After a Good Night’s Sleep

Oh, it’s not another post about decaffeinated coffee, it’s what I had last night: A good night’s sleep! I haven’t really had one of those in about a week. I’ve had a couple of new MS symptoms. I can’t get started on my disease modifying drugs soon enough! That, by the way, will be on November 14. The medication I’ll hopefully be taking requires a 6-hour observation for the first dose to make sure there aren’t super adverse side effects, primarily that the drug can, often does, cause the heart rate to slow down. The heart rate is usually back to normal within a month of starting it, but the main concern is that it doesn’t start slowed too much, so they want the patient, in this case me, to be in a facility with doctors available “stat.” The other drugs included ones that were injected, which I could learn to do to myself, but I’d prefer a pill, and ones with way worse known possible side effects, including brain disease. I’ve been through a ton of tests to be sure I’m strong enough to give the medication a try. Since the beginning of the year I have been tested for just everything! Other than the MS, “I am strong like ox!”


Occupying My Mind

I’ve been reading a lot about the “Occupy” protests going on, not just on Wall Street, or even all over the country, but all over the world. The whole Occupy movement doesn’t seem really organized or even in harmony with itself, but it’s young, so it might evolve into more. Right now, it’s definitely loud. I can imagine the 60s protests must have started something like this, only without the Internet to put them more in everyone’s living rooms, dining rooms, libraries, coffee shops and back pockets on a Smart Phone! I was a baby during the protest movement in the late 60's, no, serious, when the pot started to heat up for those protests I was probably a zygote! The anti-war movement peaked in 1968, but it really started to bubble in 1965. The reading I’ve been doing suggests that the unrest started before that, somewhere as the unification of World War 2 began to fade in the post war years and became unrest about racial equality, unemployment and poverty.

This time the civil unrest had its unification on 9-11-01 and for the comparatively brief period after the terrorist attacks. I recall the comparison to Pearl Harbor at that time. The end of WW2 brought out a similar celebration to Bin Laden’s death, albeit without the dramatic sailor kissing a woman in Times Square photograph, but this age is different too. We did not have the economic boom that my Mother grew up in and our Vietnam happened before the end of our WW2. Iraq was the war that divided our country into those who supported it no matter what and those who said, “what the…?” Our president’s enemy was in Iraq, but our country’s enemy was in Afghanistan. On the world political scale, we had the unrest and economy of the late 60s and never got the boom and celebration of post WW2 and we had it all at once. It’s no wonder the whole movement is mad and seeking someplace to aim their anger. The direction is unclear because the "enemy" is still unclear.

I’m not totally sure where I stand on the Occupy movement. Right now I’m trying to understand it from a psychological and historical point. It’s an interesting opportunity to understand why we study history. Society runs circularly, but it does seem that our historical model has been sucked into the middle of a metaphorical funnel, with groups like Occupy and the Tea Party trying to anchor themselves on the outside with ideas to pull us out, to “save us.”

I read the “demands” of Occupy Wall Street, or one could call them ideals, my preference to call something if you want to get people on board with you. "Demands" is confrontational and sounds dangerous. Their ideas are mostly decent. Some things will take a lot of work to change, some things need to be undone, some things never should have happened. There are other ideals that will never be allowed to happen or shouldn’t because of the strong possibility they’ll do more harm than good.

Yes, the details are purposefully vague there. That's mostly because I don’t have set opinions on a lot of it yet, but also because an entire blog could be devoted to opinions about the Occupy Movement. There are a lot of blogs already devoted to opinions about the Occupy Movement. This little section was just a look at the historical comparison and as fodder for thought and discussion. If you have any insight or opinions, grab a cup of coffee and post away!

It’s definitely NOT a decaf morning!