Caged

[Above photo: “Logboom Sunday”, a painting by Charles Stewart (my bro) shows a tug pulling a long boom of logs in Puget Sound, the entrance to Seattle.]

12 April 2020

At first it was novelty, acquiring, prepping, and freezing fish, meat, fruit, and vegetables for the coming isolation. Then figuring out how to optimally use Zoom for teaching. Then how to discipline myself, apportioning time between work, leisure, exercise, correspondence, videochats, and on and on. Now I am just getting bored with my own company. Yes, I can do most anything that a person can do alone in an apartment with a full array of electronic devices. Yes, I can contact my friends. But I am missing going out for meals, meeting and seeing and hugging real people. Here I am in Myanmar during Thingyan Holiday (Water Festival, Myanmar New Year, theoretical start of the monsoon season) with no classes to teach for a week and I can go nowhere.

Aillen and I were going to Palawan in the Philippines.  When Macau shut down I thought of going scuba diving in the Meik Archipelago in the far south of Myanmar. Then I planned to go home. Now I am here, curiously whipsawed in place. A patient of mine in Berkeley had a large shepherd-mix who he saw shaking an opossum violently in the back yard of his house and the babies kept flying out of the mother’s pouch. (No one died!) I feel shaken about by myself, I suppose, and for all the movement I remain in the same spot, in my aerie in Chinatown, Yangon.  Discomfort is relative and even though I and my family are not starving, or crazed with worry about my job, I guiltily want to express my dislike of the situation. There, I’ve done it.

I decided earlier in this week to edit my weekly 2 year-long Malwai blog and my 15 month Myanmar blog and see if I can turn them into a good read. Now I have some time to do it. Sublimation is highly overrated as a substitute for sex, but it is fun to revive the memories of those times. Through a false economy, when I switched my WordPress account from Malawi to Myanmar, not wanting to pay for both sites I let Malawi expire. The posts all vanished.  I have all the entries in my computer but I should have just sprung for the few extra $ and kept the Malawi site up. I’ll see how the sorting and editing go. It has potential, I think, but I’ll have to remove my obsessional rants.

Harold and I had a good Zoom chat yesterday.  He and Connie are rusticating in Old Chatham, New York and both are as lively as ever. Imagine when Burma was a British colony, a letter to a friend would leave on a steamboat taking however long and the return would be the same. What if you were writing to a lover? Good lord, the agony! My mother saved all the letters I dutifully wrote her from college; they help me retrieve my past. And remember Air Mail stamps? With “Par Avion” on the blue international fold-up stationary? It certainly seemed exotic and exciting to this kid on Mercer Island when his sister’s letters would arrive from Grenoble where she was working after her freshman year in college. I’m not sure what changed but by my junior year at Harvard my mother refused to let me go to Europe and kick around for a year. Probably a wise step, since drugs were coming in, I was fairly lost and adventuresome, and I likely would have gotten into a situation of some sort. I’m sure she was not wanting to postpone my dependency on her any longer than necessary, as well, although she never complained of it. It is a mark of her character that she never did, despite largely putting me through college and med school. I always had jobs in both, but the bulk of the bills she carried.

The most ominous event of the year, to me, is that the Supreme Court of the United States, by refusing to allow additional days for absentee voting, determined that many Wisconsin voters would have to risk illness (and some, their lives or those of loved ones) to vote in the primary election.   Voter suppression is the key to a Republican victory, as DT and others have openly noted.  Disenfranchisement of minorities has been with us since Blacks were given the vote after the Civil War.  All the bullshit about being “Strict Constitutionalists”, “voter fraud” etc. etc. is like preachers using their religion and excerpts from the Bible to preach hatred. It’s mostly just Big Business, Wealth Preservation, and maintaining the Status Quo.

We all have a right to our values, certainly. But to live by them, not to impose them on others. I’m not saying you must have an abortion if you have an unwanted pregnancy.  Homosexuality is not a life-style choice.  If parents don’t want their children to have school-based sex ed, schools should allow the children to have an alternative activity during that class.  Just don’t complain about the increase in teen pregnancy as a result.  Ignorance is not bliss, as we are bitterly experiencing with our current leadership. Nor is poverty generally a life-style choice or the result of laziness. Much of the world works very hard and is impoverished.

And as to fiscal conservatism, start with Ronald Reagan and move forward, looking at government spending and the national debt. The Republicans, who used to squeal like stuck pigs about “tax and spend” Democrats have run up the most massive debts. Obama, it should be noted, had a high national debt but he inherited two Republican-instigated wars and a massive recession, requiring bail-outs, which came at the end of 8 years of Republican mis-governance. Let’s toss that chestnut in the fire. Clinton, flawed man, left 43 with a $500 billion surplus! What is left that Republicans say they stand for except social values and fiscal conservatism? Fear of non-whites, including immigrants not from Norway? Oh, I’d best stop. My wheels are spinning!

Thankfully my brother Charlie sent the above painting, which calms me and recalls wonderful times hiking and camping, sailing, fishing, canoeing, and kayaking in the Pacific Northwest.  Log booms would be towed past our home on Lake Washington. In the summers we’d sail or row or paddle out to them and run and skip over the loose logs in the middle for hours. Never fell in, never clonked our heads, never drowned. I don’t know if I could have been as casual about it with my children as my mother was with us, even knowing how glad I am she was and recalling what fun we had.  Simpler times. For some of us.