FollowDid you ever feel like you’re swimming in soil? Scraped arms. Tired. Going nowhere. Dust in nostrils and throat. Much in the news about companies and perverse greed. Lest we forget. BP. Glaxo and Avandia(diabetes drug). Being a denizen of social media, I often wonder about protest on the landscape. I don’t see many posts inciting. I can’t be in Kansas during the sixties anymore? Protest sounds infiltrated air vents in Middle American buildings. No avoidance. It was everywhere about everything. I tell my son how wonderful it was being a twenty something back then. There is no protest anymore. Why do I visualize cattle cars in Chicago hauling their load to slaughter? Sure, a couple of hundred people in downtown New York City got together and threw some black gook on themselves and a BP gas station sign during the first weeks of the gulf oil apocalypse. And people linked hands on beaches all over America to stop offshore drilling. Millions in the Gulf State’s lives have been disrupted/ruined, maybe forever. Trickle down goes up to all of us. As of this writing, they’re waiting to see if the well stays capped. Would love new chapter devoted to massive cleanup. Maybe when Christmas shopping in a mall, meeting friends we’ll talk about the well that’s still capped and off shore drilling being curtailed. And now, what’s this I hear about Britain releasing the convicted Pan Am plane bomber to Libya because he was dying and now that he hasn’t died in Libya, all of a sudden BP gets this lucrative oil deal with Libya. I don’t know. Expectations these days drop me at the bottom of a canyon; buzzards circling overhead while holding an un-strung broken tennis racket to ward them off.
The Avandia diabetes drug by Glaxo. A million Americans should be marching/protesting at their headquarters. The Senate revealed an internal email from Glaxo. “Per Senior Management request, these data should not see the light of day to anyone outside of GlaxoSmithKline.” Then their sales analysis. “If cardio-vascular safety issues intensifies” company would lose $600 million in sales. However the FDA just decided to leave it on the market. I shook my head (a disbelief motion). People died. I remember my mother had a lawyer acquaintance named Atticus (something). He once said, “Speed no longer kills, greed does.” But there is no protest. Smart folks reside inside that marble edifice with columns and a statue of a Roman God. They know people forget and go about their business; don’t want to get involved. It doesn’t concern them; maybe just the relatives of those poor souls who took the diabetes drug to live and died will protest. I have to say it. My novel foretold drug companies not recalling.
On the theme of people not getting involved. I’ve been reading the novel ‘Sarah’s Key’ which begins on July 16, 1942, coincidentally the date of this blog, in Paris, France and how the French police and civil servants (no Germans) brutally rounded up (took pleasure. Who was worse?) over 13,000 French Jews, many women and children, held them at the Velodrome D’Hiver and internment camps before shipping them to Auschwitz. Of course not many survived. The pain of mothers and children ripped, beaten and separated. Unbearable reading. Not many French citizens protested or got involved. French police did a thorough job. History books are filled with non-involvement going back 2010 years. We must have a shared non-involvement gene in our constitution. A strange dizziness and nauseous headache arrives every time I pick up the book; the same symptoms as I watch gulf BP news every day. I’ve stopped taking ibuprofen for headaches; worried about the cleanliness of the manufacturing facilities of the drug (contemporary news). And I just learned that most of the billions of dollars pledged to Haiti(earthquake 6 months ago, lest ye forget) from countries all over, ‘it’s a small world after all,’ never arrived and there are warehouses filled with food that needy Haitians never get because of all the red tape. Where have all the protests gone?
Introspection time. I wonder where my sense of right, protest, individuality and fair play developed. Perhaps when Eisenhower was President. Day camp in Newark, New Jersey. I was eleven, slight, skinny and shadow fearful. Each morning we played bombardment. The camp split in two. I was one of the younger campers and a wonderful ball dodger, meaning I ruined many a game by artfully dodging the ball, allowing a team mate to come back each time the bad guys missed me; a never ending game. A few weeks of Calvin ruining the game by dodging (it was called dodge ball by some) prompted the head counselor to warn me. If I didn’t make an effort to catch the ball, then at the end of swimming that day I would have to fight/box Sam Jax, the oldest, biggest, meanest and toughest kid in camp. Three times my size. Fear like never before paralyzed me. Everyone heard the warning. The noisy game became silent. Everyone watched the next ball. I was a dodger (and a Brooklyn Dodger fan as well) so my eleven years of life experience told me to dodge the ball; a difficult decision as Sam Jax, out of the corner of my eye, was punching his palm. I dodged the ball. The head counselor announced the boxing mismatch for later that day. My camp friends knew it was unfair. A funny (curious) thing; no one said anything or protested, not even my counselor. I guess the campers were glad they didn’t have to fight Sam Jax. Next, we walked down to Weequahic Park to play softball. A few kids asked what I was going to do (much like a strategy question) After softball, the bus came to take us to swim. I slipped into the dense shrubbery. No one saw. I was alone, crying and walked miles by myself to get home. Good strategy; never fought Sam Jax. My mother almost did. But looking back, I drew the first of many lines in the sand; a first protest of sorts. I love post scripts. So does Reckless Ostrich. Many years later, I bumped into Sam Jax. I was twice his size now with a few ICBMs in my garage. Of course he didn’t remember anything. I wish now for the art of protest to overspread. So much is going on. A little fantasy before a milestone birthday: Grow my hair long, get a Captain America leather coat, take a trip to Haight- Ashbury and Sedona and try to get home to my mother one more time.
As always, an invitation to novel website. http://vichywater.net