We had our Thanksgiving dinner at the BierStein last night. We drove around downtown and Valley River trying to find a place that was open. We figured we could manage the bar at Valley River Inn, but they were packed with their holiday crowd. I called four restaraunts before we were able to find somewhere to eat dinner, but, unfortunately, none of us could finish our meals. I did, however, manage to finish my half pint of porter at least.

My brother was awake and coherent when we visited him before going home. We were able to joke around, and talk a little bit about calling his job and the travel plans he had made for Christmas. It was a very, very good moment. I was able to go to sleep last night without dread consuming my thoughts. As I texted my friends to give them the update, I knew they might think things were looking better and that it meant he was on the mend. But it does not. All it means is that he was awake last night and able to talk with us for about twenty minutes. It was simply the very first good moment of hopefully many more good moments to come, but it does not erase the fact that we will have to deal with just as many very bad moments until this ordeal finally ends.

Around four in the morning, Kev managed to pull the drain out of the top of his head. His hands have been mildly restrained, but it wasn’t enough to stop him. The staff waited to see how he managed since he had such good responses before going to sleep for the night. But, by 10am, he started to become too agitated again and they put the drain back in. Unfortunately, the fluid now coming out of the drain is a soft pinkish color, which means it is mostly cerebral spinal fluid that is coming out instead of the blood that needs to come out. The big problem today is that there is a blood clot in my brother’s fourth ventricle increasing pressure upon his brain stem. His neuro examines have continued to degenerate because of the pressure. His eyes are roving and his tremors have become worse. The doctor is going to begin the process of administering a drug directly through the catheter into my brother’s brain in the hopes of breaking up the clot and removing it from the ventricle to release the pressure on his brain stem. This will, in all hopes, allow the resiliency of the brain stem to help him slowly become a little bit more stable. This is the only procedure available to try and break up the clot to relieve pressure.

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The medicine is in his brain and he is sitting up with the drain clamped, waiting for the medicine to take effect. In an hour they will lay him back down, unclamp the drain, and we will wait to see what color of fluid starts to come out. Hopefully, it will be bright red! The drug will be administered every 8-12 hours for the next three days. Surgery and an induced-coma were both discussed as unviable options. This procedure will either work, or it will not. All we can do now is wait and see what happens next.

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I found a request for article submissions to a very small publication in Olympia, WA. The topic is Resiliency and Empowerment. I’m going to use this crisis as an analogy for my article. I’m going to write about how the Resiliency of the brain will be the ultimate factor for our hopes of restoring normal neurological functions of my brother’s brain after the pressure has been removed. This will be my analogy for the pressures we all experience trying to live in a post-modern world that has become designed for the profit of a miniscule portion of humanity. The Empowerment side of the article will be a reflection upon the struggles I have had to overcome with my experiences of being Type 1 Diabetic in what can at times be an uncaring healthcare system. I have learned through these struggles how to advocate for myself, and thus for my brother when he needed me, by shedding my culturally-implanted tendency to always believe in the efficacy of doctors and their medical staff. I do not believe my brother would have as good of a chance for recovery as he might have now if I had not stood up and vehemently argued with the ER doctor and nurse about their bigoted assumptions that my brother suffered primarily from mental illness, addiction or homelessness because of the way he looks and the clothes he wears.

Sometimes, in this post-modern (and ignorantly supposed post-racial) society, we tend to look without thinking. We believe we are capable of knowing what is happening around us without bothering to dig for deeper meanings or understandings. We believe that Progress will save us from our own socially-induced destruction. We know that some of the ways in which we live, and some the things we do, help to kill the planet’s ability to sustain life, but without Empowerment we are incapable of standing up and fighting for what we also know to be Right. The pressures pushing down on all of us from the society we live within are causing us to be sick. We forget how to stop and enjoy the rain, rather we curse how it will make us wet and late to the job we hate. But we have accepted these pressures because those in authority told us they are necessary. Authority does not inherently include the qualities of responsibility, integrity, or compassion. Those are qualities we must all choose to improve upon in our daily interactions with each other.

The tenets of Progress tell us that we need everything to be bigger, better, and faster. I believe these terms are correct, and we desperately need them, but I do not believe in our current definition of what these terms truly mean. What we need are bigger hearts and souls. We need a collective conscience that learns how to take care of and place value upon all life, not just human. Our skills of communication need to become better in the sense of how well we use them, not just how convenient they can become. Instead of increasing the scope of our military to create better access to bigger fossil fuel reserves, we need to start working on constructing better social structures within our nation that will help to increase the population’s abilities for collaboration, conflict resolution, and sustainable practices, in the hopes of replacing our current social trend of disposability and destruction.

Faster is obviously not a problem. As a child I watched Sesame Street on a TV with a handful of UHF/VHF channels and an antennae wrapped in foil but, by the time I was twenty, the internet was widely available in the home of everyone I knew. During the next twenty years of my life, I watched as the internet evolved from AOL dial-up to iPhones. All of this is to say that faster is not hard for us to accomplish. I would even say it is the nature of our current existence. But faster does not help us to solve the imminent problems facing us in our post-modern world. What we need is an immediacy in our attempts to apply a solution for our current trend of global extinction.

World War II proved to us how efficient our nation can be at providing an immediate change within our society to provide the necessary means for success. Women joined the workforce because of the war and, because they forced an immediate change in the way their place within our gender-structured society was accepted, we won the war. The same thing can happen now in our war against the multinational corporations that have hijacked our planet. We just need to learn how to pause and reflect about the events happening around us. Everything may be happening faster, but that does not mean they are happening outside of our control, or without the ability for us to adapt and adjust to our rapidly changing circumstances.

Resiliency is the key. It is our ticket out of the hell we have allowed into existence with our habits of giving license to outside authorities to take precedence in our lives. It is difficult to believe one is capable of being empowered when you feel crushed by the pressure surrounding you. It is unimaginable to think escape is probable if you are scared of freedom.

If we can find a way to eradicate the pressure pushing on my brother’s brain then he will have the most optimal chance of recovery because of his Resiliency. The same is true for our society. If we can find the strength and courage to reclaim the personal power we have given away in exchange for convenience, then there is every possibility our natural resiliency will help us to find a sustainable path into a future of peace and unity for the entire planet.