My infusion of monoclonal antibodies

Getting my infusion

If you are 65 or older and have any serious health risk, and you come down with Covid-19, consider getting an infusion of monoclonal antibodies, which nips the infection in the bud.  

My case of Covid-19 was relatively mild, so I didn't think I needed the top-of-the-line medical care that our former president got.  I was pretty sure I wouldn't take a turn for the worse.

But Dr. Bill, my brother, told me I should ask my doctor to give me a referral for the infusion. 

An infection with this virus can start out mild and then attack some organ that is vulnerable.  Or you can have an overreaction of your immune system, called a cytokine storm.  In any case, you have to be in the first several days of your symptoms and not hospitalized to qualify for this treatment.

With a referral, a Medicare panel will review a person's health situation and decide whether to pay for you to have this safeguard.

Anyone over 65 qualifies for the infusion if they have one other factor like diabetes or heart disease.  

But you have to ask for this treatment--the average primary care doctor may not know the latest on Covid care.  Or she may not regard your case of Covid as any serious threat to your health.

My brother told me this on a Tuesday night, and by Wednesday afternoon I had a virtual appointment with one of my doctor's partners.  She was skeptical about my need for the infusion, but she made the referral.  

Soon after, I received a call that Medicare had approved the infusion, that I would get a call from a local infusion center called IV League, Inc. the next morning.

On Thursday morning at 8:30 am, a clerk at the infusion center called and gave me a choice between an 11 am or 12 noon appointment.  

I chose 11 am, but the first step was to bathe myself and wash my hair.  I'd been sick for five days, but I wanted to look good for this big occasion.  I didn't realize how tired I was and slow.

At 10:45 am, I ran out the front door and typed "6706 Bristol Parkway, Culver City CA" into the Google maps app on my cell phone, but the address was actually 6076.  Instead of taking 20 minutes to get there, I got mixed up and took 30 minutes to find a small building tucked into a business park next to the San Diego freeway.

Drip, drip, drip

I arrived 15 minutes late, but the infusion techs were kind and patient.  

Apparently the right combination of monoclonal antibodies has to be mixed up just before being dripped into a patient's arm, so I had to wait while the mixing was being done in a lab.

Soon, however, the saline solution hung above my head and the antibodies were being pushed into a vein on the inside of my right elbow.

The lady in the next room told the tech that she had just been to an emergency room where she was diagnosed with Covid pneumonia.  She and her son had been sent here to be treated.  She was very tired and listless, but she too had dressed up nicely for this occasion.

I felt guilty for being there.  I wasn't sick enough, I told myself.  I was wasting the government's money.  

"Relax!  You're not relaxing!" one of the techs kept telling her son.  She couldn't find enough of a vein in his arm to insert the infusion needle.

I relaxed and prayed for this woman and her son and all the people who needed Covid vaccines or infusions and couldn't get them.  I gave thanks for the infusion techs, risking their health to treat all of us.

Afterward, I sat in a small room with others waiting twenty minutes to be observed for a possible adverse reaction to the infusion.  

One white man about 30 years old wore a red cap backwards on his scruffy hair; he had a beer belly.  I wondered whether he was an anti-vaxxer.

Another was clearly a retired person like me, privileged, white, getting the infusion just in case.

I drove home feeling relieved that both tasks were over: my panic to get this appointment and my frantic search to find the clinic.

Finally I could go back to bed and just rest.

How to get a test for Covid

Hi, world.  I tested positive for Covid on Tuesday, Nov. 9.  

It was hard for me to believe when the home test kit showed two pink lines (positive), not one pink line (negative).  

"These tests aren't that accurate," I said to my daughter Roz.  I thought I just had a light cold--mild headache, not much sore throat, tired feeling.  Not even as bad as the average flu, but my cough was getting deeper and "productive," as they say.

Roz did a search on rapid tests, however, and the internet said a positive test is almost always correct.  For info on this kind of testing, see https://www.aahealth.org/rapid-covid-testing-faq/

Walgreen's sells the rapid home tests, 2 for $24.  Nationwide.  But on any one day, a store could run out.  CVS near me didn't sell them. 

The next challenge was to find a PCR test, the kind they send to a lab and you wait 2-3 days for the results.  You can't get the top treatment for Covid-19 unless you have proof of a positive PCR test.

PCR stands for Polymerase Chain Reaction.  The scientist who developed this method of testing for the presence of a specific bit of DNA was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1993.

To get a PCR test, you need an appointment with your doctor or a clinic or a testing place set up in a park or parking lot or near a pharmacy like CVS.  Again doing an internet search, Roz found a park near me where the test is being done in the recreation center office.  Same-day appointments were available.

I came home exhausted, but the work of being a Covid patient was just beginning.

That night I called my brother, Dr. Bill.  He said, "You need to get monoclonal antibodies."

"What's that?" I asked.  More new vocabulary to learn.  

"The treatment they're doing now for people like you, over 65 with at least one other serious medical condition," he said.  "You probably qualify for it.  Medicare will pay."

The easiest way to qualify is being overweight or having diabetes or being immunocompromised.  But there are others.  

The next day, Wednesday, I called my doctor's office, expecting to be told to walk right in.

Instead, I had to make an appointment for a virtual doctor visit.  One of her partners would do it later in the day. 

The appointment wasn't by Zoom or Facetime, of course.  That would have been too easy.  And it couldn't be done via laptop.

I had to download the MyChart app onto my cell phone.  Then I had to make an account and password and find the button to do a virtual appointment.

When the doctor finally appeared on my screen, she was skeptical.  "How are you feeling?  Why do you want an infusion?"  

"My brother told me to.  He said Covid-19 can start out mild and suddenly get worse." 

To get this treatment, you can't be super sick and you can't be just imagining you have Covid.  As with Goldilocks, everything has to be just right.

"Okay, I'll forward a request and see if you qualify," she concluded.  "We will contact you if Medicare says yes, and then you'll have to submit proof that your test was positive."

Tomorrow: going for my infusion.

Note:

LHI.care/covidtesting is the national website where you can find the nearest testing site and get an appointment.  LHI stands for Logistics Health Inc.  Logistics Health was founded in Wisconsin in 1999, now part of OptumServe, which got a contract with the federal government in 2001 to handle testing, immunization, and record keeping for federal employees, military, vets, and others.

My mistakes: how I caught Covid-19

 

I did everything right for 20 months--March 2020 through November 3, 2021. Twice I refused go to lunch with a visiting friend.  I refused to drive a visitor to LA in my car.  I even traveled on a plane to attend my nephew's wedding celebration in Washington, D.C.  That was in late July 2021, when everyone had recent vaccines and cases of Covid in the US were dropping.

But then I made a series of mistakes.

Step 1  -  I spent an afternoon with a friend from out of state.

A friend of mine living in Ann Arbor MI was making plans to visit her family in Las Vegas for the first time in two years.  Afterwards she was going to spend two days in Los Angeles, staying at a hotel.  I was planning to meet her at her hotel and then drive with her to visit two other friends.

Step 2  -  I figured we were both safe because we had been vaccinated.

I had had the Pfizer vaccine on February 25 and on March 18.  She had had the Johnson & Johnson vaccine in May and was not sick at all when she left Michigan.

I never stopped to think that she might be exposed to the Delta variant in Las Vegas and carry it to me.  I thought the break-out cases were few and far between.  Neither of us realized that a high number of Covid cases was occurring at the beginning of November in Vegas, but I knew that was happening in LA County.  

Step 3  -  I didn't realize I might have just 30% of the ideal number of antibodies.

No one told me that 6-7 months after my vaccinations, I might have just 30% of the antibodies I had built up shortly after receiving the vaccine.  Dr. Bill, my brother, told me this fact a week later when I called to tell him I had Covid.  

Step 4  -  I'd gotten my booster shot on Nov. 3, so I thought I was superprotected on Nov. 4.

Wrong.  It takes roughly two weeks for people to manufacture a high level of antibodies after receiving a booster. "You had no more antibodies on Thursday than you had on Wednesday when you got the booster," said Dr. Bill.

Step 5  -  I didn't wear a mask while driving my car with my out-of-town friend.

I drove to my friend's hotel to meet her on Thursday at 1 pm. I hugged her while saying hello.  We both wore masks in the hotel lobby, but I took my mask off when I got in my car. 

"You don't have to wear a mask in the car," I told her.  After all, we were both vaccinated, right?

"I'm going to keep wearing my mask," she said.  

"She's cautious," I thought.  Unnecessarily cautious.  It didn't occur to me that maybe she was trying to be careful not to expose me, just in case.

We talked.  I drove us to see two other friends in the Fairfax neighborhood north of I-10.  On the way back to the west side of Los Angeles, we were stuck in traffic for an hour, laughing and talking.  A car is a small space, and I wasn't wearing a mask.

Then we went to a restaurant with a friend, wearing our masks except while eating.  It was a huge, high roofed place with 40 tables, only two of them occupied.  

Step 6  -  I wasn't alarmed when my friend started to feel unwell about 6 pm.

It could be anything, I thought.  A flu.  A cold.  Or possibly Covid.  I wanted her to stop by my house and have a piece of the pumpkin pie I had made, but she said no.  By the time I dropped her off at her motel, she had cancelled her Friday plans with another friend. She just wanted to rest.  She had a ticket to fly back to Michigan on Saturday.

Step 7  -  I exposed other people.

On Friday I went to visit a friend whose husband had died ten days earlier.  I hugged her.  We sat in her living room and talked for 40 minutes.  I talked to her toddler grandchildren and held the toys they handed me. (None of them got Covid.)

At home I interacted with my husband and adult daughter, who works at Starbucks.  Because I had just had a booster, I thought I could not get Covid-19 even if my friend had it. I thought I was Superwoman. (None of them got it either.)

Step 8  -  When symptoms began, I thought it was because of the booster.

On Saturday evening I noticed a teeny bit of scratchiness in my throat.  By Sunday I had a sore throat and light cough.  I felt tired and chilled, even though I was dressed warmly.  I started to wonder if I had whatever my friend had.  I lay down to take a nap at 5 pm, felt hot, and took my temperature: a 99.4 fever.  

It wasn't much; I've certainly been sicker in the last year and a half.  This couldn't be the Big Bad Covid, I told myself.  At most, it's the booster.

Step 9 -  I kept up with my work deadlines and went to a routine doctor appointment.

I didn't rest.  I didn't listen to my body.  I wish I had.  Instead, I exposed my doctor and a nurse at a doctor appointment on Monday.  By afternoon, I was exhausted and had a deep cough.  

Step 10 -  I didn't own a home rapid test for Covid-19, and I had no idea where to get one.

I decided to try to get tested but had no idea where find a home kit or where to drive to get a swab done and sent off to a laboratory.  I should have bought the kit earlier and kept it on hand.

I was exhausted, but I drove around for an hour or more, looking for a home Covid test.  I learned that an appointment was needed to get the Polymerase Chain Reaction test-- the PCR-- but none was available for that day or the next or the next.

When Roz got home from Starbucks, she told me they sell them at Walgreen's, but I was too tired to go get one by then.  Besides, it was such a light cold. I had no more fever.

But I got a text from my friend in Michigan:  "I've lost my sense of smell."  I knew she had Covid-19.

The one thing I did right: getting my vaccines.

Because I had received two vaccines, I had some antibodies already in my system.  As a result, I didn't become seriously ill or need to be hospitalized.

The next story (Nov. 13):

how I found a home test kit the next morning but couldn't believe the positive result I was seeing.

how I found a place to get a Polymerase Chain Reaction test (PCR) to be sent to a lab.

how Dr. Bill, my brother, told me to get an infusion of monoclonal antibodies.

. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~

See this article: "Antigen vs. Antibody: What are the differences?" by Anna MacDonald on the Technology Networks website.   

the

AT&T backs One America News

The Walter J. and Ermalee Hickel House

Two years ago I found myself in a low-cost, motel-like residence for families of patients at Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage.  It's called the Walter J. and Ermalee Hickel House.

My husband had suffered pulmonary emboli while we were on a cruise to see Alaska's glaciers.  

I spent many evenings in my room with very few television options.  There was no MSNBC.  

At least there was CNN, the channel that reports both sides.  "The sky is blue.  Now let's hear what QAnon and the Proud Boys think."

While searching for access to national news, I came across One America News Network.

"This is more far-right than Fox News!" I reported to my husband on my visits back to the hospital.

It was incredible, but I figured the hospital's connection to the Catholic church was the cause.  Either that or all of Alaska is being fed this hogwash.

I didn't do any research on OANN when I got back to Los Angeles, but now in October 2021 it has popped up in the news as being founded and funded largely by AT&T.

Should I stop paying $128 to AT&T each month?

I'm afraid the answer is yes.  

That's what Rick Stengel of Media Matters told listeners a few days ago while being interviewed by Nicolle Wallace on Deadline: White House--on MSNBC.  (See my previous blog post.)

"AT&T is allegedly One America News Network's biggest backer" says a report on The Verge on October 6, 2021.  

Reuters Investigates was the first to report the connection between Trump TV: the AT&T Connection.

I'm grateful to be back in a part of the world where I have access to news that is not far-right propaganda.  I'm sorry I need to find another cell phone provider.

Will this be like the time in 1995 when I heard about Shell Oil's actions in Nigeria and cancelled my Shell credit card? 

Within a few years I learned that Mobil and all the other oil corporations were doing equally bad things elsewhere--but I didn't stop buying gasoline and driving my car.

Maybe all the owners of the media corporations are buddies.  Maybe I won't be able to find a cell service that's not enslaved to the racist, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, pro-billionaire, pro-Trump forces behind the January 6 insurrection.

3 Ways to Boycott Murdoch

Rick Stengel of Media Matters on MSNBC

"When are they going to admit there was no insurrection?" asked Tucker Carlson on Fox News on September 16, 2021.  Another anchor, Laura Ingraham, made similar claims.

Thanks to Nicolle Wallace in her Deadline: White House news hour today on MSNBC for reporting on the cumulative lies spoken on Fox and even printed in today's Wall Street Journal.

She interviewed Rick Stengel of the nonprofit Media Matters on reports that Fox is about to release a "documentary" claiming that the attack on the Capitol and its police officers was a false flag--an action set up by the FBI to make the right look bad. 

Fox is "supporting people who committed the earlier insurrection, and they're motivating people to do another one," says Stengel. 

Even Geraldo Rivera, another Fox anchor, spoke out against lies by Carlson today, calling his words "inflammatory and outrageous and uncorroborated." 

To make matters worse, the Wall Street Journal today published a Trump letter to the editor repeating his false election claims.  

The Fox "documentary" makes the false flag claim that the Jan. 6 insurrection was planned by the FBI to make the right wing look bad.

"There are dozens and dozens of people who are on trial for their crimes in participating in that riot,  " he observes.  "They are testifying about their planning and their actions that day."

"The myth of the great fraud is his platform for 2024 if he runs again, and they promote it because the audience wants to hear and loves it," explained Stengel.

"I think if they aired porn, they'd like that too," replied Wallace, "There are some things that are not suitable to air, that violate norms and standards."

 Can lies like this qualify as speech protected by the First Amendment?

"The one kind of speech that is not protected is speech that leads directly or indirectly to violence," notes Rick Stengel, citing the Brandenburg decision by the Supreme Court in 1955.

Enough summarizing of current lies, whether on heard on Fox News or printed in the Wall Street Journal.

How can we, the people, protest these lies on Fox News and in the Journal, both owned by the Murdoch family?  

"One way that people can protest is to boycott all the products and outlets owned by Rupert Murdoch, which fuel and support Fox News," Stengel says.  Read his call for a boycott on the Media Matters website.  

• Cancel your subscriptions to the Wall Street Journal or anything owned by the Murdochs.
• Don't watch the NFL on Fox Sports
• Don't use the products advertised on Fox Sports or in the WSJ.

"That's the sort of thing that will get Rupert Murdoch's attention," advises Stengel. "There's a very traditional form of protest and boycott that's available to people.  Grassroots public protest is perfectly acceptable and very effective."

Most of us can only boycott Murdoch's media empire partially, though, because his NewsCorp owns so much of what we watch, from Hulu to American Idol.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Footnote: Both News Corp and the Fox Corporation, News Corp's sister company and successor to the former 21st Century Fox, are owned and controlled by the Murdoch family.

.

Cancel Facebook?

Should I stop posting my dog photos and feminist Christian news on Facebook?

I took a 4-year vacay from FB after its reader-enhancing formulas helped elect Donald Trump, and now I'm considering whether to leave again because of its role in the lead-up to January 6 insurrection against our usual peaceful transfer of power in the USA.  

To get more eyeballs, FB looked the other way as Stop the Steal and QAnon worked around its weak efforts to ban them.  It also cut back on its Civic Integrity team and ignored the team's advice.

What do you think?  Should we give FB-Meta a time-out?  All we have to do is treat it like a violent child in the family, shutting them up in a room until they calm down and find a way to play nicely with others.  

This report in the Washington Post reveals how half-hearted Facebook's efforts to stop enhancing hate have been.  Thank you, Craig Timberg, Elizabeth Dwoskin, and Reed Albergotti.

Politico also revealed in Andrea S. Levine's article on Oct. 22 that Facebook took down the original Stop the Steal group in November, but it did not ban content using that phrase until after the Jan. 6 riot.

Facebook felt like such a safe space that a Capitol police K-9 officer exchanged messages with one of the insurrection planners before January 6.  Afterward, he tried to delete those posts and get his friend to delete them too.  Now he's facing a possible 20 years in prison and had to resign from his job.

Listen to NPR's report on how Stop the Steal evaded FB's weak efforts by affiliating with other FB groups.

Thank you to FB whistleblower Frances Haugen for her courageous testimony to the Security and Exchanges Commission on Capitol Hill, reported in the above media and first reported by Buzzfeed.

Exvangelicals, post-evangelicals and other evolving creatures

Some born-again Christians are running away from the e-word as fast as they can.  

Check out this link to the article on Rachel Held Evans by Eliza Griswold posted Oct. 26 in The New Yorker in the section titled On Religion.  

You may have already seen the Washington Post article by Sarah Pulliam Bailey Oct. 22 on post-evangelicals and exvangelicals.  

Bailey attended an ad hoc gathering of a hundred post-evangelical pastors in mid-October in Indiana.  She  reports that some younger evangelicals are moving away from views often associated with evangelicals, tending to be more LGBTQ-affirming and more opposed to racism and Trump..

Some of us older evangelicals have been moving in a more tolerant direction for years.  

After all, this book Evangelical Feminism: A History was published in 2005.  There was a thirty-year history of evangelical feminism back in 2005.  

Another example is the group founded in 1974 as Evangelical Women's Caucus, now known as Evangelical & Ecumenical Women's Caucus - Christian Feminism Today.  EEWC-CFT has been LGBT affirming since 1986.  People didn't hear much about the Q back then.

Our website is full of thoughtful articles, book and film and music reviews, original poetry, and a useful FAQ.

Some in EEWC-Christian Feminism Today have tossed the e-word in the trash bin, but others like me still consider themselves evangelical, even if we don't look like it to the run-of-the-mill evangelical today.

Because the word evangelical just means "good news," eu-angelion in Greek, I see no reason to hand it over to right-wing folks who don't seem to me to be living out that good news.  

I'm a Bible-thumping, gospel-believing follower of Jesus, like Beth Moore.  She's been sending out some powerful tweets lately after being dinged by the Southern Baptist Convention for standing up against its all-male control.  See her on Twitter @BethMooreLPM

These positive signs remind me of that Martin Luther King Jr. quote: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” 

John MacArthur: Keeping women down

John MacArthur in 2013
born in Los Angeles in 1939

 John MacArthur is a sad case.

I used to see him as an opponent.  But now I realize he's 82 years old, a year older than Speaker Nancy Pelosi, three years older than Mitch McConnell, and four years older than President Joe Biden, the seniors who govern our nation.  He's nine years older than I am, bless him.

Oh, I forgot Senator Joe Manchin, who is 74, and Senator Kyrsten Sinema, who is 45, a junior to them all.  She won her seat in 2018 when Senator Jeff Flake stepped out of Arizona politics after criticizing Trump.  Manchin and Sinema actually govern the US as much as Pelosi, McConnell, and Biden do.  Being passive-aggressive gets them attention.

Anyway, Johnny has been serving at Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, since 1969, when he began as the junior pastor there.  His father was a Baptist radio preacher in Los Angeles, educated at Bob Jones College in South Carolina.  Johnny began college at Bob Jones but returned to Los Angeles to attend a now-defunct church college.

The point is that he is who he is, and he's not going to change.  Misogynists, like racists, only vanish by dying off.  They don't change their minds.

If you check out Wikipedia's page on MacArthur, you see who he is:

MacArthur has been involved with multiple controversies regarding his outspokenness on certain topics. MacArthur is very open about opposing same-sex marriage, against female pastors, and the social justice movement.^[37] He has delivered multiple sermons where he discusses these issues.^[38]

In 2012, at The Shepherd's Conference, MacArthur was participating in a word association questionnaire where the moderator gave him the name "Steven Furtick." MacArthur proceeded to argue that Furtick, pastor of Elevation Church, was "unqualified".^[39] Furtick responded to this comment in his 2016 book Unqualified: How God Uses Broken People to Do Big Things.

In 2019, at the Truth Matters Conference, where, during a word association questionnaire, the name "Beth Moore" was given. Reiterating his stance on 1 Timothy 2:12, MacArthur responded by stating that Beth Moore should "Go home" and that "There is no case that can be made Biblically for a woman preacher. Period. Paragraph. End of Discussion."^[40] Moore responded to this stance by stating on her Twitter account, "I did not surrender to a calling of man when I was 18 years old. I surrendered to a calling of God. It never occurs to me for a second to not fulfill it. I will follow Jesus - and Jesus alone - all the way home. And I will see His beautiful face and proclaim, Worthy is the Lamb!"^[41]

In 2020 and 2021, during the COVID-19 global crisis, MacArthur denied the existence of a pandemic, ignored orders from Los Angeles County public health officials regarding services at Grace Community Church, and insisted that no one from the church had become seriously ill.^[42] Los Angeles County sued the church over its refusal to close down, and the church counter-sued, claiming religious freedom discrimination. Eventually the lawsuits were settled out of court with the county and state paying $400,000 each to Grace Community Church. In August 2021, MacArthur admitted to congregants that "many people" contracted COVID-19 while it "went through" the church in December 2020 and January 2021, including both he and his wife.^[43][44]

I thought of picketing his church to protest his recent statements against women pastors, but then I reconsidered.  

Why bother?  He's not going to change.  His church may change out from under him while he still lives.  

In an article for Sojourners magazine, I interviewed women there who had no idea that he believes women should submit to their husbands.  Grace Community Church downplays that theology when recruiting young members.  Apparently it doesn't sell well. After a few years when a woman is deeply involved in the church, she learns these doctrines.  Or dicktrines.

Grace Church doesn't teach Galatians 3:28.  Or Acts 2:16-21.  In its Bible studies, you'll learn about Ephesians 5:22, but nothing about Ephesians 5:21. 

Johnny and his buddies at The Master's Seminary like to ignore the women who worked with Peter and Paul preaching the gospel in the earliest years of Christianity: Prisca, Lydia, Junia, Phoebe, Mary of Magdala, and others.  

Note: The seminary began as Los Angeles Baptist Theological Seminary in 1927.  The new name hides its Baptist roots and plays up its masculine identity.  No women are allowed to enroll. 

The website says: "One word sums up the legacy that is entrusted to the men who come to TMS: faithfulness."

I could think of other words: Sexist.  Patriarchal.  Misguided.  Non-biblical.  Would Jesus exclude half the human race from a college to train preachers?  

I mean the guy denied the existence of the pandemic during 2020 and lied about whether his congregants had become seriously ill with the coronavirus of 2019.  

He was lying like Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who was recently exposed by Rep. Adam Schiff in a blatant lie.  Read about it in Schiff's new book, Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could.

Schiff told Morning Joe:

“One of the stories I tell about Kevin McCarthy is, I was sitting next to him on a plane having a private conversation and then him going to the press and telling the press the exact opposite of our conversation, and when I confronted him on the House floor about this and said, ‘Kevin, you know I said the exact opposite of what you told the press,’ his answer was to me, ‘Yeah, I know, Adam, but you know how it goes.'”

Pastor MacArthur, you lied to us about whether your members at Grace Community Church were getting seriously ill with Covid-19 because you encouraged them to keep attending indoors during the worst of the pandemic.  "Yeah, I know, folks, but you know how it goes."

McCarthy, MacArthur.  Both big-time liars, both deeply into preserving and gaining power for their side.  One claims to follow Jesus; one doesn't even pretend to be a man of values.

Like Trump, John MacArthur deserves our pity, not our attention as a worthy opponent.  

I won't bother to picket Grace Community Church to counter the wacky views of this guy.  

Instead, I will pick up the pen and use my social platform.  

I will also pray for him.  He followed his father's footsteps obediently, but millennials and their grandchildren won't buy his opposition to women's equality, to marriage equality, and to the rights of women and gays to serve the church.

As Jesus prayed, "Forgive them, for they know not what they do."

Of Morons, Choir Boys, and Peril

 

Buy these books for yourself and for your great-grandchildren:

Fear by Bob Woodward.* 

Rage by Bob Woodward.*  

Peril by Bob Woodward* with Robert Costa.  

They document what Trump and right-wing Republicans did to our nation from 2015 through 2021.  They're on my Christmas wish list.

This review in The Guardian explains why we need to read and remember what's in these books.

Written with Robert Costa, another Washington Post reporter, Peril caps a Trump trilogy by one half of the team that took down Richard Nixon. As was the case with Fear and Rage, Peril is meticulously researched. Quotes fly off the page. 

The third book, just out, documents Trump's effort to overthrow the 2020 election, starting long before November, climaxing with the coup attempt on January 6, and continuing today.

It contains lots of behind-the-stage gossip, gleaned through hundreds of interviews.

Here's a tidbit from The Guardian's review:

“Do you know why [former secretary of state Rex] Tillerson was able to say he didn’t call the president a ‘moron’?” the Senate Republican leader [Mitch McConnell] asks.

“Because he called him a ‘fucking moron’.”

By contrast, McConnell has kind words for Biden – a man he is dedicated to rendering a one-term president. America’s cold civil war goes on. Some, sometimes, still send messages across no man’s land.

Buy Peril, the last in the series, now.  Keep it on the shelf you have labeled for your survivors to read: "Keep.  History as it was happening."  

For further proof of the urgency of this trilogy, read On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder.  (See this review.)

Just hope that no future US government puts a ban on these books.

               ~     ~     ~

*Footnote for those who didn't live through the Nixon years:

While a young reporter for The Washington Post in 1972, Woodward teamed up with Carl Bernstein; the two did much of the original news reporting on the Watergate scandal.

As many news analysts have said in 2021, Trump makes Nixon look like a choir boy.

Ambiguous loss - Dr. Pauline Boss

Dr. Pauline Boss

Ambiguous loss is a term coined by Pauline Boss, the professor who wrote several books on this problem, including The Myth of Closure: Ambiguous Loss in a Time of Pandemic.

She has also appeared on programs like NPR's On Being with Krista Tippett (see link). 

See her brief introduction to the subject in a video on YouTube.

The term "closure" implies acceptance of a definite loss.  

An open-ended feeling of loss can be easier to bear, a protection from finality: "He or she is gone, but not for sure."  Or it can be harder, haunting.

"The tolerance of ambiguity is what we are trying to increase," Dr. Boss says. 

Some of her central points: 

😔Sadness and even the condition of complicated grief are different from major depression.

😔"Sadness is treated with human connection." 

😔Grief is complex and varying, not something that comes in a prescribed number of stages or in a linear timeline.

Thank you to my friend Letha Dawson Scanzoni for calling the work of Pauline Boss to my attention.