reader. writer.

My weekly check-in on my favorite topics

What’s been helpful

I know I’ve mentioned how many distractions there are now, words or events calculated to shock or enrage. Every day, I have to decide how much of my attention I will spend on this chaos. Here’s what helps me most: I engage as briefly as I can with news or political analysis to absorb the basics. If I can, I identify one action I can take in response, such as attending a protest, calling a legislator, attending a training, volunteering for a good cause, etc. And then I step back because it’s a matter of cognitive/emotional survival. As in, I won’t be able to help any good cause if I allow terrible people to undermine my ability to form a coherent thought.

What I’m reading:

Just finished Everything is tuberculosis by John Green, which had popped up on my Libby app this week after being on hold from the local library for months. Reading it inspired me to periodically ask my husband questions like, “Did you know that the Bronte sisters all died of TB?” To which he began responding, “Why are you so obsessed with TB?” You have to read the book to understand, and everyone should. I encouraged my daughter to, and she said, “What’s it about?” and I said, “The title says it all.” 

Reading a sensitive, nuanced book that explores the history and politics of an issue always feels like good use of my attention because it boosts rather than harms my ability to make sense of the world we live in. 

What I’m writing:

I took some time this week to look up possible meanings for words I had invented for futuristic concepts and names of aliens. There were several that I had to change based on embarrassing double meanings, sigh. A helpful exercise.

Democracy, yes, please: 

I wonder if we will ever have an accurate estimate of the harm inflicted by the reckless cuts to healthcare funding and research by this administration, from USAID to Medicaid. I want to believe that what has been destroyed can be rebuilt (but how much harm, waste, and tragic loss will take place before then?) In the meantime, I have to hope that breakthroughs in medical science and innovations in public health models will be achieved by other countries, including ways to make a curable, treatable disease like TB no longer the number one cause of death. 

All I know is this: some countries fund healthcare, education, infrastructure, and scientific research. My country funds CEOs.

Notable words:

“On my first day of training, she said to me, ‘Death is natural. Children dying is natural. None of us want to live in a natural world.’ Treating disease—whether through herbs or magic or drugs—is unnatural…Hospitals are unnatural, as are novels and saxophones. None of us actually wants to live in a natural world.”

“Framing illness as even involving morality seems to me a mistake, because of course cancer does not give a shit whether you are a good person. Biology has no moral compass. It does not punish the evil and reward the good.”

“We could reimagine the allocation of global healthcare resources to better align them with the burden of global suffering—rewarding treatments that save or improve lives rather than treatments that the rich can afford. When markets tell companies it’s more valuable to develop drugs that lengthen eyelashes than to develop drugs that treat malaria or tuberculosis, something is clearly wrong with the incentive structure. And we are not stuck with that incentive structure.”

Multiple excerpts from Everything is tuberculosis by John Green (read it, read it, read it)