Police State of Arizona Loses it's Mind, Again.

I thought we lived in America? Not if you're in Arizona.

Here is a nice guy: hard working truck driver born in Fresno, California, pays his taxes. Stopped at a weigh station and ended up handcuffed, arrested and detained because his commercial drivers license and social security card weren't enough for Arizona officials to believe that he is a US citizen.

He was detained for 90 minutes while his wife frantically finds his birth certificate-- and her own-- because she's afraid she'll get arrested too. How long would he have been held if his wife couldn't find the birth certificate? What if they couldn't reach her? Remember, this guy broke no law: he was arrested and detained because he is a Mexican American, but I want to emphasize here that HE IS AN AMERICAN. He speaks with an accent. That's it. No American citizen should be treated like this. This is an absolute outrage. Thanks Arizona Republicans, good one. You're so big on freedom from government interference? You just turned yourself into East Germany before the wall came down, comrades.

Yes, Arizona just voted itself a Police State. They're also trying to vote in a "birther law" which demands that any presidential candidate submit proof to Arizona officials that he is a US citizen. It's meaningless, of course, you have to be born in America to run for president. It's routinely verified at the Federal level. These are Republican House Representatives trying to make some kind of statement by aligning themselves with a crazy conspiracy theory which has already been disproved many many times: so many times in fact, that Hawaii, where our current president was born, is trying to enact their own legal exemption from responding to these spurious requests for verification. What's the Statement Arizona, that it's not OK to have a black president? That you think you have the right to harass our president as well as any free citizen you choose to racially profile? No other US president has ever had his citizenship questioned like this.

My God. The state is 30% hispanic. How in the world can you imagine that there will be no backlash in your home State, as well as from the rest of the country if not the world? You know, if you just want to be racist, you may want to stop short of being cowards. Tell it like it is. Have the courage of your convictions and declare Arizona a "white zone". See how that works out for ya. I'm talking to the Republicans in the Arizona State government enacting these unconstitutional laws. Put on your white sheets before heading off to work in the morning, and then introduce some legislation declaring martial law in Arizona and dissolving democratic rule entirely. Stop hiding behind pretense: you want to make the State over in your own image. All hail the leadership of Arizona. For historical reference: refusing to recognize Martin Luther King day as a holiday did not work out too well, nor did it last. The boycotts worked and you caved.

Not that illegal immigration deserves serious discussion in this hysterical climate-- are we at war with Mexico? Are commercial truck drivers really spies? Are they enemy combatants? How clever of him to have a valid CDL and a freaking genuine social security card then. But listen, I lived in California nearly all my life where an estimated 25% of all illegal immigrants in the country reside: we use and abuse the illegal immigrants as we see fit-- they do not enjoy equal protection under the law and they typically take only the jobs we'd never touch. Want to control illegal immigration? Start busting the employers. It's easy, cost effective, and it almost never happens. Guess why--- because we don't want to pay eight bucks for a basket of strawberries. It's that simple. Study your history: America has always depended upon a huge influx of cheap labor. My own people, the Irish, were titled "the new niggers" after slavery was abolished. I don't know what they called the Chinese when they were building the railroads but it couldn't have been good. I'm sure I'm not the only person who notices that the border issues only come up when elections are gearing up, but it sure would be refreshing if we stopped the hypocrisy.

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Latest photos and news

Finally started feeling well enough to take a few photos. After 2 rounds of antibiotics-- by the end of the second round the toxicity of the antibiotic itself was mimicking the symptoms of the bronchitis I was trying to cure. So it goes. I don't blame anybody for this, it's just how it is sometimes. Had some pretty bad nights there, doing better now. Oh yeah, and it's pollen season and Sheryl and I both started having allergies in the middle of trying to get well. Still coughing and sneezing some but we're able to get out and take walks and get a few photos here and there. I think that the pollen is starting to abate too, so that's good for us. We're completely surrounded by Junipers and that's the main source of pollen. I don't think I've been this sick for this long, ever. Off and on since Christmas, it get's really tiresome. Of course we've been looking at spiritual/psychological reasons for this, as well as environmental factors. It's not always so easy to solve, and we probably should have turned to help sooner.

Click on the photos above for a larger view. We're happy that things are looking up now.

Complex issues in 2 minutes.

I shot the video above 2 years ago, along with a bunch of others. It's a short, maybe too short and too simplistic treatment of the mental/emotional component of being physically ill. I got a few comments on it from people who expected a lot more from a a 2 minute video. I also got some encouragement. Not many comments, but people still watch it a fair amount (compared to some of our other videos). So, maybe one day I'll re-do it longer and more completely. Maybe not. It's short, it's off the cuff, and the issue is one of the largest issues which human beings face.

"Why people get sick" probably should have been called "Some Contributing Factors to Illness". The basic premise being that sometimes people get sick because they need an undeniable excuse to avoid something in their lives. SOMETIMES, being the important word.

Granted, I'm pretty healthy most of the time. I go through long periods being perfectly fine, and then, once in while I get sick and seem to take a very long time to get over it. In my case there are usually some easily discernable psychological patterns there, personal stuff, that's how and why I do any video; to share from my personal experience, as far as that goes and only as far as that goes. Some youtube viewers get that, some get mad when their personal experience doesn't exactly match mine. Or they want to take my "Why PEOPLE get Sick" video and ask me why animals get sick. Not ask, really, but start an argument with me.

In 2 years we've had to learn to simply delete the malcontents, the trolls, essentially anybody who either lacks common sense or just has a chip on their shoulder for reasons which have nothing to do with me. Web 2.0 is not all that it's cracked up to be. Imagine if every TV broadcaster could hear what every viewer across the world yells at their television set. Do you think those "comments" would be worth publishing? That's what happens if you run unmoderated comments on youtube. Actually, it's worse than that: because one comment feeds another comment, and another and another. OK, enough about dogpiling trolls. It looks exactly the way that it sounds, and I'd have to say that it smells about the same way too.

Lately I was very dismayed to find that a video of an older white guy who gets in a fight with a younger black guy got about 1.5 million views in three days. It's still going of course, getting reposted everywhere. I had already come to grips with the fact that any teenage girl in a skimpy outfit doing anything would get far more views than all of our educational videos combined. Maybe that will change some day--- after all, our most popular video is about spontaneous Kundalini awakening and I figured that this would be the most obscure subject of any video that we've shot. Anyway, sex and violence: it's a draw and it's always been a big draw. Even Shakespeare knew how to use that to his advantage, and yet his plays also move in to the profound, some of the highest human concerns and callings. There must be a lesson in that. It's holistic, life includes it all. Don't expect to see Hamlet on youtube anytime soon though, you need to devote several solid hours to really take in the unedited play, and that's the way that it should be.

Sick Again

I can't believe how much I've been sick since Christmas. Near as we can tell, I came down with the swine flu shortly before Christmas. Never confirmed because I never saw a doctor, but all the symptoms were there. Sheryl quite amazingly held off getting sick for the longest time. She seems fearless about this kind if thing, whereas I hate being around contagiously sick people. I've had bouts with pneumonia and bronchitis before, and this was pretty bad-- I ended up sick for all of January. Again, never saw a doctor; partly because I kept thinking I was on the mend, telling myself "OK, well if I'm not much better by Monday--- then I'll go." Monday would come around, I'd feel better, but then find myself feeling punk a few days later. On and on it went.

Around my birthday, Feb 7th, I still wasn't feeling so hot. Lingering respiratory symptoms, tightness and wheezing, and just not feeling up to mustering the energy to watch and enjoy a whole movie in a theater. Not really sure now when it lifted, but somewhere in there I managed to sit through "Avatar" and enjoy it, and gradually felt more and more like I could take long walks in the desert with Sheryl again. And yet. . .

Here came March, and the Juniper pollen started blowing. Last year I discovered I had an acute allergy to Juniper pollen. We are absolutely surrounded by Juniper trees for miles, and not much else. This year the symptoms started in again, though not as badly. And I was determined to make friends with the pollen. It's been a confusing time-- as I did manage, mostly through mental attitude, to slow the response down to just a few sneezes here and there. But then the chest constriction, the wheezing started in again, a deep pain in my chest and a really, really deep cough. In the middle of this we had a house guest who suffers from severe allergies. We assumed I was having a sort of allergic asthma, and when I got desperate I borrowed his inhaler. Suddenly I could breath again. But the following day-- noises in my chest, a headache lasting the entire day, and to make a long story short, within a few days we realized that allergic symptoms weren't really adding up to this, I had chills and a bad cough. . . again.

Enough is enough, I went to a local doctor. Good man, he prescribed me some of the usual stuff: an antibiotic called Cipro, Albuterol in a nebulizer for the wheezing and constriction, a very small does of prednisone (basically an immune supressant for allergic type symptoms). I looked up everything on the net, and have been dealing with all that ever since. Pretty much skipped taking the prednisone, and am good with that decision. I figure when I've got an infection, I'll handle discomfort to some extent in favor of keeping my immune system un-supressed.

Took the Cipro religiously like a good boy, twice a day. I appear to be on a medium dosage. Good news there is that it doesn't give me terrible stomach aches like some anti-biotics have (In case you wondered why I avoided the Doc for so long-- there it is.)

Good news bad news: I can't determine for certain why the Doc chose Cipro, and can't tell if it's actually doing anything good. In the past when an antibiotic "hit the mark" meaning it was eradicating the particular bugs I was infected with, I've generally felt a hell of a lot better within about three or four days. Besides that, there were always obvious changes in the nasty mucous; from nasty thick yellow/grey to a less noxious clear and watery. Not so this time. In fact as of Thursday (four days on the Cipro) I was having so many new noises in my chest it sounded like a haunted house. It seriously scared me, and Sheryl and I determined to call the doc back the next day.

We did, got another clinician, and in my opinion, a pretty weird response: "The Cipro is working" she said, "It gets worse before it gets better."

I though about that, and either she's right, and I just need to give it more time, or she's wrong--- and the Cipro isn't hitting my particular bacterial infection. We can research these things now, and it turns out that Cipro works well on gram negative bacteria, but not gram positive (whatever that means). No antibiotic is perfect, and I wouldn't want anybody to get the wrong idea either, that I'm critical of medical personnel, or think I know better than they do etc. Further, I'm allergic to Penicillin or anything pretending to be it. And, without a lab culture telling the Doc specifically which type of bacterial bug you may have, the actual drug you get prescribed is just a broad-spectrum killer which will hopefully knock back your particular brand of little, hungry, invading critter.

The more I read about antibiotics, the more impressed I am by the cleverness of the people creating them, but also the more horrified I am about how quickly new bacteria strains evolve, the kind which resist being killed by all the wonderful antibiotics which came before. Doctors have to keep up on what the latest and greatest antibiotics are, because they are the only ones which work, for now, until the new bugs kick their collective asses too. Furthermore, this is mostly the fault of patients who take three or four doses and then quit the rest of the bottle--- no matter how many times they've been told that this is precisely how to build antibiotic-resistant superbugs. There are also many good reasons to avoid antibiotics altogether, if you can. And I usually do avoid them, but comes a time when you say, hey, I ain't livin' in medieval times here, gimme some of them good drugs.

Cipro is a pretty good drug, after several tries, we determined a lot of good reasons why this Doc prescribed it, as opposed to say, Clarithromycin. So for now, I'm good with that, good with the idea that considering how incredibly differently this drug works compared to others, that my past subjective impressions may not apply anymore.

These things can get confusing though: for example, the abluterol inhaler that I borrowed about a week ago was a sudden and amazing godsend. Suddenly I could breath. The next day: I was truly sick. All day. Chalked it up to side effects, but what if it wasn't that?

Here's the thing: my bronchial tubes get inflamed and close up for a reason, they're fighting infection. If I force them to open up chemically, then what? Have I interfered with a natural and important part of my own immune system? Same goes for the prednisone; I'll say this, if you've ever needed a steroid to keep your own immune system from killing you, these drugs are like miracles. You get to not die. And that feels pretty good. Same goes for lesser versions like OTC allergy meds; your quality of life compared to gasping for breath, hiding in the house next to a hospital air filter running full blast on a gorgeous Spring day, is just an amazing difference. Suddenly you're normal. Better yet you can train your body to say "hello, I love you" to perfectly harmless pollen, but we haven't all mastered that yet. Wait and see. We will.

But getting back to some of my other meds: I'm not doing the prednisone. I did do the albuterol, twice I think, on Thursday. I also tended to get real "aggressive" in trying to cough up the stuff in my lungs. Why: because I hate being sick. I hate having stuff in my lungs. I want it out, right now. But around the time I started seeing a little bit of blood coming up along with what little I actually was coughing up, I had to rethink the strategy. By late that same night (yesterday) I seemed worse than ever. My chest hurt, my throat hurt, I was wheezing and rattling like you wouldn't believe, and starting to get panicky.

This is the kind of thing I remember from way back when, had several bouts with similar symptoms in 1998. It's not so simple as "coughing it all up". You can injure your lungs doing that, coughing too hard and too often. You can irritate your lungs inhaling medicine too, no matter what it's supposed to fix: your lungs only want to see clean air, and are built to reject anything else. The response to rejecting what you put it in them are a form of pneumonia right there. Sinuses too: they're delicate. You can't just go nuking them with any old home remedy and expect good results. Anyway it's a balance. There are ways you can assist your body to get you well, and ways which you can shoot yourself in the foot. I'm dealing with that this week. I think I could have a had a much better year, so far, had I seen doctors sooner. I don't think I'd even be sick right now. I'd be done with it. And yet, now that I've got a few chemicals in the house, designed to have some pretty powerful effects, I have to be cautious and careful. You can't employ a scorched earth policy against "germs" when you're the earth.

Peace.

My Sweetheart

My sweetheart, Sheryl. We took a walk today nearby. However I started out starving and dehydrated. Not too bright to do that in the desert. It was windy too, and we walked up a sandy gully with few sights we'd not sen before. Oh well. Sometimes the magic works, sometimes it doesn't. Still, this is beautiful country and we can try again tomorrow. I got a few shots, and the weather was very nice, as it has been for several days now.

When the ego loses, sometimes the spirit wins.

We finally got around to shooting some new video. Put one up on youtube here . This one I worked from without notes, it's just one continuous take. We only trimmed off some superfluous stuff at the very beginning and at the end.

In the video I discuss some aspects of loss, effects on the ego and on the spiritual life of an individual whether they chose loss or it gets chosen for them.

Sunflower Print, 24X36"

Shipping a large print to Susan in California, soon. Sunflowers! I shot this back in 2005 I think. Re-edited the file for the size and print process. Very happy with the way that it turned out. Should cheer up whatever room it's in. That's my partner, Sheryl, holding the framed print. Susan chose a black frame and I think it's a good choice. We'd definitely buy from that frame vendor again too, the quality is good and it was packed really well, makes it easy to re-ship. Discovered that Imagekind could handle a 77 megapixel image without choking too. It all went well. Click here if you want one, or email me and we'll handle the details.

On forgiveness

Eric Ball: feels that the resistance to forgive is an attachment to the need to be right. When we lack the capacity to forgive others, it is an indication that we also find it difficult to forgive ourselves. The power of forgiveness is liberating, because it allows the flow of good into your life.

I found this on facebook and decided to quote it. Forgiveness and acceptance of the past comes up a lot in our practice, in one way or another. From time to time we also encounter perfectionism of a variety which is crippling, to the point of paralysis for some. We all have standards, and that's a good thing. But the choice of accepting the flow of life can really get dammed up when judgment is too harsh.

In the grand scheme, "who's right?" can't be the factor in deciding who or what to forgive or to withhold forgiveness from. After all the "unforgivable" does occur, and what do you do then? You can never really move on until you forgive. Not to be confused with approval, nor with being a doormat, forgiveness is for the benefit of those who were harmed, lest a festering wound becomes an evil seed over time.

And that's how it works really-- become the thing which you despise if you work at it hard enough. Not a fun thing to wake up to one fine day. "Hey, I didn't know that hatred is contagious. Why didn't I wash my hands more? I need a shot of Love-a-cillin."

New newsletter is out now

So, this month I wrote the newsletter article and Sheryl contributed something to it as well. Here is the link http://healingcommunicationnews.blogspot.com/ and you can sign up and get it directly to your email in the future if you want.

These days I write more on facebook than anywhere else, but am working on getting my book together too. I have a lot of collected writing, this book will be a combination of my fiction work most likely, and the stories are often true enough. Sheryl does a lot more blogging than I do right here http://healingcommunication.blogspot.com/ and she's got her finished book being shopped around for a publisher.

Follow up on the Government Healthcare issue

I think that the people (us) who originally supported this bill in huge numbers did so because they were convinced that, plain and simple, it meant that the average person in the U.S. would be able to see a doctor without having to worry about what it would cost. Since then the bill has fallen precipitously in popularity, as it has gone through the various compromises and deal making which every bill goes through before it ultimately will be allowed to pass. Has the bill been "ruined" now? Is it still "pretty good", better than what we had before, good enough for starters?

I'd prefer it if people went directly to the official source and decide for themselves. So here it is:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/Issues/health-Care

It's the White House, of course, because I'm not about to recommend some "compromised" source of information where they will seek to re-interpret the whole thing for ya. If you're really diligent, I'm pretty sure you can read the whole bill itself. Part of the problem with politics is everybody wants the sound-bite version, and rarely are things that simple. Trouble with sound bites: consider the source. There is little integrity left in the news media today. It's all going the way of sensationalism and partisanship. Lately my biggest "tactic" whenever I get into an important discussion on Facebook or elsewhere is to simply fact check what people are reporting. Takes about ten seconds on Google. You never won an argument so fast as when you point out that somebody is reporting completely fictional "facts". People lie. They lie a lot. Be careful out there folks.