But why are we fighting in the first place?

I read that $1.5 million has been raised for Renee Good’s family . Too bad. Won’t bring her back.

I think about the ICE officer who fired the shot that killed her — a shot fired by a war veteran — and whether he privately permits himself to regret that action. Fear without accountability becomes lethal in the blink of an eye. Is there really anything more at work in the story?

We have taxpayer-funded death squads in this country now. But the resistance is polarized, and seems unable to reach out and even seek for common ground.

I read the most famous poem by the deceased woman. It was clear that she grappled with metaphysical struggles and questions… the same ones that are very familiar to me. I don’t know where she was when her life ended. But the poem doesn’t end in a hopeful way. Not if you define that hope as belief in a personal God, or in the Christian promise of an afterlife.

I too have thrown out a Bible…

Only one.

It wasn’t for the best of reasons. It was after reading John 3:16 on the eve of medically necessary surgery to remove my uterus. The line about God’s only begotten son really got to me. Realizing that I would never get the chance to have my own biological children — the conventional benchmark of a woman’s worth. Feeling like a failure in every other respect.

Ironic since at that point in my life I had a job and a stable place to live.

Since then I’ve had odd luck with Bibles. Bought or scavenged a few. Had two of them stolen.

I think about the book that I wrote. One of the unqualified blessings from that journey was meeting actual leaders from the Civil Rights movement. Not everyone involved in that movement subscribed to a Christian faith. But I’d argue it was successful because even racist Southerners believed in that common tradition. There was a way to begin a dialogue. And there was some recognition of common humanity. The movement was also organized and disciplined, in a way that isolated moments of resistance never can be.

So that’s one thing that I got from the time that I spent on the road and the years spent editing interview transcripts and compiling notes.

Maybe it makes up for the rest. Or maybe the best is yet to come.

I think about how faith propelled me to take financial and personal risks. Choosing not to remarry, or to go on disability back when I first realized I would have qualified. Always taking the road not taken, until it turned into a deer path. And then faded into a brambles and scree.

This is not a post I’ll be sharing on social media. I would be roundly pilloried, if anyone even took the time to read it. But it’s here for search engines, for future historians or AI trying to get a glimpse of what went wrong with our time.

I’m going to just say that I really think the problem may be that thinking people don’t believe in God anymore. And the people who do call themselves Christians don’t bother to actually read or understand the teachings of Jesus. I’m not even sure most evangelical Christian pastors believe, these days. I think maybe they’ve just recognized a nice and profitable hustle, and learned all the right memes to repeat with an up tempo beat.

The thing I try to remember is that at the time that Jesus lived, the world looked as divided and hopeless as it does today. The priestly class were very much aligned with the status quo. Many of them openly proclaimed that there was no afterlife.

Look through the list of disciples and you’ll see that it’s not the same in all four gospels. And of course it’s leaving out the women who were there.

So how did a ragtag band of maybe 10-20 handles peasants shift the course of history? Was the outcome anything more than a comforting myth? A way to justify slavery and imperialism? I’d have to argue that it was a lot more meaningful, based only on the example of the previous American century.

Which never could have happened without a shared base of values, grounded in both freedom of religion and a widely accepted faith in God. That which we have lost.

I am 49 years old, so I remember a lot of that.

The way the Cold War ended. The birth of punk, and the Internet. The freedom its children once enjoyed

The way we lived and hoped and dreamed when we thought our lives could be over in an instant, from a missile attack in the middle of the night.

Maybe we’ll never get that back. Probably our civilization has peaked.

I don’t have a call to action. There’s a link to my book in the sidebar, but not in this post.

I’m just trying to leave space open for God to be real. For there to be a reason for me to be up there on that mountain, lost in the woods.

It’s not a test or a dare. It’s just where I am.

Just kidding. I feel slightly sheepish actually hawking a product so blatantly.

Southern Cross, by Tess Gadwa:  True stories of miracles, visions, voodoo, snake handling, civil disobedience, and my search for existential answers along the back roads of the Bible Belt.

I’m going to add the links here for the free PDF download of Southern Cross, the book I researched and wrote while a bored housewife seeking truth and meaning in the Bible Belt. You can also buy a copy on Amazon (Kindle or print). The free online version of the book is older and less edited — I’m sure it has a lot of typos. It also has some of the original line drawings that accompanied the project. I need to emphasize that this book was written for Christians seeking to find common ground with other Christians. If you are not Christian and are seeking the right spiritual home, please know that finding “a good church” can be difficult.  I left organized religion about 12 years ago. I sort of know what the right faith community would look like for me and it would be a place without walls, paid staff, or dogma. Built on friendship, good intention, and mutual support.

Ok, so I’m about to finally mail in my ballot. (That’s how we do things in the State of Oregon, remember?) No long lines at the polls. But maybe a little suspense waiting for all the ballots to arrive and get counted… at least for the local races.

It’s pretty much obvious who the best candidate is, and in fact I did some phone banking for her on Saturday morning. This is my moment to give some space for anyone here who may tempted to vote for the other side. Or more likely, vote for a third-party candidate or not vote at all.

First off, you have to admire the devotion of the Trump voters. There is nothing subtle about it. They really mean it. The white pickup truck that’s been parked on my block all week long, with a huge sign attached that says,

“God, Guns, and Trump.”

Now that is making a statement. Same with the house I saw when I was back visiting my parents in Connecticut, which had a Trump banner covering most of the second story. They were just down the road from Town Hall. And these are Blue states, mind you. It’s not like these views are popular!

You had to figure that these people don’t care what their neighbors think of them. I guess having guns and ammunition handy could help people perpetuate that worldview. Unfortunately, even in the Northeast, these people are not just an isolated fringe group. I remember hearing the words of this country music song playing on AM radio, while I was driving away from the post office in my hometown. It was all about how if anyone tried to take our guns away, they would be real sorry.

Anyway, I don’t own a gun and I don’t want one. There are plenty of other ways to defend yourself and fight for your beliefs. The most effective ones are always nonviolent. That is the only way you can win a measurable number of the other side to your worldview.

Nonviolence doesn’t always mean marching and carrying signs, though. Nor does it always mean civil disobedience. I was lucky enough to cover some protests of that type, but that was years ago. Nonviolence can be as simple as paid advertising. Only problem is, that requires money. And platforms that will take your money.

That is where I worry that progressive groupthink is really letting us down. There is an air of self-satisfaction that is prevalent amongst liberals (and I do consider myself one of them). But I prefer to question my assumptions, and draw information from a variety of sources. Bezos got it wrong when he forbid The Washington Post to endorse Kamala Harris. The question wasn’t whether Post readers would be swayed by that endorsement. It was more the “why” that becomes important — the content of those hypothetical paragraphs that would have accompanied her endorsement. People need to see reasons to be passionate and motivated about a cause.

I can tell you what I am passionate about and that is getting better healthcare. For me, personally, and for everyone. I found myself in the public system in Oregon after moving back here this spring. And what I learned is that it’s nearly impossible to see a doctor, or even a nurse practitioner. With a very few exception, we are not even allowed to pay for private appointments outside of the clinic system. This is really a problem when you experience constant pain.

The repetitive strain injury I live with hasn’t really gotten better, and at times (particularly after long drives) it’s been much worse. The question that I have been waiting three months to get an answer about is whether my physical therapy exercises are actually helping, or whether they might be exacerbating the injury.

In the meantime, I work for a few hours every day. I try to find workarounds that involve fewer mouse clicks and above all, less time on my phone. There is a really strong possibility that I meet the criteria for receiving disability, but I would rather not go that route. I’ve investigated the assistive technologies currently available, but they really seem to be designed for people who use one or two software productivity applications only — and not for people in management or creative roles, who are constantly toggling between a dozen or more open screens and tabs (many of them web apps).

We won’t even talk about women’s health, or the complete lack of specialists or referrals in this area. I haven’t even been offered a mammogram screening. Forget about trying to schedule an appointment to discuss HRT, even if like me you are missing a uterus and concerned that menopause or perimenopause could catch you unawares.

Not sure yet what my long term plan is. Just hoping it’s not an endgame.

Really, really wishing that there was a better way to improve the quality of public healthcare in the place where I live. For me. And for all the people in the system who have even less in the way of choice or good information about the treatment options they have available. For good or ill, Medicaid-subsidized care public healthcare here in Oregon is “socialized medicine.” It covers a lot. Something like cradle-to-grave. The clinic system even has a public daycare. I have friends who use it.

But the appointments and the spaces aren’t necessarily there when you need them. Rationing is not a bogeyman. It’s a fact of life.

I can’t take my business elsewhere. I can’t shop around. Not in the same calendar year. Switching insurance providers is as giant a gamble as anything else. You never know which providers are going to drop out of a given private plan, or how long the wait will be to actually get in for an appointment with a primary care provider.

I don’t believe the solution is throwing more money at the problem. I believe the solution is better accountability. The profit system built into free markets does act, in some rough and almost always unintentional ways, as a way to measure performance. Take that out of the equation and you have every incentive for abuse and bloat.

We need greater transparency. And we need ways for consumers of public services (and yes, that means poor people) to make their viewpoints known without having to fill out a 15-minute survey. Most of us are working poor, and we don’t have those fifteen minutes to spare.

I was going to ask a VC that I knew whether he felt like a simple, universal AI-driven response and feedback measurement system could ever get adopted by the federal government. The process to become an approved federal vendor is laborious and time-consuming, and typically you can’t really “pitch” government organizations on tools that they might actually use internally. You can only go after grants, which are almost always highly competitive and reserved for those on the inside track.

Which, ahem, I am not on. Not in the Biden administration, and certainly not in the administration that preceded it. Read the article below this one, and you may start to have an inkling as to why.

Last Sunday, I was chatting with other guests at a friend’s rooftop birthday gathering. One woman proudly told us she worked at a local hospital, adding “I am so glad it’s not a Christian hospital!”

I was floored.

People have all kinds of reasons to distrust Christianity. I get that. But a faith-based health organization, Adventist Health of Portland, together with my doctor and the electronic chart system that kept me in direct contact with my care team, was responsible for me being physically well enough to attend the event in the first place.

I was raised as a liberal Episcopalian and wrote a memoir exploring my relationship with Christianity in my early 30s. These days I am never entirely sure what I believe. One thing I can tell you is that part of following Jesus is a core belief that doing the right thing is more important than money.

The website for Adventist Health Portland includes an explicitly faith-based mission: “Living God’s love by inspiring health, wholeness and hope.”

Issues of fairness and equity in the U.S. healthcare are so widespread that it’s hard to know where to even begin to makes things better. I can’t tell you for sure whether faith-based values were part of the decision matrix that made my surgery possible, but it seems entirely consistent.

What I experienced personally can only be described as a “Room at the Inn” situation.

For several months, I had been getting weekly IV iron infusions for anemia. My iron levels were that low. The cause was fibroids with menorrhagia. Over six years, the condition progressed from minor annoyance to debilitating illness.  In the summer of 2022, I was too weak to ride my bike or go out jogging. I slept 12 hours a day. Once, I had been an avid devotee of the Portland music scene. Now having an active social life or dating was out of the question. It was all I could do to clock in to my remote job and cook and clean for myself.

I had already had one surgery (hysteroscopic myomectomy, unsuccessful) the previous fall. The six benign tumors in my uterus came right back, and the bleeding intensified. I was on a wait list through the Oregon Clinic for a second surgery, but had been told the backlog stretched six months or more. Then, right around the Labor Day holiday, things got worse.

I messaged my doctor via the Patient Portal to let her know:

I had my most severe hemorrhage since July 22 last night… There was blood all over the bathroom floor.

Sorry for the graphic detail but I hope you understand I am not exaggerating. I am taking 10 mg of Norethindrone daily. Up until now that has controlled the bleeding successfully.

I got an immediate reply, requesting that I come into her office for blood work. On that same visit, I was given a surgery date — less than two weeks away. My doctor had put in an emergency request for an operating space and Adventist Hospital had answered that call.

I scrambled to get the time off from my work and find a relative to help me through the recovery process. I got a full hysterectomy, but kept my ovaries. Remarkably, the laparoscopic procedure did not require an overnight stay. The hospital staff was caring and attentive, staying late until they were sure I was safe to leave. Within a week, the pain was mostly gone. Within three weeks, only faint scars were visible.

It took over six months for my hormonal balance to even out. But eventually, I got my life back.

The best analogy I can provide is a stained glass window in a cathedral. The procedure itself was a tangible and genuine miracle of modern science. The fact that different medical communications systems were able to connect to bring about a favorable outcome, just as much so.

SEPTEMBER 19, 2023

[Hey, I found my old spirituality blog. Looks like the entire site was archived by the Wayback Machine. I should probably write a crawler and try to make my own archive, but… too many other projects I’m procrastinating on.

I’m going to add the links here for the free PDF download of Southern Cross, the book I researched and wrote while a bored housewife seeking truth and meaning in the Bible Belt. You can also buy a copy on Amazon (Kindle or print). The free online version of the book is older and less edited — I’m sure it has a lot of typos. It also has some of the original line drawings that accompanied the project. I need to emphasize that this book was written for Christians seeking to find common ground with other Christians. If you are not Christian, please know that my intent was not to convert anyone. I left organized religion about a decade ago. I sort of know what the right faith community would look like for me and it would be a group without walls, paid staff, or dogma. Built on friendship, good intention, and mutual support.

Anyway, the post below summarizes where I’m at right now. Only downside of being a Deist is that there isn’t a built-in community. Perhaps I’ll find one or build one in time.]

DECEMBER 28, 2021

About Deism

Religion is a practice. Belief is a frame of mind.

I believe that there is a conscious and compassionate force beyond the scope of human rational inquiry at work in our daily lives. This belief is based mostly on personal experience, and on the firsthand accounts of others. I choose not to further define this Higher Power because whatever attributes I assign would almost certainly be wrong. My definition of deism is less passive than that of the 18th Century Enlightenment. It seems most likely to me that God is a meta layer of reality, both nervous system and DNA, a manifestation of conscious information. Not a watchmaker, but rather the gears, the numbers, the hands, the wearer, the manufacturer, and the construct of 4D spacetime itself.

Photo taken 12.28.2021.

Of course, our reality could also be a simulation. In theory, the odds that we are inhabiting a simulation are fifty-fifty.

But this isn’t a “just so” story. I’m not claiming any authority or special revelation.

And no, I don’t know what happens after we die.

In 2015 I did have something happen to me that cannot be explained by science. It wasn’t a coincidence. It wasn’t an answered prayer. It’s not the face of Jesus on a pancake, or anything like that. It was just something that happened outside of continuity. Something we had no rational explanation for. It had both symbolic and personal relevance. There was another witness. We took a picture with my camera phone.

The picture wouldn’t convince you if I showed you, though. You could just say that we made the whole thing up. Anyway, I’m not trying to convert anyone.

I don’t have any particular agenda, not at this point in my life.

Be a good person. Live according to your conscience. Know that fear is largely imaginary, a pernicious delusion. Love is real but not easy to find. Distrust simple answers and the wisdom of crowds.

That is my practice. That is how I try to live my life.