Category: Education

Black Friday

On By ZephyrIn Education, Liberation, Type 1 DiabetesLeave a comment

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.

Intro to Public Education

On By ZephyrIn Diabetic Lifestyle, Education, Liberation, racism, sexism, and other ismsLeave a comment

In February of 2016 I wrote a short comment on an article for the Environmental Politics class I was taking at Lane Community College. I have a couple hours before I head out to the gym with my friend, and then trivia at BeerGarden. I thought for my post today I would revise my original comment and add in some new perspectives I have concerning the role of education for making a sustainable society.

The article was titled ‘Global Warming’s Terrifying Math,’ written by Bill McKibbon, and it talks about the numbers that have become generally accepted as the limits imposed upon the use of fossilized fuels to prevent climate control failure, and why the fossil-fuel companies are allowed to get away with ignoring these numbers. Planet Earth has been scientifically assigned the official position of not being capable of temperatures rising more than two degrees Celsius without imminent catastrophe. We have already raised the average temperature of the planet just under 0.8 degrees Celsius, and that has already caused far more damage than most scientists originally expected.

Scientists estimate humans can pour roughly 565 more gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by mid-century and still have some reasonable hope of staying below the two degrees limit. The amount of carbon already contained in the proven coal and oil and gas reserves of the fossil-fuel companies is 2,795 gigatons, and it is this fuel which we, as a society, are currently planning to burn—a number fives times higher than 565.

Alone among businesses, the fossil-fuel industry is allowed to dump its main waste, carbon dioxide, for free because, until a quarter-century ago, almost no one knew that CO2 was dangerous. Our current economic system is controlled by the industries who directly profit from the special pollution break, supported by our politicians and government, which allows them the success of staying alive past the point of no return. The fight for our future survival will depend upon our collective ability as citizens to force the fossil-fuel industry to stop their destruction of our future as a species. In the economists’ parlance, we’ll make them internalize those externalities.

A strong point of the article was the explanation that big fossil-fuel companies’ willingness to fight for the prevention of regulations controlling the release of carbon-dioxide is because the reserves still technically in the ground are already economically aboveground—those reserves are the primary assets figured into share prices, the principle upon which companies are borrowing money against, and are the holdings that give the companies their value. But, given the afore-mentioned math, it becomes painfully clear that the planet has an enemy, a rogue industry, reckless like no other force on Earth, that will indeed help to usher in a rapid, transformative change, because building a movement requires a good enemy.

I believe Public Education can be used as a strategy by which to usher in our transformation as a society. By teaching our children, and ourselves in the process, how to recognize the forces influencing our private and public spheres, we can learn how to regain control over our lives, and how to live in new ways that help to mitigate the damage already done. It is a time for emphasizing collaboration over competition, resolution over conflict, community over isolation, sustainability over disposability, and tolerance over fear.

Social Movements are how things in society get changed for the better. We have a long history of such movements proving the point. Learning how to create, build support for, and sustain a social movement for change is challenging in the extreme. So much so, in fact, that many movements fail as a result of a lack of awareness for what needed to be done next in order to succeed. Many people lose faith when they perceive the movement as having failed to create the change they worked so hard for. Social change is a process governed by a more glacial pace of time then most people usually encounter in their daily lives.

I want to teach children how to critically analyze Social Movements as a way to choose the cause they are willing to fight for, and then show them the direct and nonviolent strategies and tactics that are needed to succeed, as well as helping them to recognize what success looks like, and how to maintain their momentum and motivation for the long haul. We must become comfortable with the understanding that ‘success’ will not be seen in our lifetimes. But it is for those future lifetimes that we must begin to make sacrifices today. The younger an individual can begin to learn how to fight for survival, and how to WIN those fights, is a necessary component of an education for sustainability. And I do believe that the ultimate purpose of Public Education should be the continuation of the Public.

I believe it is appropriate, and necessary, for public education to have a desirable political socializing effect upon children, whereupon they learn how to become active citizens who not only know how to live well in the world and create changes for social and ecological justice, but who will think critically in dealing with unpredictable problems, as well as competently knowing how to communicate and share their thinking processes with others in a collective atmosphere.

Whew. I’m done for today. I have more thoughts on these ideas, but this is only the beginning. Hell. I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of what I believe, why I believe it, and what the hell I am doing about it (insomuch as I can). I’m going to work on tomorrow’s post until I’m finished with my bitter and then I’m headed home to catch my ride for tonight’s entertainment.

I hope all y’all have a wonderful evening as well during this year’s turkey week!

*Pause*Breathe*Reflect*

On By ZephyrIn diabetes, Education, Pool1 Comment

Day 7

I feel no doubt. I am not sad. The guilt is minimal and underwhelming. The anger no longer bubbles to the surface with ease. I regret not seeing my friends, and the awkward position my actions may have put them in.

But, I do not regret walking out of my job one week ago. It was the right choice. It was healthy, self-serving, liberating, and the most ethical choice I could make at the time. I conducted myself with dignity and integrity. Even though I knew my actions would cause harm I was never, at any moment, intent on hurting anyone. I don’t know if that makes a difference for anyone else, but I feel comfortable with my belief that it makes all the difference for me.

This blog has become my full-time job in the past seven days. I wake up in the morning, putz around the house or watch a movie, and then I go out into the world to sit among the public and write the post to be published for that day. I’m actually quite sick of this routine already. My posts this week have become erratic and rather pedantic for my taste. Each post has been a reaction to my action of walking away from the pool. I either sit at Townshend’s, Falling Sky, or The Wandering Goat typing my post for the day and publishing it immediately. This technique was helpful at first. It allowed me to spend the daylight hours of my first week being unemployed feeling as if I were accomplishing something significant. But, let’s be honest, that’s bullsh*t.

Being able to purge my thoughts and feelings into a post written and edited thirty seconds before publication was constructive because it helped to organize my thoughts into a narrative. I now have an idea of how my story should be told. I realized with my post last night that I want to put more thought and time into telling my story. I want to have more reflection upon all the interconnected elements of my experience as I write about them. I want to decrease the amount of reactive emotion being incorporated in my writing, and instead learn to focus my storytelling on the issues of disability discrimination, gender, race, sexual harassment, hostile work environments, obsolete administrative structures, effective communication, retaliation, rampant rumormongering, and the harmful damage caused by the process of labeling others as ‘different.’ These are the issues that I struggled to learn how to recognize within my experiences at the pool, but they are not the only issues I am concerned with in our society.

A decade of living with diabetes, instead of building a career in education, has given me the unprecedented ability to step back from everything I know about our society, and truly begin to understand what it is I want to educate our young about how to survive within our society. Survival for the human species, and planet Earth, will depend upon a shift in global attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. If we continue to live the way we are currently, then we will kill all life as we know to exist. I want to teach kids how to change their world by modeling for them how I change my world everyday. They will need to deeply understand the concepts of community resilience, local government, sustainability, reduction of consumption, a renewable energy-based economy, collaberation and cooperation, as well as conflict resolution skills, which are all woefully neglected within the pedagogy and currriculum of our nation’s public education system. I want to use public education as a vehicle for helping students to create a global community built upon the values of self-sacrifice, stewardship, and civic duty.

These ideas are too big for me to write about while drinking a pint, or three, of beer at the deli. So, this is my last post to be written in public and published immediately. I had an image in my mind of writing everyday and telling my story in pieces, but the strain of keeping my thoughts flowing in a linear stream to make each post directly connect to the next is not working for me. Instead, my story is simply going to come out in random chunks. Each day will still be met with a published post, but each post will no longer be an attempt to tell my narrative in a linear fashion. I will be jumping from chapter to chapter of my life, telling the stories I have accumulated over the years of experience I have lived through.

My plan (for now) is to label each relevant story under the category of either Education, Diabetes, or Pool. That way, those interested in reading my stories can choose which narrative to follow. I think this may work. I have high hopes. *shrug*

Otherwise, my daily posts are going to be random stories from over the years that may actually have nothing to do with my disease, my time at the pool, or my convictions about public education (I have climbing stories up the wazoo!). The only thing connecting all the various narratives will be the simple fact they all happened to me at some point in my life. That is, after all, what this blog is ultimately about: me. 

Thank you for taking the time to read my blatherings. I appreciate the support and love your action of reading provides me!