because their orange god made COVID political, made masks a symbol of tyranny, called it a hoax all the while wanting credit for vaccine creation.

We see daily how completely selfish and devoid of humanity are so many of our neighbors.  They prey on masked shoppers in stores, harassing us, coughing in our faces, mocking us.  They threaten anyone in governance - from school boards to Senators - who try to mitigate the transmission of the virus via mask mandates, vaccine requirements.  They throw up one excuse after another for not getting the vaccine shots.  Hoax!  We don't know what's in it!  You can't make me!

That last one is most prevalent.  The toddler-esque nature of their behavior would be laughable if the consequences were not literally deadly.  Unvaccinated people are 49 times more likely to end up hospitalized if they contract COVID than their vaccinated peers.  And if you are hospitalized - unvaccinated - for COVID, you are in shit shape.  Hospitals are stretched thin, beds far and few between, and they are not admitting those who are not in the most dire of straits.  

We remember and lament the 2,977 lives we lost on 9/11/2001, but we lost 5,573 in the past 48 hours and we just stumble on.  Make that make sense.  

Never mind.  You can't.  I can't.  The unvaxxed horde can't.  All they have are lies and conspiracies and egos that they believe will keep them alive.  Those won't.  COVID-19 laughs at their ivermectin ingestion, their Facebook memes, their misspelled posterboards.  We laugh at them, too, because in the duh dot com of their choices, what else is there to do?  We have tried reasoning, we have tried cajoling, we have tried fact bombardment, we have appealed to them as parents, we have appealed to their patriotism, we have offered them money - to no avail.  So now we peace the fuck out, keep our distance, and watch them die while we do our best to protect ourselves from them. 

It is depressing.  9/11 revealed how good we can be to one another.  COVID has revealed how heinous we can be.  How selfish, arrogant, filled with hubris, negligent of each of our roles in the social contract.  There is a malignancy on the soul of this country and each day it metastasizes deeper and wider throughout the figurative body politic and body patriotic, throughout the literal body national.  January 6 of this year showed us just how deadly is our current course.  We watched as fellow citizens erected a gallows in DC, as they smashed their way into the Capitol, as they hunted elected leaders, intent on doing them harm.  Decent society stared open mouthed at our TVs, just as we had done in 2001, barely able to process what we were seeing take place on our soil.

We have forgotten.  We have once again lost our way.  And twenty years of distance has allowed the mental breadcrumbs to disintegrate into nothingness, leaving barely a dusty trail back to where we were when we all knew what mattered.

We have seen how tragedy can unite us.  Somewhere, those memories reside deep inside each of us.  If we are Americans - all of us - then we must call upon those better angels of our nature who do remember, who can see the horrors, the inequality, the racism, the bigotry, the phobias, the unfolding pandemic tragedy all around us, and pull us back together once more.

Barack Obama was not truly their problem.  Their racism, willful ignorance, and lust for hegemony were.  Donald Trump was not truly our problem - he is who has always been: an unintelligent, self aggrandizing, repugnant famewhore who was embraced as the convenient stooge the GOP used/uses to consolidate power and erode our liberty, our rights, our place on the world stage. Our laissez faire attitude towards voting, towards filling the streets like so many do around the world, towards children being placed in jeopardy by their own willfully ignorant, unvaccinated parents, towards fighting this fight - those are our problems. 

"The people who died are OK.  They are not hurting at all."

We are not being attacked from without this time.  This time, the attack is coming from within.  We are the ones who are hurting.  Only this time, we CAN stop it before another worst becomes another tragic touchstone for us all.

As you do your own remembering on this day, I have a request of the better angels of all those reading, sharing - donate through the Paypal link if you can.  We have so many of our fellow citizens reeling in the aftermath of last week's hurricane and requests for help have been streaming in.  In memory of all those we lost on 9/11, and all those we have lost, and will lose, to this ongoing pandemic, reach out if you can.  We know it takes a village and our village is an ongoing, brilliant engine for change, and the reminder that the good still outnumber the bad in our world.  Love you all, Linda

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

For those who perished 20 years ago, for those who loved them, for those who carry on today ... for us all ... we must do better.

The GQP Needs Aborted

Last night while we slept the clocks got set back.  No, not by an hour for daylight savings time, but by decades for women in the United States.

At the stroke of midnight, unencumbered by any interference from the Supreme Court, the most draconian of abortion laws went in effect in the state of Texas.  And in being allowed to take hold, it has paved the way for state after state to follow course.

Six weeks.  The new law places a 6 week limitation on all abortions.  For the men out there who know fuck all about a woman's body to begin with, most of us have zero idea we are pregnant at six weeks.  Unless we are desperately trying to become pregnant, with tests at the ready the second we estimate ourselves to be late, we really don't know.  That is why nearly 90% of abortions take place after 6 weeks. (And to further edify you, six weeks is counted from the first day of the last period, so six weeks pregnant is really 4ish weeks pregnant.)

Periods are funny that way.  Some of us run like a train - on time, every time.  Those lucky ladies can prep, plug up, pad up, and rarely have period panties in their drawers.  But the majority of us are held hostage by a reproductive system that comes when it pleases.  Maybe 14 days since the last one.  Maybe 20, hell, throw a curve ball in and maybe 40.  And no, ignorant men, we cannot control it, hold it in, put it off.

So six weeks is an absurd timetable.  But then, the GQP knows that much about women.  And let's be honest, this law, and so many others like it winding their way through legislatures across the country, has nothing to do with protecting the fetus, being pro-life, or uber Christian.  These laws are about controlling women.  

Controlling our access to reproductive care.  Controlling our options.  Controlling our bodily autonomy.

What's hilarious in this is that the very same crybabies whining "My body, my choice" about mask mandates and vaccine requirements are fapping themselves silly over this restrictive law denying women dominion over their bodies, their choices.  

But the law doesn't just stop with a 6 week ban on abortion access.  Oh no, what fun would that be?  Now, in Texas, you can sue someone for aiding a woman in getting an abortion after 6 weeks.  That's right - there is now a cash bounty of $10,000 on the heads of those who would encourage, aid, or support a woman in obtaining the procedure.  Doctors, clergy, family members, friends, clinic staff, the Uber driver that transports a woman to a clinic - all could be dragged into court, tried, and fined $10,000 and the court costs of the Gladys Karen Kravitz who stuck their nose in where it has no business being.

Called The Texas Heartbeat Act - it is a medical misnomer.  What these rabidly ignorant right-to-LIEfers call a heartbeat is actually just electrical activity in the tissue that will go on to form a heart.  But then FACTS have no place in their hypocritical bullshit.

One need only look at their handling of COVID-19, a pandemic that has taken 658,103 lives as of this writing.  Mitigating the deadly spread is breathtakingly simply - wear a fucking mask, wash your hands, and get the FREE vaccine shots.  THAT is how you take pro-life steps.  Instead, these Facebook "doctors and nurses" bleat about masks being akin to Auschwitz, they storm school board meetings threatening the ones making the decisions about masking in schools, and spread horse dewormer on their morning bagels.

The result?  Texas is currently #2 in cases (3,625,256 total, 12,228 in the past 24 hours alone), deaths (57,556), and a death per millions rate (1,985) that is almost the national rate (1,975). 

The pro-lifery of Texas is a fucking joke.  It is easier to get a gun in that backass state than a COVID test.  They can write up and enforce dress codes that send a girl home for spaghetti straps, but cannot implement a mask requirement in schools.  They have no problem putting small children through active shooter drills because of the very real risk of school shootings, but they cry foul at the mention of masks or quarantine for infected students in the face of the very real pandemic of coronavirus.

And yes, I know that asking Texass or any GQP heavy state to make sense is a fool's errand.  I have lived more years of my life in that state than I ever envisioned I would.  I currently have two children still there, daughters both, so this latest strike against their right to choose is personal.

As has been said many times, outlawing abortions will not end abortions.  It will only end SAFE abortions.  And Texas pulling shit like this will only serve to create a network of people like me happy to facilitate access to travel and out of state reproductive care for those now trapped in our nation's Gilead.  Yes, reproductive care.  That is what an abortion is.  And it has fuck-all to do with anyone other than the woman and her healthcare provider.

Think not?  Think all these bleating pro-life sheep have a stake in an unwanted, compromised, or life threatening pregnancy?  Bull and shit.  They cry and threaten and wave their misspelled signs, but do they take a woman in and pay for the pregnancy and resulting baby?  Do they stand waiting to adopt all the babies that will be born from this intrusive law?  Do they champion healthcare, food, support, aid for the subsequent children, and the women who will be forced to have these kids they did not wish to bring into this world?  Do you really think that actually care about babies or growing children?

If you believe that, I have some horse paste to shove up your ass when your COVID test comes back positive.

And not for nothing, but where are the provisions for the men involved in these pregnancies?  Where is the mandatory child support in this law?  Where is the ironclad requirement that the sperm donor be present in the child's life till death do they part?  Hell, for that matter, where is the law making male masturbation a felony?  Where is the Texas Mansplatter Act that awards me $10,000 for every man and his stiff tube sock or wad of Kleenex I turn in?  Now there's a pro-life law!  Every product of a chicken choking that is wiped off his stomach, tossed in a trash can, or wasted on the sheets represents BILLIONS of potential lives.

And that is, after all, what we are talking about.  Potential life. Not active, viable, ready to take a breath life, but cells.  The building blocks, yes, but not the complete Lego baby.  There is no true heartbeat at six weeks.  At best what is in there resembles a miniscule shrimp.  And if you want it, it is everything.  I have been pregnant four times, and I have delivered three babies.  I wanted to be pregnant each time, so even as a tiny prawn, I was all in.  

But that was me.  And that is where my influence and decision making begins and ends - with my body.  I have never had an abortion.  But I still have periods - even at 55 - and I can tell you straight up, without wavering, that if I were to turn up pregnant?  I would have one.  No question, no guilt, no hesitation.  Because that would be MY choice for MY body and MY life and MY future.

(I am 100% pro-choice.  That does not make me, as many right-to-lifers would like to grandstand, some rah-rah-PRO-ABORTION cheerleader.  It simply means I do not believe I have the right to make decisions about the body of another human being.  Not about how they treat a cold, combat cancer, strengthen a boner, pop a zit, or approach a pregnancy. 

Should I be allowed to make someone have an abortion?  To drag them from their house?  What's that?  No?  Because it's your body and your choice to stay pregnant?

Bingo.) 

Women have abortions for many reasons.  And yes, there are some who turn to it as a form of birth control.  But the majority of abortion procedures are performed for women who did take precautions yet still got pregnant; for women and girls who were raped; for young girls who were victims of incest; for women who desperately want their pregnancies but find out along the way that their fetus has no brain, or is severely compromised in any number of other ways; for women whose lives are found to be in danger by carrying to term. (FYI - the Texas law makes no allowances for rape and incest - gifts from God and all...)

Regardless of the reason, it is no one's business but theirs.  It is between her and her doctor.  That's it.  If you don't want me being able to hold sway when you come up with colon cancer, screaming that God doesn't make mistakes, then who the hell do you think you are to insinuate yourself into another's person's medical decision making?  How about a law that makes it impossible for you to have a tumor removed, or an abscess drained, or your totally predictable contracting of COVID treated because my religion demands you accept whatever the Divine doles out?  There are religions like that in this country.  Why shouldn't they have as much power as you do?  

What's that again?  Your body, your choice?  Riiiiiiiiiiiiiight.  

Sadly, the hypocrites on the other side of the abortion debate see it differently.  Whether through the prism of their religion, politics, or personal morals, they do believe every woman's body is theirs over which to rule.

I honestly don't care where you fall in the debate.  I ask only one thing: don't bring a sponge to a brain fight.

If you want to enter a dialogue, be it about politics, programs, the Affordable Care Act, Afghanistan, education, or abortion, you'd better come with accurate information, an understanding of the issue, and FACTS.

If you cannot do that, sit down and STFU.

This country is replete with dullards, asshats, conspiracy theorists, and power hungry politicians spreading their lies, disinformation, and horse paste "medicine".  And people are dying daily because of them being allowed into positions of power.  (Seriously, how many of your compatriots do you need to see die with a tube down their their gullets before you accept this is real and you should get vaccinated?) COVID bodies are again piling up in morgues and refrigerator trucks because of reprobates like Texass governor Greg Abbott and Floriduh's Moron Deathsantis facilitating the spread of the virus at every opportunity.  This abortion law will only serve to add to the dead as women take desperate measures to procure an abortion beyond the six week restriction. 

GQP men have demonstrated their abject stupidity and ignorance of women's bodies at every turn - uttering bullshit like "women can shut that down" (in cases of rape), that we should "swallow a small camera for a remote gynecological exam", that they "never heard of a child becoming pregnant by rape", "the juices just don't flow during a rape" - yet they are the majority in passing these laws that take away our decision making over our own bodies.  It is insulting, it is sickening, it is deadly.

Abortion is healthcare.  It must remain safe and obtainable and private.  The only thing that truly needs an abortion mandate is the GQP.  It is long past time to rid this country of their unwanted presence and danger.  If only we had a big enough coat hanger.