A little hopium for your Wednesday
By 
Yesterday was pretty eventful here in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where I’ve been since my mother broke her pelvis this weekend. (Here’s the story of another bad week she had awhile ago). Several tornados touched down in the area in the late afternoon, including a large one that did a whole lot of damage about five miles south of us. As of last night several dozen workers were still trapped inside a collapsed FedEx facility, but hopefully they’ve all been rescued by now.
For me, the situation was doubly surreal because by almost pure chance I happened to be in almost exactly the same spot I had been in back in May of 1980, when a tornado destroyed a lot of buildings in downtown Kalamazoo. Now I was in my mother’s hospital room, where I learned that what happens during a tornado emergency is that all the patients and their necessary equipment get moved out into the hallway, away from the room windows, and, if things get sufficiently dangerous, visitors get sent to the basement, while the nurses stay with the patients in the hallway, since moving them to the basement isn’t possible. So that was pretty stressful, much more so for my mother than myself of course, especially given what she had already gone through over the past three days.
Fortunately for us the tornados stayed a few miles south, and after about an hour we got to watch the nurses move all the patients back into the rooms. The concept of a first responder/front line worker was terribly abused post-9/11 and during the middle of the pandemic for nefarious political purposes, but I was struck by how these people — overwhelmingly still women I noticed — are simply expected to engage in heroic risk taking as part of their job, so we can then thank them for their service without necessarily paying them more for it or anything like that.
The other thing me and my siblings have been doing over the past couple of days is trying to find a good rehab facility for my mother, which has also been an eye-opening experience. It turns out these facilities are generally full at any particular moment, but are also having rooms become available all the time, because people are routinely kicked out when their insurance coverage expires, which under basic Medicare is after seven days apparently. So once a week a bunch of ill and injured elderly people are put out on the street because the best medical system in the world ™ says you get seven days, unless you’ve paid out of pocket for enhanced Medicare coverage.
My parents have extensive additional coverage, plus six children sufficiently mindful of the relevant commandment, plus several dutiful grandchildren in the area, and it’s still a difficult situation for them on several levels. What do people who don’t have some or all of those things do I’ve wondered several times this week?
On a more cheerful note, this happened last night:
That does seem significant, no? (By contrast, Joe Biden didn’t even have an opponent on the ballot in the Democratic primary). I mean Nikki Haley dropped out two months ago now, and I doubt most Republican voters in Indiana could tell you one thing about her other than that she’s a woman and she’s not Donald Trump, which is apparently a good enough combination for 22% of them to go out of their way to cast a pure protest vote against his felonious ass.
Again, I must reference my favorite singer to remind us junkies that most people are only beginning to pay any attention whatsoever to the presidential campaign, and that this fact is probably very good news for the opponents of contemporary American fascism, and its viscerally disgusting avatar.