[Above photo: A clear view of the pier, gangway, and float from my porch.]
31 July 2022
NPR aired an interview with the Director of the Islamic Relief Society about refugees from the turmoil in Somalia. He was speaking about a 500,000 person camp in (?) Kenya where food and water are in very short supply. 70 babies have died in the past week. People trekked there with no food or water for 7 days—is that even possible, to survive 7 days in that climate without water? NGO’s are not able to fulfill the basic life needs of the largely elderly, women, and children in the camp.
Meanwhile, in Myanmar, many are supporting the armed groups (PDF or People’s Defense Force) contesting the ruling military, to their great peril. Chinese have supplied the military with software to monitor phone, email, and social media communications, as well as facial recognition programs. How effectively these are implemented is unknown to me but the level of fear and the courage to overcome it among the dissidents must be considerable, especially since the formal executions have recently begun. Of course, the junta has been executing protesters informally, shooting into crowds and abducting opposition leaders from their homes, since the third week of February 2021, three weeks after the coup.
I am becoming irascible, less charitable with my family and more angrily outspoken. I don’t like it. I don’t feel depressed, although there are ample reasons for that. One of my dearest friends has started treatment for cancer that has spread all over his body, in part as a conclusion of a missed diagnosis 6 months ago. That figures into my feelings, clearly.
However, I think I am overloaded with media and messages. We seem unable to stop striving and killing. Women aren’t allowed to have control over their bodies. The Catholic Church is reportedly putting millions of dollars into a campaign in Kansas to make abortion illegal. I am sick that Donald Trump is walking free; why doesn’t that cheeseburger-chomping ball of lard keel over with a heart attack? I am irritable.
I shall be given the Charlotte and Norbert Rieger Award for Service Program Excellence at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in October. I’ll give a talk about my work in Myanmar and create a quotation for publication. I have valued the Academy as a professional home, although I have disagreed with its direction at times. For example, the “medicalization” of psychiatry, which means primarily giving pills like other physicians, has been a big error. Most psychiatric trainees these days do not emerge capable of conducting psychotherapy. This is a change over the past 40 years. It is part of why I loved my work in Malawi and in Myanmar, as I could give full voice to the power of “the talking cure”. The judicious use of medications is always part of my training.
The porch of my house faces east and is warmed by the rising sun early each morning. There are two bamboo rollup shades to keep the brightness out of our eyes as we sit in one of the three very comfortable hanging hammock chairs, drinking coffee and looking down the meadow towards the harbor. I discovered the chairs at the Blue Zebra, a little resort occupying a tiny island in Lake Malawi. I had their manufacturer in Johannesburg courier a set of 4 to Cape Town where I visited family, bringing the chairs home in a suitcase.
The meadow changes color each year, depending on the amount of rainfall. Sometimes it is green; at others it is a deep purple. This year with the drought it is golden. I mentioned to an amateur biologist friend that it recalled ‘Christina’s World’, the famous Andrew Wyeth painting. He noted that it wasn’t surprising, since the grass species is identical in both Maine sites.
My lady hummingbird friend is hard at it, feeding her brood and chasing intruders from the feeder. The latter leave with the haste and chagrin of a stranger fleeing through the back door after you discover them at your fridge drinking milk from a carton, like the opening scene of “The Big Lebowski” but without Jeff Bridges’ indifference.
Within her tiny body, which weighs less than an ounce, lives more beautiful, complex, and sophisticated machinery than anything we’ll ever design or construct. Intelligence, guidance systems, and reproductive capacity, in addition to everything else. Does her manufacture or operation damage the environment? On the contrary, she likely is a pollinator and her tiny droppings fertilize wherever they fall.
It seems important for Us to manipulate the environment, to assert our power over it, to even attempt to conquer it. It feels too passive to simply live, love, and bear witness. We must best our neighbor, the rest be damned. We strive for inequality, with ourselves on top. And ease and often glittery, luxurious objects, not unlike our monkey ancestors.
Science can be used to bear witness, to simply understand what is happening. However, without activating the advances in public health and medical knowledge we’d live about 35 years. We need a new paradigm to guide and limit our manipulation of the environment.
The Gross National Happiness quotient of Bhutan seemed magical and unreal when I first heard of it: A country measuring its progress by considering the well-being of all of its citizens?! Newly reading about the massive importance of the underworld of fungi for the health of trees and for carbon sequestration, it seems our ambition should be to live in harmony with the natural world and all of its inhabitants, like many of our ancestors.
Their convictions formed before the Industrial and Information Ages and, once having driven a Tesla or texted a friend, it’s difficult to roll the clock back. Thank goodness there are eoclogists and environmentalists, including those mycologists tramping around Chile sampling the soil to map the mycological genome, to remind us of what we are destroying
Then there is Senator Ted Cruz fist-bumping Senator Chris Daines after they blocked passage of a bill to provide medical and other support to military victims of toxic fumes from the burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan. Almost as good as Ted’s flight to Cancun in winter during the Texas electrical grid failure, when people in Texas were freezing to death. Not as funny as the montage of Senator Josh Hawley’s solidarity fist and then fleeing like a scared bunny on January 6. What low specimens we have directing our government. Give a man free-will, (a bit of) intelligence, and an elected office and see what a mess he can make of our lives.
I’ll take hummingbirds. And all the “good” people, of course. It would improve my attitude to stop reading the Times and the Post, but I won’t.
A Psychiatrist in Myanmar 