1229

Thursday, December 29, 2022

In bed at 10:30, awake at 4:30, half awake till 5:50, 5 pss, one cognac. Back ache, loud tinnitus.  40 degrees, expecting 49, cloudy all day, Sunrise 7:23, sunset 4:24., 9 hours, 1 minute.

Opening the Laptop.  I should give more thought to the tabs I leave open when I close the laptop for the night for that is the tab I will see when I open the laptop at whatever hour I lumber out of bed.  This morning I opened to The Atlantic and Nicole Davidoff's "Poverty is Violent," but after finishing that feature I turned to Nicole Chung's newsletter  I Have Notes.  I followed a link to reviews of her memoir A Living Remedy and its story of our inadequacy and inequality of health care, which led to her parents' early deaths.  It reminded me of my good friend Roland Wright, a fellow parishioner at St. Francis of Assisi parish in the inner city.  Roland was my first pickup and last drop-off during the years I drove the church van every Sunday.  I sat in the driver's seat, Roland 'rode shotgun.'  Over several years, we became good friends.  He was poor, Black, a recovering alcoholic, a resident of public housing for the elderly at the Convent Hill 'project,'  a quiet man of deep modesty and of deep gratitude, a former alcoholism counselor who carried in his heart a burden of guilt, of sin.  He had lived with his father in his drinking days and one night there was a smoky fire in their residence that killed his father.  Roland was so drunk he slept through it and survived, I'm not sure how, but he blamed himself and his drunkenness for his father's death.  At some point, I noticed that Roland didn't seem well and I asked him about it.  For a time he denied that he was ill but eventually admitted to me that he had esophageal cancer.  He had no car and reluctantly agreed to my driving him to his medical appointments and accompanying him during his sessions with his doctors.  I remember how taken aback I was when his oncologist at Mt. Sinai told him his cancer was incurable, that 'it will take your life.'  He said it coldly, unemotionally, or, as it seemed to me sitting there next to Roland, almost brutally.  I wondered if he was like that with all his terminal patients or only with his poor, Black, Medicare/Medicaid patients who live in public housing.  On reflection, I think I was too harsh in my judgment.  The doctor's job was one that none of us would volunteer for and he surely knew better than I did how such news is best delivered.  I also accompanied Roland to other medical appointments at an inner city senior center, the Clinton Rose Senior Center on 3td Street (now MLK Drive) and Burleigh Avenue. The patients there were all poor, all Black.  The rotating doctors were all doing charity work.  Roland's medical file was thick, not surprising for an old man who had attended this medical clinic for years, but I wondered how much attention the attending physician could give to the information in that file.  As I recall, the wait to see the doctor was long but I'm not really sure, it was a long time ago and my memory is poor.  I had a bit of a struggle to pull up Roland's name from my sclerotic hippocampus and amygdala.  Soon Roland couldn't swallow and I and a nurse at the housing project who also happened to be a parishioner at St. Francis shared the duty to visiting him in his apartment, grinding up his pills, mixing them into his protein drinks, and pouring them into his "g-tube" implanted into his stomach.   Eventually he had to be moved to a local inner city nursing home.  I drove him there and visited him regularly as he quickly (as best I can recall) became so doped up or 'medicated' that he was uncommunicative.  Roland had no family, at least none that we knew of.  At his funeral mass at St. Francis, which was well attended because he had friends there, the eulogies were delivered by the nurse and by me.  I don't have a copy of mine anymore, but I remember its gist: that in his life, Roland refused to accept any praise but now I was free to heap praise on this good, kind, gentle man.  His burial was attended only by Father Matthew Gottschalk from the House of Pease, me, and one other person whose identity I can't now recall.  I still have the crucifix from his casket and on the shelf in my painting area I keep a small photo of him sitting on his bed in his little apartment.  My experiences with Roland opened by eyes to the challenges of health care for the poor, especially the elderly Black poor.  It's not that there is no health care available, though one wonders what would be the case without the "socialist' Medicare and Medicaid programs, but there are real challenges just accessing it.  In my life, I had the same primary care physician, Kathleen Baugrud, for more than 25 years.  I had the same gastroenterologist for my Barrett's esophagus, the son of a lawyer I knew in law school and agasint whom I had litigated a case.  I always had my own car to get me to and from appointments.  I had my own insurance, my own income adequate to pay co-pays and deductibles and uncovered expenses.  Roland and I lived in very different worlds mainly because he was born poor and Black and I was born poor and White.  White Privilege = Not Being Black in America.

New Record for Goldfinches.  15 or 16 on the niger feeder at one time.

POVERTY IS VIOLENT: Why are so many Black men shot to death in certain American neighborhoods? By Nicholas Dawidoff, The Atlantic, 12/28/22

An interesting article in many respects, notably the effects of moving manufacturing and other jobs away from American cities to China, Mexico, etc.  From THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MILWAUKEE: "After employing more than 15,000 workers in the late 1950s, for example, Allis-Chalmers declared bankruptcy in 1987. By the end of the twentieth century, the site of its massive factory in West Allis became home to a K-Mart and several other stores and restaurants. A similar fate befell other industries in Milwaukee. A former Caterpillar factory on Holt Avenue became a Pick ’n Save grocery store, while the Blatz brewery changed into apartments. [Ditto Pabst Brewery & Schlitz Brewery] 50,000 manufacturing jobs left Milwaukee between 1979 and 1983. Between 1979 and 1989, the Milwaukee metropolitan area lost 19 percent of its industrial employment. This decline was three times higher than occurred nationally."  Former workers become the unemployed.  Family stability decreases.  Home ownership decreases.  Median household income and educational attainment decrease.  Hope for a prosperous future life decreases and for some disappears, resulting in the lethal criminality, illicit drug use, and gun violence we see in American cities today, including Milwaukee.  Roughly 90% of metro Milwaukee’s black population lives in the city, the lowest rate of black suburbanization of any large metro.  About 40% of black men 25 to 44 aren’t working, either because they are unemployed, out of the labor force, on disability or jailed, he said. Milwaukee has one of the highest black household poverty rates among large metro areas.  Black men are the disproportionate victims of gun violence, dying of firearm homicide at a rate 22.3 times higher than other Americans.  I saw the real-life effects of this when I worked at the House of Peace where I learned not to ask mothers about their children, especially sons, as I was so often told 'he was killed.'  Hattie Clayton, a single mother of 5 children (Tiffany, Chrystal, Brian, Kelly, and Lovie) living across the street from the Catholic private high school, Messmer, said she heard gunshots almost every night.  Capuchin Brother Bob Smith, principal of the school, told me the same thing.  Roughly 90% of metro Milwaukee’s black population lives in the city, the lowest rate of black suburbanization of any large metro area.  The author of The Atlantic article points out that "the political right tends to describe gun violence as part of a cultural apocalypse arising from liberal tolerance for criminals . . . The left prefers to avoid talking about it at all.   Both the desire to exaggerate crime and the impulse to downplay it undermine constructive attention to a horrific problem"  He cites a "study . . . conducted for internal state use in 2018 of people arrested for serious crimes as juveniles found that 30 percent suffered from fetal drug or alcohol syndrome, and another 30 percent had been removed from their families because of abuse or neglect." 

    I attribute this suffering and injustice to America's  largely unbridled free-market capitalism and White indifference.  An intrinsic characteristic of capitalist business, at least corporate business, is the desire to minimize labor costs.  Profits equals revenues minus expenses and for many if not most business the highest expenses are employee costs: wages and fringe benefits.  If it's cheaper to produce widgets in China or Mexico than in Detroit, do it where it's cheapest. Bill Clinton and our Congress helped this project along with NAFTA.  Our government is in the pockets of Corporate America, transnationalAmerica.  The best illustration is our health care system, lately controlled by 'free market' enthusiasts who assure Americans that we can't afford 'socialized medicine' like almost all advanced economies have, even though we are 'the richest nation in the history of the planet.'  The health care that Sarah enjoys in Germany, we 'can't afford' here.  Getting rid of Obamacare, which ensures some members of our family, has been a top priority of Republicans since its passage. Only the wisdom and courage of one senator, John McCain, saved it for the nation.  

Lilly's annual visit with the Vet.  She's OK.  Cost $500+

Geek Squad and the Oven Door.  Fixed.