Superbug shutdown

Forty days and nights I have been flooded by antibiotics, a record at least for me. The overkill is not because of a "superbug," something so foxy medical scientists can't hound it out. No. The somewhat befuddled doctor on my case thinks we are chasing not so super ethmoid sinus bacteria that settled in and set up shop enough time ago to have become a booming business. 

Their swelling may be what put pressure on the nerves around my eye that caused the pain, blurriness and trouble that led me to think my eye was going to shut down. I wasn't too far off. My retina detached. All the medical men insisted this was mere coincidence. Ho ho ha. It doesn't take a super Buddhist to be aware that all phenomena exist as cause and effect. If you believe in virgin birth, you can believe in spontaneous retina detachment. The big squeeze on my eye, I insisted, caused the detached retina. And I desperately did not want that to happen again. Enter antibiotics, cause for a new effect.

Happily, the retina is holding firm and the swelling has noticeably subsided. The doc congratulated himself on hitting the target. That's the only thing doctors in our one-sided culture care about: the one isolated organ that is their bailiwick. They are like single issue politicians.

Unfortunately, my body is as complex as the body politic. Forty days and nights of antibiotics affects other organs. For one, the kidneys declared war on this endless flow of killer medication. Its trickle down has annoyed them so much, they are now all fired up and throwing the stuff out so fast I live in fear they will shut down. Also I am running out of toilet paper.

Elsewhere, like in the stomach, vital good bacteria have died as collateral damage. Their wipe-out has damaged my digestion. I am now running a counter terror operation with probiotic pills, local raw milk yogurt, mushrooms, and all the greens I can grab: arugula, watercress, turnip tops, collards et al cooked with cider vinegar. Anything to get the good ferment going.

As fate would have it, I have been fed and fighting this mountain of antibiotics at the same time I am being fed a steady stream of fighting newspaper and internet reports about the enormous collateral damage coming from overfeeding of antibiotics to dinner plate animals. You know, steer, hogs and chickens. They get even more amoxicillin and tetracycline than me. The Federal government, in this case the pathetic FDA, is unwilling to stop the cavalier cramming of these once precious pills into the meat supply even though the practice has yet again been pinpointed as the chief cause of the lethal superbugs killing people. Since 80% of all antibiotics are sold to feedlot folks, Big Pharma is defending its profits to the death, of us. Supermarket shoppers have involuntarily ingested so much antibiotic in their sandwiches and suppers, the whole anti effect has worn off. That's left us vulnerable to attack, sometimes fatal, by new super improved killer bacteria. 

As fate would have it, I've been drowning in this news about superbugs and my own bugs at the very moment the American Taliban erupted into its biggest cry baby temper tantrum ever. Not getting what they want--no Obama, no Obamacare, no regulations--they've  spitefully shut down the United States government. Their way or the highway has infected us. Of course because it's their way right now, the highway is crumbling. But I digress.

Actually everything is crumbling. I could see in the news and in faces on the street, in schools and hospitals and the whole damned horror show of sequester how these vicious beings with their all or nothing at all attitude have rapidly infected and weakened the body politic and blighted the physical landscape. You could say these people are vampires sucking the lifeblood out of our common good.  I say the Tea Party is another lethal superbug overdosing has created before we can counteract it with anti something.

Remember, in the 60s when we could still remember the common cause of World War II, we were able to inoculate ourselves against the lunacy of the John Birch Society and scariness of Barry Goldwater. But as we now know, these lived on underground in the money vaults of the Koch Brothers where the disinfectant known as sunlight could not shine. Apparently they grew into an infectious new superbug by feeding not just on money, but on what the Buddha identified as the primary cause of all human suffering: change. You know, life does not stop so you have to go with the flow. Bacteria bugs actually do that: they have the awesomely intelligent ability to morph and adapt and progress. A lot people don't. Or just plain won't. Moving on is not an option. New is the unknown, so it is scary. It is involuntary. It may even be inconvenient, the most inexcusable sin in America today.  Facing it can be hard work. Psychology creates Conservatives, and eventually supersized super bugged ones that kill.

Here's the recipe: you take all the rightwing self-medication with lies, deceptions and pretenses to inoculate against change, adaption and progress, in other words: to hang onto male white Christian supremacy--a target reality has bull's eyed, and cross it all with the corporate catering to consumerism that has force fed us a virulent strain of foie gras called instant gratification. (I love it that "foie" doesn't just mean liver; it also means faith.) Add in today's carefully cultivated rabid sports fanaticism, all the overdoses of winning is not just everything, it's the only thing! And the body politic gets violently infected with the I want what I want and I want it winner take all now superbug.

The obsession with preventing progress makes the extorting, hostage taking, suicide bombing Tea Partyers no different from the Taliban or Al Qaeda: terrifying because they are terrified. They feel so threatened by the future, which is to say all the demographic, lifestyle and intellectual knowledge changes, they're as fired up as my kidneys, unleashing their own endless stream of polluted bile to keep it at bay. They have just resorted to an Al Shabab terror attempt to blow up the United States for being as modern and international as Nairobi's Westgate Mall. These people bring to mind that great 1960s Broadway show title: Stop the World, I Want to get Off! 

As it happens, tra la,  that show's ultra-famous hit song was What Kind of Fool Am I?  Honestly I'd be happy to tell the Tea Partyers. Honestly reality humiliates us all sometime. We have to move on and get past it. But honestly,  as I said, some people just can't move on. And with these particular people stuck as they are, anything that isn't what they want to hear about how pure and perfect they are just fuels their huge grudge about being disrespected and supersizes what super bugs them.

Well, all I can say is despite these people who want to roll back time, life does move on. Tomorrow will be day 41 of antibiotics for me with no let up in preventing a stomach or kidney shut down. I am though heartened by signs the medication may be working. In any event, the shutdown of antibiotics is 9 days away. There is an end in sight.

As for that virulent superbug that has shut down the less than United States of America with no end in sight, don't count on John Boehner or even Barack Obama to come up with a remedy. Our only hope is probably the Buddha because he already did. And as it happens, his cure perfectly fits the Tea Party bill: it's DIY and promotes their very special interests: self-reliance, freedom, and total independence. 

The Buddha referred to doses of Dharma as medicine you can take if you want to heal a dis-eased mind. Of course the American Taliban's whole point is not being told what to do. It's their way or no way. Of course, they don't see themselves as dis-eased at all. In fact they are so sure they're pure and perfect, they don't feel any need for healing. I reckon that's why giving people access to medical attention is what superbugs them bad enough to have shut us all down. 

They squawk about entitlements. Well, there's one I'd be happy to counteract for forty days and nights or however long it takes to stop the superbugged from killing us.




~Sandy Garson "Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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