Sarah Burke: A death that demands we do SOMETHING about universal healthcare

Engraving of an imagined druid's grove. Both yew and oak were sacred to druids, as was the whole earth and everything on it. (Wiki commons)

Some days, you just have to go with the flow.

Today was supposed to be about getting ready for a short, important trip. And about walking the dog since she’ll be caged for a few days. And about promoting my novel (shameless promotion: humorous mystery, Crash Course by Nicky McBride, on Kindle).

But it’s not. It’s about the real needs of people and how those needs have been crushed under the heels of the fearless hunters among us, the recipients of DNA that offers brawn without brain, humanity without compassion and ignorance without respite. In short, the modern corporation man. (NOTE: I will use the masculine pronoun, not because I’m anti-feminist, but because casting females in a role the feminine principle does not support is ludicrous.)

This rumination was occasioned by an article a friend posted on Facebook. The article notes that Canadian half-pipe skier Sarah Burke died in a hospital in the US, meaning her parents are socked with a bill for a couple hundred grand. Had she died in Canada―had an AMERICAN skier died in Canada, in fact―there would have been no such bill. In Canada, as in most of developed nations, people are not denied healthcare, nor are they bankrupted when an unavoidable situation develops in which they are given health care whether they want it or not.

Out cold, but not out in the cold. Whew!

About 20 years ago, I was tossed off a horse, knocked out cold, and concussed. I awoke briefly a couple of times; during one lucid interlude, the barn staff told me they had called the ambulance. “Oh, no,” I said. “I’d rather just go home.” Sure. Wouldn’t anyone who had no recollection of what had happened and saw little but a sort of swimmy green jacket? But, though I actually had health insurance at the time because I actually worked for someone else (a rarity), I was so used to NOT availing myself of any sort of medicine that the first thing in my mind when I was just barely conscious (and not for long) was, “NO, please don’t call the medics. I can’t afford it.” I next awoke in the hospital with a friend standing next to me. And then I was out again, thankfully until after the CAT scan. She, a graphic artist, asked to watch it; she told me later I did have a brain. Nice.

Anyway, my little story is as nothing compared to what so many have faced. And further, my little dance with healthcare that time cost me about $600, as had the first of the two incidents I’ve ever had. And both times, I was totally responsible; it wasn’t an illness or disease or disorder. It was my choice to ride crazy horses. And I was damn lucky.

Maybe it is because of that luck that I feel so firmly that it is unconscionable for any society to bankrupt those whose encounters with the healthcare industry are unavoidable, if indeed they get the care in the first place. It might be said that Sarah Burke’s injury was self-inflicted, as was mine. She was engaged, by choice, in a dangerous sport. As was I. As I said, I was damn lucky.

Life is dangerous; So what?

But what of that? Should we never get any exercise, never push the envelope of what humans can do? It is bad enough that you can’t get coverage if you tick the box for riding motorcycles, flying a plane and assorted other things the tunnel-visioned actuaries think are dangerous. I was just lucky there, too; they haven’t figured out yet that riding horses over fences is a dangerous sport.  I just happened, during brief interludes of employment, to be covered by health insurance when a problem arose. But if I could have afforded insurance when I was freelance, I wouldn’t have been denied since equine sports have gotten a pass from the dodos at Theft Coverage USA.

What’s a society to do? Whatever it takes. And that does not include preventing talented people in sports or any human pursuit from fulfilling their life’s work or passion.

Each of the ancient Celtic tribes supported their healers in toto. They also supported their spiritual leaders. And they supported their poets, the keepers of their history and mores, the creators of beauty in words and often music, and sometimes other forms of art. Healers―druids or shamans, if you like―had no other task but to be available to heal members of the tribe. Spiritual guides, ovates, had no other task but to help members of the tribe in their relationship with the earth mother, each other, themselves. Bards―poets, musicians, historians, artists―had no other task but to create beauty and convey from one generation to the next the truth of the tribe.

In no case does America honor its druids, ovates and bards. Oh, sure. Some doctors get amazingly wealthy; is that honoring them? No. It is paying them out of individual pockets for tightly controlled use of their special skills.

Millionaire clergy; contradiction in terms

Some religious leaders become millionaires; is it because their pastoral care is available to all of their tribe―or to visitors―who ask? No, it is because they have developed a firm grasp of fund-raising, television, or both.

And some artists become quite wealthy. Look at J.K. Rowling. Look at Angelina Jolie. Look at the late Michael Jackson. Is it because they offer their gift willingly to the tribe that supports them? No. Not at all. In the case of Rowling (one of my favorite rants as some will know), she borrowed from other tribes’ work, and when she got rich, she set about using the courts to ensure others could not profit from any work even passingly similar to her own derivative one. Bona fide bards help other bards to develop, to learn from them the skills and information needed to become good bards, who will in due course be supported by their tribe.

Angelina Jolie finds adoption to be a nice path to fame and fortune, piggybacking her possible acting gift (a druidic calling and worthwhile to society) on her self-promotion gift (a corporate, hunter sort of thing to do. I expect we should just be happy a few children find a home as a collateral benefit.) 

And Michael Jackson, who had a true gift, was so lumbered with the insanities of his family and the lust of his fans that there was no chance he could express his gift for the asking in peace during a long life. As a bard should do.

The Druid model is all we need

It is all skewed. It is skewed in the ways that the powerful hunters think best. It is skewed in the ways that will enable the powerful hunters to choose who the druids, bards and ovates will be, and who in the tribe has access to their gifts, and even which of their gifts will be deemed acceptable by the hunters.

Time to give it up.

In homeopathy, the easiest part of the body to heal will experience recovery first, followed by the deeper tissues, and finally proceeding to the spirit level―to the constitution―and correcting its anomalies. So I think it is right to tackle health care first. For all the misery its lack causes, that lack is not a malady in itself but rather an expression of deeper maladies in the body politic. So, if we correct access to medical care, then next we will begin to truly see what is the matter with our spiritual leadership and take it out of the hands of martinets and oligarchs and return it to the gentle spiritual healers of old who actually cared for their tribe. And once that is on its way to health, maybe we will begin to support the bards―the poets, artists, musicians―who fill our newly opened souls with joy and who chronicle the way we are for the delight and education of generations yet to come.

It’s a nice dream―I try to live in it at least once a day―and it’s one I’m hoping will come true.

Old-Time Religion: What the Baggers ain't got

Disclaimer: I am not a follower of any religion, although I count myself among those informed by the Episcopal rubric which depends―more than most, I think―on a common-sense approach to the valuable insights and teachings of a very important Jewish rabbi of antiquity, Joshua Ben Joseph of Nazareth. One of his mentors, Joseph of Arimathea, is thought by many to have taken Joshua to southwest England to study with druids, a reasonable thought considering the mysticism that permeates the teachings of Joshua Ben Joseph. And contrary to the beliefs of the uniformed, there was abundant trade between the southern Mediterranean and the British Isles back then.

St. Benedict of Nursia (Fra Angelico; Wiki Commons)

It is a shame that the religious right knows so little about religion. From their actions, it seems doubtful that most Tea Baggers have ever heard of The Rule of St. Benedict. It might surprise the Tea Baggers that both St. Benedict and the Gospels they claim to love encourage socialism. For example, Acts 4:35 notes that, “Distribution was made to everyone according as he had need.” Sounds socialist to me.

The early monasteries, particularly those in Ireland as chronicled by Thomas Cahill in his book How The Irish Saved Civilization, were the western founts of learning for hundreds of years. The monks, in all that time, must have figured out a thing or two. With or without the ‘god parts,’ the Rule of St. Benedict, venerating as it does a sober, sanctified, charitable, wisdom-bearing approach to daily life in a coherent community, might well be a road-map for a modern approach to otherwise almost insurmountable problems, the problems of lack of work, lack of health care, lack of food and clothing, lack of respect for others. In short, charity in all its guises. If only the “godly” right wing recognized the Rule, or any part of it.

Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. (The New Testament, King James version, Matthew 22:37-40)

The best Benedict, whose Rule informs thoughtful lives today

St. Benedict (a far cry from the current Pope of that name) was a Roman Catholic monk of the sixth century who set forth the totality of ways monks were to behave and the manner in which the self-sufficient monasteries were to be run. In times of economic stress, it would seem his Rule might have much to say to modern populations. The thrust of the Rule was to care for others before self. There are at least half a dozen specific instructions which, if the right-wing pseudo-Christians knew their importance and attempted to follow them, might change the landscape of current political discourse in the US.

Those few important rules are:

• To relieve the poor
• To hate no one
• To visit the sick
• Not to be arrogant
• To guard one’s mouth against evil and vicious speech
• Not to abandon charity

Those are among about 75 rules in all, including the ten commandments as the very first ones. But perhaps the one I like best of all is the last of those six, as it covers all the rest.

Charity begins…one hopes

Abandoning charity is the very thing the pseudo-Christians who inhabit the right-wing of political America have done, and done very nearly completely. A rundown, rule by rule:

Relieve the poor

The right wing does not wish to relieve the poor, especially not if those poor come from afar (like Mexico, for example), rather than within their own state at best, or the nation if they must be that generous. If they must. Not by choice. Never.

Hate no one

Far from hating no one, they seem to hate just about everyone. They hate them so much that foolish men like Herman Cain can, with a straight face, tell people that if they don’t have a job, it’s their own fault. Inanely, he can tell them that in an economy that fails by a good ten percent or more in providing jobs for all workers.

Visit the sick

Even if one or two Baggers occasionally visit people in the hospital, they do not, for all intents and purposes, visit the sick.  These days, visiting the sick might be taken to mean providing for the care of the sick, since medicine is far to complex for most of us to do anything ourselves except provide ways for professionals to attend to the problems.  They seem to have taken a vow of ignorance regarding understanding the true horror of a large community lacking universal access to health care.

It is unthinkable that a monk or even those who worked as lay people in the monastery, or even travelers or visitors would be turned away by the monastery’s infirmarer. No abbot worth his salt would have tolerated such a state of affairs. 

Whether health care consists of the herbs and leeches of the middle ages, or the sophisticated diagnostic equipment and medications of today, it is intolerable that a cohesive community―the United States, for instance―should not provide care for its members.

It is unchristian, for one thing. For another, it is just plain stupid. A community with a number of sick members and no help for them is asking for contagion and plagues, a breakdown of work life, a diminishing of the community sooner rather than later. Sick people can worship neither God nor mammon; sick people cannot build  a community that serves all, and they  cannot expand that community and help others. Failing to care for the sick is, at any level since contagion may affect all equally, just plain stupid.

Do not be arrogant

The Tea Baggers are arrogant in the extreme.

Without any visible powers of discernment, without benefit of a belief in anything except their own short-term gain, without a frame of reference to the historical failures and successes of the universe in human terms, they nonetheless think their self-referential desires should determine how a community/nation runs. In their arrogance, they believe others to be less worthy than they. Among those they regard as less worthy, they include younger people, artists and craft workers, the marginally self-employed, the low-paid, those they see as lazy, the infirm, those of other beliefs, those of other colors and backgrounds ad infinitum. The Baggers are, indeed, the Philistines of our age, denigrating culture, art, and most of all, spirituality.

Guard against evil and vicious speech

They do not guard their mouths against evil and vicious speech. Indeed, the celebrate and heap honors upon those who might be chosen as role models for how NOT to live a thoughtful, Christian (or Jewish or Hindu, etc.) life. Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, to take two sterling examples, trade on their own arrogance in consigning to perdition any person who disagrees with them in the least trifle. Vicious hardly begins to describe Coulter’s speech; evil is inherent in almost every opinion Limbaugh utters. And yet, they both think they are good Christians. I doubt they’d want to debate that with St. Benedict. Although I’d love to watch them try.

Charity: The idea that giving…in every way…is better for everyone than taking

The religious right in America has abandoned charity, in the particulars above and many more. Charity is far more than giving your old clothes to the Purple Heart. It is far more than putting a dollar in the collection plate during the one day a year you go to church, hedging your bets against the possible actual existence of god. It is more than refraining from commenting on your friend’s horrible new hairdo. It is more than passing by a Mercedes with a man slumped over the wheel and doing nothing because, “Hell, he’s rich; he can just dial for an ambulance on his own cell phone.”

Charity is the practice of finding out what help you can render, and doing that. Period. The Jews call it a mitzvah, a good deed. Not a deed done for your own good. It must be selfless, and doing it anonymously is a plus. It includes donating to causes you believe in; it also includes praising others for donating to causes they believe in even if those causes are not yours. Baggers have bashed me for supporting animal rescue organizations before human-oriented ones, forgetting that by giving us dominion over the animals, as their god said, we are also given responsibility for them. They fail to understand that by donating to any helping organization―whether it is people or animals being helped―one is increasing the net supply of kindness in the world, decreasing the net experience of suffering, and actually attending to their god’s business.

Baggers just plain fail to understand, because they fail to empathize. They fail to embrace charity at its most basic. How do the supporters of draconian anti-immigration laws know what an illegal immigrant might have faced at home? They don’t. Worse, they don’t care to know. They insulate themselves from the suffering of immigrants, as well as the jobless and those who need medical care they cannot get. Their arrogant is clear in the ways in which they wrap studious ignorance around themselves like an impenetrable cloak.

No illusions

I have no illusions that one Tea Bagger will recognize himself or herself in any of this; I have no illusions that a Tea Bagger will read it. So I am preaching to the choir. 

If I were a Christian, I might chide myself for saying it is not likely the godless religious fundamentalists will take any of this to heart. So it’s a good thing I’m not a Christian, though I don’t imagine I can say that with impunity. I expect, actually, to be pilloried from both the right and the left on this, no matter how many times I insist that I am actually an existentialist informed via an Episcopalian background, and leavened by a soupçon of intense exposure to the ideas and community of classical Judaism.

Joshua Ben David and the Royal Myth

The Holy Thorn, Glastonbury, England. Legend says it grew after Joseph of Arimathea stuck his staff into the ground at that spot. It flowers at Christmas and Easter. (Jim Champion, Wiki Commons)Dan,Corn

At breakfast this morning, the subject of the subject of Easter arose…but not from the dead. It arose because the breezy, sunny morning seemed to call for a longer time sitting at breakfast, looking at the distant moor across the river Tamar in Devon. And it happened that my husband, Simon, who was raised by strict Anglicans, asked if anyone during the life of a Jewish rabbi named Joshua Ben David called him Christ.

How could my husband, who is quite well-read and well-travelled, have missed the fact that Christos―from the Greek for annointed―was an honorific hung round the neck of this married Jewish rabbi much later? Later, when the myth was being created that he was unwed (which would have been very, very odd for a son of the royal House of David, and a 30-year-old rabbi) and that he was a rabble rouser who courted death to bring all souls to a God unknown in the world until that moment. One might almost say, in fact, that the creators of the myth were also creating a God.

And so they were. And so it is about time to issue a disclaimer: Anyone who is a fundamentalist about Christian thought might as well stop reading now. If, however, you are able to entertain the possibility that Christianity is no more than a myth, if indeed, a pretty good one, read on.

Years ago, I discovered books written by the late Laurence Gardner, a prolific British writer  who had traced the lineages of the royal houses of Europe (and influenced the work of Dan Brown). Their claim of the right to rule was based, in fact, on their own knowledge of their descent from Jesus of Nazareth, as Joshua Ben David became known post-humously, who his followers claimed was the son of God. They based that claim on what they posthumously reported as his own words, referring to his father in heaven.

A new, blue heaven

Interesting, that. At the time, there was no concept of heaven as we know it. The Romans didn’t have it, nor did the Jews in the way it was spoken of. The only culture of that time/world that had a concept of an afterlife was the Druids.

And now we get to Joseph of Arimathea, the rich man who supposedly gave his burial chamber to Joshua Ben David’s family to bury him after he was crucified by the Romans. Or by the Jews, depending on whose hands you wish to splash that blood.

What blood? Indeed, it is likely Joshua, like most criminals, was hanged by ropes. Certainly, some died. But Joshua was offered “gall” as he hung on the cross. In all likelihood, it was a Druid potion making it possible for him to endure, or to seem to have died when in fact he was in a coma of sorts and thus was cut down, according to Gardner. Later, he awakened, arose, and went to France with his WIFE Mary Magdalen.

Druids helped Jesus live

The real story of Joshua Ben David, pieced together by numerous historians, is complex, and using this small space won’t tell it all. So, jumping around is necessary.

Back to that Druid thing. Joseph of Arimathea was not just a rich man. He traded in metals. He traded in Cornwall; there is little doubt that he also took Joshua Ben David with him on a trip to Glastonbury, there to meet Druids.

And there is where Joshua Ben David, future rabbi, acquired his belief in an afterlife. Of all the known populations at the time, only the Druids believed in an everlasting cycle of life, and that belief made them much less fearful of death than other folk. They didn’t think of it as a bearded old man sitting on a cloud with a sidekick deciding whether to let people into heaven or not; neither did Joshua. When he referred to his “father”―and remember, this is only from translations of translations of translations, all of them written no less than 50 years after his “death” (can you recall what happens to statements when kids play ‘telephone’?)―he referred to the origin of mankind. Not to a definable entity. His belief was clearly that it was incumbent upon mankind to be loving with each other and to be thankful that we had such a magnificent world in which to play out this phase of our eternality. No more, no less.

British royals, and Celtic Warrior Kings

And so we skip to the royal houses of Europe; they believe they derive their divine right from God, the God they think Joshua Ben David explained to one and all, or at least to those living around the Mediterranean about 2000 years ago. Since evidence points to Joshua of the royal house of David moving to France and raising a family, they have a point. But why not let the hoi polloi know this? Why keep it a secret, and try to convince the hoi polloi of the ludicrous myth of a ghost dude walking around and then ascending like a puppet hauled up on invisible strings to a place above the clouds where his lesser throne would perch beside Dad’s? Why?

Because the rest of the world’s royals at the time―Celtic warrior kings, example―derived their power from killing more enemies and stealing more cattle than other king wannabes did. So, in fact, perpetuating the myth would make it possible for rulers to rule with barely the tip of a rapier insulting the body of a foe.

For that alone, making governmental succession less bloody (in theory; note that even English kings and queens drew blood, often a lot of it, but at least they could then say they were doing God’s work and not just participating in a major cattle raid), perhaps the myth of Jesus Christ, the embroidering of the doubtless thoughtful life of Rabbi Joshua Ben David, should be thanked.

Thanked, but not necessarily believed.

Take Three Cups of Tea and lie to me in the morning

Three cups of tea? Or a helping of swill? (Wiki commons)

About twelve years ago, one of New York’s toughest agents―a man who had worked to sell my most incendiary manuscript when my usual agent failed―told me there was one problem with selling it.

It was not the writing. Not the subject matter. It was that I didn’t have a platform. That is, I had not killed anyone or otherwise engaged in notorious behavior that would make some imbecilic publisher and its moronic sales staff get excited about pumping it to the jaded, overpaid, possibly coke-snorting buyers of various bookstore chains.

I told him I had no intention of committing mayhem just to sell books, and put the manuscript back in the drawer.

I was wrong. All I had to do, apparently, was make up a good tale, such as the one Greg Mortenson made up to sell Three Cups of Tea and make a name for himself, as well as a fortune. The fortune? Well, yes. He said he was going to give it all to charities in Pakistan and so on, which apparently was also mainly cut from whole cloth, or at least pinned together and not sewn.

Celtic kidnapping results in charity abroad

So here’s a possibility: Woman of a certain age travels to Ireland where she is lured into what she thinks is a gypsy caravan but is actually a cell of the neo-Celtic group, the Druid Militia. Once she is there, they cannot let her go; unless she joins them, they’ll have to kill her, but they assure her that the ancient Celts did not fear death. Still….she didn’t want to die, regardless of what modern morons think ancient Celts believed. So she pretended to join them. She helped them carry out raids on music stores, destroying all the discs by Enya in the process because Enya, as every militant neo-Celtic Druid Militia member knows, had taken Celtic ideas and made them global. And global is evil. Everyone knows that.

Global Church of Enya and Embroidery Society
After a year of pretending to be one of them, she found herself alone one day, unattended by a Militia member. Gathering what was left of her wits, she escaped, running immediately to a Roman Catholic Church, where she asked for asylum but was told she was unworthy as she wasn’t a Roman Catholic or a pedophile clergyman of any denomination. So she did the only thing left to her. She packed her Enya CDs into a suitcase (she had secretly saved her share of the loot), went to New York City, flung them onto the desk of a gullible publisher, and told him that she had suffered blackouts for years, and when she woke from them, she had been visited by an angel who told her to found a fan club for Enya. The current Enya fan club? It was nothing, of no account, she assured the publisher. It was not the angelic one she had come to found, the one that would teach every Celtic child in Ireland and the world how to play the harp and sing. The one that would build schools for global cooperation. It was not the one that would become the Global Church of Enya and Embroidery Society.

She took for herself a new name―Angela of the Ashes―and was sent on a worldwide tour, speaking the truth of Enya wherever she went. She amassed a fortune. (She laughed aloud whenever she thought how gullible people were, that they didn't figure out she, Angela, was her own angel.)

And then someone found out. None of it was true. Indeed, the woman had never met Enya or an angel (although she quite liked Enya’s music, but thought the angel cult of the past 20 years just a tad ludicrous.) She hadn’t founded any schools in Ireland, although she did visit quite often to stay at her favorite Dublin hotel, Pembroke Townhouse, and dine at her favorite steak house, FXB. (That part about becoming a vegetarian when she was founding the cult of Enya? Hyperbole. In fact, she simply added an apple a day to her diet.)

So, Mr. Curtis, will that do as a platform? Or have you sent some ignorant publisher to Bozeman, Montana, to sign Mortenson to another book contract? This one will doubtless be about how he repented and came clean about his lying and cheating the first time out, and maybe will include information about his upcoming heart surgery.

Disclaimer: Yes, I know 60 Minutes did not write the Bible on outing stinkers. But it has a fairly decent track record. And anyway, there have been so many famous authors whose personal history was bogus, if not this one, then another.