Hopping Right Along... To Tuesday's election

Thankfully, it's not yet winter; snow hasn't begun to fall, nor has ice yet covered the sidewalks and streets. My hope is that, before winter gets to Hartford, with its precipitation and other un-fun stuff, my ankle will have healed and it will no longer be in a splint.

A week and a half back, on Saturday, 16 October, I managed to fracture my right ankle. I'd gone grocery shopping at a new -- to me -- semi-neighborhood grocery store, Shop-Rite; I was bringing home 4 cases of seltzer, some gluten-free pasta, gluten-free hot cereal, & I've-forgotten-what-else on my electric wheelchair. Somehow, I managed to hyper-extend my ankle while using my foot to prop open the door that separates the inside from the outside hallway on the bottom floor.

It was a freak accident; people look at me funny when I try to explain how it happened. Then again, I'm famous for freak accidents -- I fractured my right wrist when I shifted my balance to avoid stepping on my younger cat, Geoffrey; I fractured my right acetabulum--a bone in the hip that is impossible to fracture unless one has been in a motorcycle or serious auto accident, neither of which has ever happened to me; in high school, I damaged my larynx by hitting it against a stairway railing when I fell going UPSTAIRS; in grade school gym class, I did a series of deep knee bends--until one of my knees wouldn't unbend, & my mother had to come get me, hop me home, & phone the doctor. Doctors made house calls back in the late 1950's & early 1960's, so he came to see me. He didn't know what happened, so he told my mother to put a pillow under my knee & let the joint unbend on its own. It did, over the next 12 hours. You get the picture. Freak accidents.

So now I'm stumbling around in a splint that goes from my toes to my knee; it shows only a small amount of the swelling that built up in the week prior to getting the splint put on. See, since I could walk on the leg / ankle / foot, I decided that the ankle was sprained, not broken. So I put an ace bandage on it & went about my week. The week included a visit to my doctor on Thursday; he took one look & ordered an x-ray. The x-ray showed a fracture, & I spent most of the next day in the ER at Saint Francis Hospital waiting for someone to decide what to do about my ankle and trying to remember where all of the paperwork I'll need is so that I'll be able to apply for Medicaid.

Spending time in the ER proved to be quite instructive. I learned that most ER personnel -- doctors, nurses, intake people, etc. -- do not know that, when someone has been approved for Social Security Disability, that person is not eligible for Medicare coverage for two years. Seems crazy, no? Someone -- in this case, moi -- has been determined to have physical and / or mental problems serious enough that she / he is disabled. At the same time, she / he has no coverage for those medical and / or emotional problems that disabled her / him. The ER personnel at Saint Francis certainly thought it was crazy. So crazy that they didn't refuse to treat me. Only heaven knows what I'll owe the hospital, doctors, etc.

So now, I'm supposed to spend most of my time on bed with my right leg elevated on 2 or 3 pillows. I'm there as often as I'm able to be, but it's difficult since I live alone with 2 cats who don't quite understand "That's where I need to put my foot, sweetie." The splint is heavy, my ankle still hurts, & I'm not sleeping all that well. So I tend to doze off often, & not just when I'm on bed. Once it happened while I was washing dishes in the kitchen. The water felt so nice & warm on my hands....

I am getting lots of reading done, since I'd been to the library last week & had checked out a whole raft of books. I also have some magazines, some of which are current & others several months old that I've never read. I figure that whatever they show for fashion should be on sale by now. Not that I'll be able to race out to get it...

The furthest I've gone since getting the splint is a 1/2 block, to Walgreens for some frozen fruit bars & other various snack food. Tomorrow I'll be going to my mother's (4 blocks away), & on Thursday, to West Hartford Center & Blue Back Square. Then Friday, it's back to the doctor to find out what comes next. I hope she / he will tell me that surgery doesn't make sense.

Whatever happens, I'm NOT going to miss voting this coming Tuesday. So far, Richard Blumenthal is maintaining a double-digit lead over Linda McMahon, but it's not a big enough double-digit lead for me to feel comfortable. The Democratic candidate for governor has an even smaller lead over his Republican opponent.

This is a crucial election, friends. We all need to get out to vote in a show of force and reason against the Tea Partyites & other such right-wingers. It has become really ugly out there. Rand Paul supporters beat up an opponent, putting her in the hospital with a concussion. The Republican candidate for governor in New York State, Carl Paladino, has said he'll use eminent domain to prevent the building & development of an Islamic Center at Park51 in Manhattan. And there's more, & much of it is pretty awful.

Our weapons are our voices, our votes, for those among you who are religious / spiritual, our prayers and appeals to the Most High, and, finally, hard as it is -- and it is hard, I know -- our love. Love for one another isn't hard. Love for those whom we oppose is. As someone who has been strongly influenced by Jesus, Gandhi-ji, Martin Luther King, Thomas Merton, Robert McAfee Brown, and Joan Baez, I believe that we must try. Will we succeed? I'm not going to predict, although I know myself well enough to know I'll have lots of work to do when it comes to loving Linda McMahon, let alone Karl Rove. However, I do believe that we are called upon to try to love them. Or at least attempt to try to love them. That doesn't mean agree with them. Instead, it could mean backing off from our own anger, frustration, rage, & disgust that have built up as this election campaign has gone on & on & on. If nothing else, backing off will help us prevent burn-out & make us more able to keep on keepin' on for the long road ahead. G-D Bless & Much Shalom!

This Fall's Election

I first want to say that I will be very glad when this November's election is over. I want it to be over and done with, so I don't have to watch one more advert by Linda McMahon, Connecticut's Republican candidate for the US Senate seat that's open because Chris Dodd has decided to retire. Somehow, Linda McMahon must have missed taking Civics in junior high or high school. She seems to be under the illusion that the job of a US Senator is to create jobs. The only jobs Linda McMahon could create as a US Senator would be jobs in her own Senate office, jobs for her staff. The role of a US Senator is NOT that of creating jobs. The role of a US Senator is proposing and enacting legislation, advising and consenting on Presidential appointments such as Supreme Court Justices, overseeing the government and holding hearings on potential problems, and appropriating funds for various government functions and programs. And those are just four duties I'm able to think of off the top of my head -- without consulting Wikipedia, the US Constitution, or my mother.

Yes, I'm ranting. I have found this election campaign profoundly disturbing and disheartening. This is especially so because of some of the women candidates, specifically those associated with the "Tea Party Movement." The Tea Party frightens me down to my toes. Their rhetoric may be populist, however, their ideology is straight out of some of the most right-wing thinkers and organizations in US history, including the John Birch Society. While Linda McMahon isn't necessarily a Tea Partier, Sarah Palin -- the elephant in the room -- and Christine O'Donnell definitely are. O'Donnell doesn't believe in a woman's right to choose to end a pregnancy even in the case of rape or incest. She believes that evolution is an unproven theory; she doesn't understand the meaning of the term theory where it relates to the scientific method. Reading her entry on Wikipedia -- which I DID read, at the urging of a close friend who lives in Delaware -- made me laugh, but it also scared me. This is a woman who has never taken responsibility for anything she has ever done in her life; she has repeatedly lied, misrepresented, and denied things she has done. It's frightening.

What frustrates me the most, I suppose, is also what disappoints me the most. The Tea Party women who are running for office are able to do so, in large part, because of what we did in the late 1960's and early 1970's, during the Women's Movement, the Second Wave of Feminism. We opened up our lives and opened up the world for women, for ourselves, for our daughters and for our granddaughters, so that we and they would have access to reproductive freedom; fair and equal pay; futures in fields that had previously been totally male or male-dominated, such as medicine, law, the clergy (at least many Protestant denominations and three of four branches of Judaism), and politics; our own bank accounts; credit in our own names; OUR OWN NAMES, period. And now, women such as O'Donnell and many others are running for office and getting support -- and money. It's the biggest argument against believing, as many women argued in the 1970's, that "all women are my sisters." Women like O'Donnell, McMahon, Palin, et al., are taking advantages of the progress made because of the Feminist Movement, however, they oppose most of the gains of that Movement, except the ones that benefit them directly. They are NOT my sisters, and they will NOT get my vote. I will be delighted to vote for Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut's Attorney General, for US Senate. And I will pray that the McMahons and O'Donnell's go down to major defeat on 2 November.