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m u s i c. m i s c h i e f. a r t. |
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chick-lit |
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And in the war on war, the U.S. just can’t resist getting into an even bigger and better quagmire in the Middle East, draining America of its wealth, its patience and the lives of its young soldiers. It would all be just too awful, if it weren’t for this…
Things are as wonderful as they’ve ever been, only better. It’s true that while getting a new computer up and running can feel about as enticing as cutting one’s hair off with a dull blade, never before has so much information and entertainment been available at our fingertips. We may have had encyclopedias before, but the internet is now an encyclopedia as big as the earth itself, offering all of us the chance to self-educate beyond our wildest dreams, thus leveling the playing field between doctors and patients, in particular. (I’m thinking of the day when I—not the team of doctors at New York City’s Mount Sinai Hospital—was the one who found the explanation for one of my complications in The New England Journal of Medicine, via the ‘net. Take that, doctor.) We’ve always supported one another in our woes, but now, internet support groups can unite people from around the globe, for any purpose at all, in ways unimaginable just 10 years ago. The U.S. has generally enjoyed a reasonable standard of living during the second half of its short history, but in 2007, never have so many lived so well, free of hunger, disease and the ravages of the elements, Katrina victims being a recent exception. Even Americans stressed to their very limits financially still drive cars, live in a home or apartment, wear decent clothes and eat a fairly healthy diet. Remove those four things, and you’ve got problems indeed. Got health issues? True, we still don’t know how the human body really works, but we’re really trying to figure it out, and we’re doing our very best to make sure as many Americans as possible have access to information and treatment, despite the rampant greed of faceless pharmaceutical corporations, uncaring health insurance companies and that eerie specialist who won’t talk to you for less than $400, no checks accepted. Countering him is my dear hematologist who charges me $25 per visit. Bless him.
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This past spring, Vanity Fair ran an essay contest, the subject of which was “What is reality to Americans today, and did we ever have a grasp of it?” My brain nearly exploded in writing this, made all the more painful by the fact that I...well...lost. But hey—I’ve now got a new essay for my site! |
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When Hope Is Enough by Mary Ann Farley
There she is…my little black cat named Hope. I didn’t actually give her that name. That was the one she had when I adopted her two years ago as a two-year-old Abyssinian who’d already had two litters and was now getting kicked out of her second home. I thought of changing it, but soon realized her name couldn’t have been more appropriate, considering the dire circumstances I was in. For the third time in five years, I’d nearly died from a rare and chronic blood condition, and hope I needed in spades. If it was no longer in my soul, I could at least welcome it when it came and sat on my lap. Plus, she arrived in tandem with the Social Security disability checks, which could only mean one thing for a 40-something-year-old woman like myself with no kids, no money, no health insurance and no boyfriend: that Hope and I were about to read a lot of books, send a lot of email, make a lot of phone calls, and most important, watch a lot of television. After careful analysis, we’ve come up with the following facts that describe reality these days for Americans everywhere. Here’s our report:
Things are as bad as they’ve ever been, only worse. Pollution is the same as it ever was, only now the North Pole is melting and nothing we can do will reverse it. The government is still overspending, but the deficit and foreign debt is so enormous in 2007 that we’re talking trillions, not hundreds of billions, of dollars. And in our efforts to communicate more efficiently, we’ve created an incalculable amount of information to absorb, leaving many of us feeling really isolated, and really stupid. Our explosive communications technology, designed to keep us connected, creates learning curves so steep that the how-to manuals never get opened. Our emailing and postings can get so intense with complete strangers that we’ve no energy left to leave the house and talk to a real human being. And our bombs—designed to be so big, so precise and so devastating—are no match for the real enemy…imagination and box cutters. |
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In the war against drugs, a recipe and a basement are all that’s needed to create one of the biggest highs known to humans—methamphetamine. In the war on crime, illegal gun trafficking is neck-and-neck with money laundering as one of the U.S.’s biggest enterprises. |