How Lessons in Humility Helped Me Understand Donald Trump Supporters

Recently a dear friend of mine let me know she had to put down her old dog. I grieved with her and as a token of sympathy, I looked up and sent her the post I did a number of years ago when I had to say goodbye to my dog. The post made me cry; I could remember the event clearly. Just to distract myself, I read some of my other posts, and wondered what on earth had happened to make me stop writing.

I have recently started blogging again at my other site, Raven’s Cruise Log, because David and I are finally seeing the end of our land-based exile. But that’s the first writing I have done in almost four years, and it’s mostly just sharing what we are doing on the boat, mostly to keep me motivated. I know every month I must post progress, so I’m more inclined to slog on and make some.

After several years of working to have a successful business (I tried several), my high point earnings were about $17,000 and David gave me the Look and said, you have to get a real job. So I got one. It required I spend all day on a computer basically doing data entry. My days turned gray with the boring work and I had little enthusiasm for looking at a computer screen when I got home in the evening. We moved from the boat to an RV to have more space and life didn't seem very exotic at all. Time for writing also took a back seat to a Tuesday night Bible study and Thursday night choir practice.

About the same time, I got really, really sick. I knew something was going on because I was just exhausted all the time. I was losing my hair, I caught every cold that wandered by, I had shingles, and I was a total insomniac. I was finally diagnosed as having Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. I am treating it with thyroid meds, but also with a very strict diet (Google “autoimmune protocol” for details – it does work!). I monitor my nutrition, I cook 98% of all my meals. I investigate root causes and side issues (digestion, inflammation, nutrition, stress reduction, etc.) What energy I had was completely absorbed in finding out about and dealing with this disease and in slogging to work every day. That left very little time and no enthusiasm for writing.

The good news is, at this point I am almost symptom free and have no antibodies attacking my thyroid, we have moved back onto the boat, and – Holy Toledo! I am retired! All of those things are very good news!

Although it was quite painful, the whole experience at work was an eye-opener, both in terms of knowing myself better and in terms of understanding the life experience of the vast majority of people who have not had my advantages. I discovered I was being ham-strung by pride on both ends of the spectrum. On the high end, it was “You are bright and experienced and way too good for this job.” On the low end, it was “You are pathetic, this is the only thing you can do to earn a living.” Both ends were equally unlovely.

There was absolutely nothing wrong with my job except that it hurt my feelings. It didn’t feed my vanity in any way. I was never consulted (even about procedures having to do with my own job!), I was never thanked or recognized, I was not rewarded financially, and my input and insight were neither desired nor valued. My business sense was ignored. I was a cog. Pretty deflating, right? 

And yet, I am grateful for this experience for it has been very good for showing me my pride in all its glory and for allowing me to cultivate the virtue of humility. Humility is just the quality of accepting things (and yourself) as you are, neither more nor less. That’s not to say we don’t strive to be our best, but it’s a striving that has to do with quality and satisfaction with one’s performance, not the esteem of others. Good practice for someone who has always been overly motivated by others’ opinions.

Another valuable insight from this experience is seeing how working people (the working class we pretend we don’t have in America) live and think, how they are routinely ignored, devalued, exploited, and shamed. It isn’t pretty. I see this in the remarks made in the media that show that the people making them have no idea that people of value can be poor, uneducated, ignorant and also generous, humorous, wise, and honest. No, not everyone has those virtues, either in the working class or anywhere else. But those virtues are at least as apparent in the men and women who strive to earn a living working with their hands. They seem to have a better grasp of reality. The reality of struggling between customers and suppliers, of juggling government regulations, taxes, lack of health care, and the weather. The weather shuts down lots of our customers (and guts our sales). Heavy rain for a week? No income for the boat painters and maintenance folk and no income for their suppliers.

I hear their worries about charging their usually well-heeled customers full price for supplies. They underbid each other all the time for work, and that cuts them out of a decent income. The next time someone is doing work you cannot do, don’t begrudge them their wage. You can’t fix your own car? Then pay someone to do it, and realize that your hourly wage is probably six to ten times more than the person you have just hired. They are saving you that amount of work and income by doing the work you would otherwise have to do yourself.

I’ve spent the last year stripping and varnishing the teak below decks on our sailboat/home, Raven, and believe me, whatever you are charged for that sort of job, you need to pay and then some. When you don’t work with your hands, you don’t realize the time involved. It takes time to do things properly, and that means the hourly labor cost is going to be higher than you expect. So if you suspect foul play, go and watch the process. Honest folks don’t mind, and you might get an education.

These are the folks who are solidly behind Donald Trump. They are the left behind, the ignored, the forgotten, the dismissed, the demeaned. And they are some kind of angry. They don’t care what Donald has done or will do, as long as the folks who have left them behind, ignored them, forgotten them, dismissed them, and demeaned them are booted out of power. Now. So what if Donald Trump is a moral degenerate? They (politicians) all are. At least he’s different. That’s what I would hear from the front counter when I walked by. And no matter what he does, he’s not One of Them.

It’s not a mindset that is amenable to reason or facts or deeds or analysis, because the root is too deep and too emotional and too long endured.

Shingles: treatment and resources

It started with a burning sensation on my skin, following by the most dreadful itching. I thought I had been bitten by a mosquito. The bite, in the middle of my back (aren’t they always) didn’t subside. It got itchier and itchier. Friends of ours mentioned that there is a new strain of mosquito on the Gulf Coast, an Asian import that features allergic red whelps as part of the bite. I decided that was the culprit when red whelps emerged.

A day or two later, to my astonishment and horror, the bite had spread! It followed the line of my bra strap, a burning, itching rash. I could feel the little bumps of the bites and was terrified that I had leaned up against something and become host to a zillion baby spiders. Meanwhile, the rash not only itched, it burned like the worst sunburn I’d ever had. Finally, about the 5th day of this experience, I called my dermatologist. It was after hours and I had to leave a message on the dermatology hotline. It will tell you how freaked out I was to know that I didn’t even laugh at the idea of a skin emergency.

She didn’t call back until late in the evening and because my phone had fallen out of my purse onto the floorboard of the car, I didn’t hear the call until mid afternoon the next day. She told me that if the bites were from a brown recluse spider (my worst fear), it wouldn’t be spreading – chunks of my back would be falling out! I was immediately cheerful to have that fear allayed. Then she said, “Sounds like shingles to me.”

Shingles! That’s what old people get! Oh, right, that would be me. It’s hard when your internal age clock stops at 35, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

Bless the internet. David went straight to Google images for a view of shingles and voila! There was my rash, in picture after picture. Some of the pictures looked like advanced cases of purple acne or leprosy. But a lot of them looked like mine. Red rash in a cord of Rorschach blotches, little “bites” or that awful word “pustule” (always makes me think of Prince John in the 1968 version of Lion in Winter).

Once I knew what I had, I went straight to my book, Nutritional Healing by James F. Balch, M.D. and Phyllis A. Balch, C.N.C. It’s my health Bible. I know that regular herpes is aggravated by arginine (an amino acid found in food such as peanuts). Those of us who get cold sores keep lysine (another amino acid that blocks arginine) on hand to suppress the virus that causes cold sores. The cold sore virus is a herpes virus, cousin or the same as the virus that causes genital herpes, chicken pox and (drum roll) shingles!!

Here’s the shingles treatment:

• Take lysine, 1,000 meg a day, for a start. (I am taking 1500 meg.)

• Quit eating any food that has arginine. I discovered that my favorite bedtime snack of almonds and raisins is chock full of arginine – great.

• Take 2,000 meg of vitamin C four times a day.

• Add cayenne pepper, 100 meg of Vitamin B three times a day, 80 meg of zinc a day for a week.

• Fast, to get that arginine out of your system and let your innards rest. Use 1 T grade B maple syrup, the juice of one large or two small lemons, and 1/8 teasp cayenne pepper in a large glass of water and just sip on it all day. it tastes great, like spicy lemonade. At night I eat a peeled fresh pear or peeled fresh apple to give my digestive tract something to do. This is a great fast and you will not be hungry or cranky - just keep sipping.

• Then work to boost your immune system. A lowered immune system (common complaint of those of us who are mature) opens the door to shingles. Nutritional Healing has a whole section on this.

I am putting fresh aloe vera on the rash several times a day. Aloe vera cures all skin problems – I have 35 years of experience with this plant, which is a living miracle. Bottled aloe vera is almost useless, by the way.

Two days later, I am very much better. I have only one area that is still hyper-sensitive. The bites (I refuse to call them pustules) are crusting over as they should. The rash is several shades lighter.

All of which is fairly serious because three days from today I am getting on a plane to New York to attend my dear daughter’s wedding. And I AM going to wear a bra!

Plastic Free Life?

If you are discouraged in trying to avoid plastic waste and poison in your life, here's a good site for tips and information.

http://myplasticfreelife.com/about-me/

In search of glass or wood or paper or cardboard or...

According to a friend of mine who is a chemist, plastic begins to react with food in a matter of minutes, meaning that food becomes contaminated with greater or lesser quantities of chemicals, depending on the food, the temperature, and the type of plastic used to make the container.

Minute amounts of these substances, if not eliminated from the body, will build up over time. What may not be toxic in small doses or eaten a few times may cause harm in larger quantities or when eaten over a period of years. We don’t know what health conditions, if any, different levels of different chemicals may produce or inhibit. Did you know that arsenic used to be a beauty treatment (it gave you lovely skin)? Then it was discovered that the body does not eliminate arsenic. It just builds up to that final, fatal dose. Terminal beauty, indeed.

Since these questions are of concern to me, I decided to quit buying food in plastic. After some weeks of grocery shopping with this in mind, I have to tell you I am shocked at my lack of choices. Try to buy food not wrapped in plastic! Even when I buy fresh produce from the bins, I have to put it in plastic bags. The only cheese I could find that wasn’t wrapped in plastic was Edam, still cheerfully packaged in red wax, or Laughing Cow, its neat little triangles wrapped in foil paper.

Consider bottled water. It sits in plastic for days or weeks waiting to be consumed, and it sits mostly in warehouses and on grocery store shelves, not in a refrigerator. I decided to buy Perrier, which I remembered comes in glass. I found that even Perrier has a plastic option – and that is the only Perrier option in Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer.

I decided to store food in glass and was amazed at the prices I was asked to pay (and all the glass storage containers have – you guessed it – plastic lids). So I went back to my old practice of saving good jars for leftovers and buying only a few of the nicer glass storage containers for use in the microwave or for those leftovers that need to be frozen. Peanut butter jars and spaghetti sauce jars with wide lids and the squat little salsa jars make great storage containers for leftovers – and they’re free!

I have found that it is possible to decrease my exposure to plastic contamination, but I have to be persistent and inventive. To eliminate plastic containers from my life I’ll have to move to another country!

Plastic, plastic everywhere

I remember laughing at a line in The Graduate, many years ago. The hero, Benjamin, is home from college and is trying to get a handle on life. His home life is absurd, his parents are absurd, his future is murky, and he is surrounded by people who all seem to be as alien as Martians. At his graduation party, Benjamin is cornered by an inebriated guest and told that the secret to life is plastic. It was a great joke and I laughed, taking it as yet another comment by Mike Nichols on the absurdity of the society we live in. Now, of course, I see what that advice was about – the guest was telling Benjamin how to get rich.

Plastic, in the late 60s, was the coming thing. It was cheap, indestructible, and could be molded into any shape you could dream of. No longer would you break your shampoo bottle in the shower if you dropped it. America was sold.

What did we do before plastic bags? We put produce into small paper bags. We put our accumulated purchases in large paper bags. We reused those bags all the time – to take out trash, to wrap parcels, to line cake tins, to make hand puppets, to line the kitty box and the bird cage. And when they were discarded, they rotted (moist paper in a land fill decomposes in a matter of weeks). We had cardboard boxes, glass bottles, and wooden crates.

Now, over 40 years later, plastic is ubiquitous. It remains cheap, indestructible, and incredibly versatile. There are a lot of issues with respect to its use (pollution, land fill, the ever expanding “continent” of floating plastic in the ocean, the fact that, in general, it takes 1,000 – yes, one thousand – years for it to disintegrate, etc.) but we’ll leave those issues for wiser heads.

What concerns me in this particular blog is the fact that we may be poisoning ourselves by buying and storing food in plastic. I’ve known for a long time that I shouldn’t microwave food in a plastic container or put hot food into a plastic container that’s headed for the fridge. For years I’ve refused to buy milk in plastic containers because the milk just tastes funny.

What I didn’t know is that the chemicals in plastic begin to react with food stored in it in a matter of minutes, regardless of the temperature of the food or drink.

Gluten allergy causes depression?!

I've had a good week, thanks, I think, to chemicals ingested. I discovered this past summer that an intolerance to gluten was responsible for my periodic deep depressions, into which no light could shine. Within a week of eliminating all forms of gluten (and they are legion) from my diet, I popped out of a three month depression and could move forward. The next psychological toxin to take hold was anxiety. Granted, I have a lot to be anxious about, personally, professionally, and as an inhabitant of this world, but my anxiety was such that all I could do was stand in the metaphorical road bleating in terror. I hardly accomplished anything at all between bursts of existential terror. Then I read somewhere that a magnesium deficiency could cause anxiety so I bought a calcium-magnesium chewable. Next I discovered a homeopathic remedy in Kroger, of all places, for "stress due to work." About three days into these two remedies, the anxiety peeled away. All the rational causes for my anxiety are still with me, but the anxiety itself is either absent or so reduced I hardly notice it. The result? I am able to move forward.

I've finished my website (www.funding-finder.com), I have three clients (no money, just three clients), and have started to connect to a whole group of people, to have conversations and do work that matters to me and generally to feel a part of something again. I have actually made a friend in the area, and what a blessing that is! Like a dog that turns around three times before settling in for the night, I am scratching my blanket and beginning to settle into my life here.