Did You Know.....(Plus, my official please help my sick, broke ass web site)
That it's National Invisible Illness Awareness Week?
No, I didn't either.
I don't even really know what that means to be honest.
It's also September 11th - and that is barely earning two minutes on any news coverage I've seen today.
Awareness isn't really our thing as a culture. That might be too harsh, maybe we just have a serious attention deficit disorder.
Because I spend the overwhelming majority of my time these days alone, pondering, and spacing out in front of the computer or tv I've made a rule to try not to engage drama on the internet. I'm already home by myself all day and the matriarch of a badass feral cat gang. I don't need to add internet antagonist to my impressive resume.
But there is a persistent theme in all media I encounter which basically goes like this: If you are unhealthy you are likely to be a morally and ethically challenged human being who lacks the self-discipline to achieve "health."
So, for example, I see a lot of: "I just feel so worried when I see fat people eating donuts, I mean...don't they care about their health as much as I do?"
But the thing is...that person doesn't really care about some stranger's health. No they don't. No they don't. If they did we wouldn't live in a world where children died from diarrhea and young, healthy women die because of pregnancy complications and lack of a qualified ob surgeon. If they cared they'd become involved in organizations like this one my pal gordonzola donates his time to : http://www.peoplesgrocery.org/index.php?topic=aboutus
Nah. Every time I see someone write something like that my bullshit detector goes off like a siren.
We have been manipulated into believing that health is something that good, disciplined, socially aware people bring to themselves as a manifestation of their worthiness in the eyes of God. And it's not health so much as the appearance of it which is why you see so many people lighting cigarettes in their cars after leaving the gym.
I've said this before but I doubt I can say it enough: I don't rightly care if you think fatness is beautiful or ugly. I am equally offended by people who use the term "skinny bitch" as I am by people who are derisive about fatness or any other body type variations. I can't control what you think of me any more than you can control what I think of you. And if you're the sort of person who is inclined to allow other people's perception of your appearance to hinder your path through the world there's nothing much I can say to change that.
What I do care very much about is the institutionalization of these ideas, because it kills people. Specifically it kills poor people, people in countries which have long been plundered by more assholic countries (aka: the "developing world"), people of color, women, children, the elderly, war refugees, the mentally ill, the survivors of trauma.
It kills writers and architects, and mathematicians, and teachers and school bus drivers and mothers and fathers and children, all of whom desperately mean something to somebody.
It kills Heather McAllisters and Audre Lordes and Toni Cade Bambaras and Eli Coppolas and millions of people I will never know. I've spent a lot of time lately pondering whether it might really kill me.
Even though I grew up in an area of the country which has been ravaged by Lyme Disease for decades, and even though I remember seeing the mother's of several friends hooked up to IVs full of antibiotics in their homes it was a very invisible illness to me. Maybe it's not possible to fully have awareness of a deteriorating body until you start picking up handfuls of your hair out of the shower drain and your skin starts sloughing off.
I don't expect people to know what this feels like. And it always makes me feel sad when someone says something to me like: "I have a headache. Oh, I shouldn't complain to you." Headaches suck. Complain! Complain to me because I really understand the concept of a headache. And because we all suffer, and we are all worthy of being comforted.
I do expect folks to cultivate an awareness of how certain ideas may be normalized through god-smackingly huge amounts of repetitive, targeted propaganda and how that may negatively impact the lives of other people. And I don't just mean people's feelings (although that is a huge part of it to be sure,) I mean ideas kill.
Despite the sloughing off skin and losing patches of my hair and smelling really badly all the time lately I'm told I've never looked better. I think that means none of us are really equipped to judge another person's health just by looking at them.
For ten years I've been told there is nothing wrong with me that a little prozac and a good diet wouldn't fix. And despite years of activism and "awareness" raising about sexism and sizeism and classism I believed them. That is the primary cause of my anger, the fact that I believed that I was lazy, and a complainer and that I had brought my illness on myself.
It has become a nauseating pattern for politicians to roll out this date whenever they want to impress upon us the significance of their agenda. And every time I hear them I cringe and I think: What a shame to be senselessly murdered and then have your memory exploited for political gain. I don't think those politicians have an acute awareness of the value of the lives lost seven years ago today, or the value of the lives of all the people they have killed in their names.
My community - mostly queers and artists and freaks - have been saving lives for years. Like, I'm betting there's at least one fat girl out there who didn't pull the trigger because she saw Heather McAllister shake her amazing ass. And like my friends - some of whom I've never met - who have/are donating time and money (neither of which they have in abundance,) to pay for my health care.
My disability has been severed and my medication costs this past month totaled $800. I am repeatedly awe-struck by the generosity of my loved ones but I can't help thinking over and over again that every person in this country could be insured for less than what it costs to wage war in Iraq alone for under a year. And I don't want my uninsured friends who make $10 an hour to have to shoulder the burden of my health costs. And I don't think I should die simply because I am a poet and a reproductive rights activist by trade and neither of those things pays well.
As such my partner has created this nifty web site to help us raise money for my continued treatment and to hopefully help raise awareness about this devastating disease which is affecting Americans in epidemic proportions:
http://www.helphealfran.org/
And, on October 1st a bunch of amazing artists will hold a benefit on my behalf in San Francisco which I will post as soon as I steal the code from somebody.
Please feel free to take the web site and the benefit information and spread it around the freaking inter-world. Not just because I'd like to see my 33rd birthday, but because I honestly believe that witnessing the love and generosity these people have bestowed upon me has made my life better. It's made me a little less angry and lot more (here's that word again,) aware of the presence of divinity in every person I lay eyes on.
angryblackbitch quoted heavily today from the Gettysburg Address as a means of memorializing this historic date:
"Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground.
The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.
The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.
It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced."
We can do better.
We can do so much better.
I promise you there is no one in this world who isn't part of your community. And there is no one who isn't worthy of compassion and care and concrete help when they are ill. I am worth saving and so are the millions of people who will die this year when they really don't need to.
Illness and death are inevitable. But those of us who are most susceptible to both (because of pollutants being dumped in our neck of the woods or a stupid insurance company cover up of a lethal and expensive disease, because we can't afford the specialist or the organ donation and so on...) well, we would like to know that we aren't suffering in vain. We'd like to know that maybe our kids will live past their 50th birthday and please god with a full head of teeth.
The next time you catch yourself judging the fat person in the McDonald's drive thru by means of worrying their health ask yourself what that's really about.
Ask yourself if the basic philosophical premise of this country means anything at all anymore. If so you have to believe we can do better than we are doing in this moment.
"...that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain..
...that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom...**
And that government of the people, by the people, for the people,
shall
not
perish
from
the
earth."
*Only, I'd change "this nation" to "this world" and "under God" to under or over whatever spiritual entities you may or may not believe in, because I roll like that.
No, I didn't either.
I don't even really know what that means to be honest.
It's also September 11th - and that is barely earning two minutes on any news coverage I've seen today.
Awareness isn't really our thing as a culture. That might be too harsh, maybe we just have a serious attention deficit disorder.
Because I spend the overwhelming majority of my time these days alone, pondering, and spacing out in front of the computer or tv I've made a rule to try not to engage drama on the internet. I'm already home by myself all day and the matriarch of a badass feral cat gang. I don't need to add internet antagonist to my impressive resume.
But there is a persistent theme in all media I encounter which basically goes like this: If you are unhealthy you are likely to be a morally and ethically challenged human being who lacks the self-discipline to achieve "health."
So, for example, I see a lot of: "I just feel so worried when I see fat people eating donuts, I mean...don't they care about their health as much as I do?"
But the thing is...that person doesn't really care about some stranger's health. No they don't. No they don't. If they did we wouldn't live in a world where children died from diarrhea and young, healthy women die because of pregnancy complications and lack of a qualified ob surgeon. If they cared they'd become involved in organizations like this one my pal gordonzola donates his time to : http://www.peoplesgrocery.org/index.php?topic=aboutus
Nah. Every time I see someone write something like that my bullshit detector goes off like a siren.
We have been manipulated into believing that health is something that good, disciplined, socially aware people bring to themselves as a manifestation of their worthiness in the eyes of God. And it's not health so much as the appearance of it which is why you see so many people lighting cigarettes in their cars after leaving the gym.
I've said this before but I doubt I can say it enough: I don't rightly care if you think fatness is beautiful or ugly. I am equally offended by people who use the term "skinny bitch" as I am by people who are derisive about fatness or any other body type variations. I can't control what you think of me any more than you can control what I think of you. And if you're the sort of person who is inclined to allow other people's perception of your appearance to hinder your path through the world there's nothing much I can say to change that.
What I do care very much about is the institutionalization of these ideas, because it kills people. Specifically it kills poor people, people in countries which have long been plundered by more assholic countries (aka: the "developing world"), people of color, women, children, the elderly, war refugees, the mentally ill, the survivors of trauma.
It kills writers and architects, and mathematicians, and teachers and school bus drivers and mothers and fathers and children, all of whom desperately mean something to somebody.
It kills Heather McAllisters and Audre Lordes and Toni Cade Bambaras and Eli Coppolas and millions of people I will never know. I've spent a lot of time lately pondering whether it might really kill me.
Even though I grew up in an area of the country which has been ravaged by Lyme Disease for decades, and even though I remember seeing the mother's of several friends hooked up to IVs full of antibiotics in their homes it was a very invisible illness to me. Maybe it's not possible to fully have awareness of a deteriorating body until you start picking up handfuls of your hair out of the shower drain and your skin starts sloughing off.
I don't expect people to know what this feels like. And it always makes me feel sad when someone says something to me like: "I have a headache. Oh, I shouldn't complain to you." Headaches suck. Complain! Complain to me because I really understand the concept of a headache. And because we all suffer, and we are all worthy of being comforted.
I do expect folks to cultivate an awareness of how certain ideas may be normalized through god-smackingly huge amounts of repetitive, targeted propaganda and how that may negatively impact the lives of other people. And I don't just mean people's feelings (although that is a huge part of it to be sure,) I mean ideas kill.
Despite the sloughing off skin and losing patches of my hair and smelling really badly all the time lately I'm told I've never looked better. I think that means none of us are really equipped to judge another person's health just by looking at them.
For ten years I've been told there is nothing wrong with me that a little prozac and a good diet wouldn't fix. And despite years of activism and "awareness" raising about sexism and sizeism and classism I believed them. That is the primary cause of my anger, the fact that I believed that I was lazy, and a complainer and that I had brought my illness on myself.
It has become a nauseating pattern for politicians to roll out this date whenever they want to impress upon us the significance of their agenda. And every time I hear them I cringe and I think: What a shame to be senselessly murdered and then have your memory exploited for political gain. I don't think those politicians have an acute awareness of the value of the lives lost seven years ago today, or the value of the lives of all the people they have killed in their names.
My community - mostly queers and artists and freaks - have been saving lives for years. Like, I'm betting there's at least one fat girl out there who didn't pull the trigger because she saw Heather McAllister shake her amazing ass. And like my friends - some of whom I've never met - who have/are donating time and money (neither of which they have in abundance,) to pay for my health care.
My disability has been severed and my medication costs this past month totaled $800. I am repeatedly awe-struck by the generosity of my loved ones but I can't help thinking over and over again that every person in this country could be insured for less than what it costs to wage war in Iraq alone for under a year. And I don't want my uninsured friends who make $10 an hour to have to shoulder the burden of my health costs. And I don't think I should die simply because I am a poet and a reproductive rights activist by trade and neither of those things pays well.
As such my partner has created this nifty web site to help us raise money for my continued treatment and to hopefully help raise awareness about this devastating disease which is affecting Americans in epidemic proportions:
http://www.helphealfran.org/
And, on October 1st a bunch of amazing artists will hold a benefit on my behalf in San Francisco which I will post as soon as I steal the code from somebody.
Please feel free to take the web site and the benefit information and spread it around the freaking inter-world. Not just because I'd like to see my 33rd birthday, but because I honestly believe that witnessing the love and generosity these people have bestowed upon me has made my life better. It's made me a little less angry and lot more (here's that word again,) aware of the presence of divinity in every person I lay eyes on.
angryblackbitch quoted heavily today from the Gettysburg Address as a means of memorializing this historic date:
"Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground.
The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.
The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.
It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced."
We can do better.
We can do so much better.
I promise you there is no one in this world who isn't part of your community. And there is no one who isn't worthy of compassion and care and concrete help when they are ill. I am worth saving and so are the millions of people who will die this year when they really don't need to.
Illness and death are inevitable. But those of us who are most susceptible to both (because of pollutants being dumped in our neck of the woods or a stupid insurance company cover up of a lethal and expensive disease, because we can't afford the specialist or the organ donation and so on...) well, we would like to know that we aren't suffering in vain. We'd like to know that maybe our kids will live past their 50th birthday and please god with a full head of teeth.
The next time you catch yourself judging the fat person in the McDonald's drive thru by means of worrying their health ask yourself what that's really about.
Ask yourself if the basic philosophical premise of this country means anything at all anymore. If so you have to believe we can do better than we are doing in this moment.
"...that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain..
...that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom...**
And that government of the people, by the people, for the people,
shall
not
perish
from
the
earth."
*Only, I'd change "this nation" to "this world" and "under God" to under or over whatever spiritual entities you may or may not believe in, because I roll like that.