Winter Fundraiser 2015, Day Six

Ah, here we are closing in on the home stretch for this Winter Quarterly Fundraiser. At this point, if we’re still standing I count it as the kindness of the Cosmos. This year in particular am I grateful for being in good enough shape to take on my share of the posting for a change. Last October I was still recovering from having my pacemaker surgically implanted. For months my heart had been slowly failing and I didn’t know it. Or rather, part of it had been in need of help that almost didn’t come in time.

Fortunately, “almost” doesn’t count. Despite what I think may have been some medical oversight, I am grateful things got sorted out, repaired, and I began to recover.

But at the time of our Autumn Fundraiser I was still in that post-surgical nightmare state that goes with having developmental PTSD. As the Baron can confirm, the condition makes me all but mute. And that includes the ability to write, so he was left to do most of the bleg posts — I think I managed one out of the seven — getting on here every day to rattle the tip cup in front of our readers. I’m grateful for that, too.

Speaking of gratitude, I remember vividly my experience on the table in the operating room. I don’t know if you’re supposed to fully “come to” during one of those procedures, but I sure did: I woke to find a white drape on my face and sensed someone standing to the side, digging into my left shoulder. The big dig part was okay — uncomfortable perhaps, as different nerve endings in my left arm were calling home to say “enough already” — but that drape across my face was NOT okay. No one had prepared me for that, or for the parched mouth that made it difficult to ask for help. Thank heavens for circulating nurses who peek in on you!

That’s the thing about being a patient: unless you know what questions to ask, most surgeons I’ve met so far have been parsimonious about sharing information; I don’t know why. Sure, they give you the technical explanations, but no one ever says OH, AND BY THE WAY, DON’T BE ALARMED IF YOU WAKE UP MIDWAY THROUGH THE PROCEDURE AND FEEL LIKE YOU’RE SUFFOCATING AS EACH BREATH PULLS THAT WHITE BURQA INTO YOUR MOUTH. AND IF I PUSH YOUR HEAD TO THE RIGHT AND GROWL AT YOU TO KEEP IT OUT OF MY WORK AREA, DON’T TAKE IT PERSONALLY.

Have you ever noticed we circumlocute the rudeness of some docs by minimizing their behavior into “doesn’t have a good bedside manner”. As if that were an adequate excuse for trauma-inducing boorishness. Patients start out butt-naked and one down; an excellent doctor takes that vulnerability into account. Or as one of my favorite doctors said, “Watch out for the mechanics and fixers. Technique isn’t enough.”

It wasn’t all that bad, though (she says now, long after the trauma) because even during that gruesome Limbo period, there was the magic moment when I felt those electric leads slide into place in my heart, followed by an overwhelming experience of gratitude. That is what has stayed with me, even as I continue the ups and downs of recovery from the slings and arrows American hospital systems seem to supply in abundance.

Since the Baron does the most work during these fundraisers, he’s the most spent of the two of us by the end of it. When he took over the job of acknowledging your gifts, he decided to task himself with answering each gift, if possible, on the day it came in…except for the ones I’d ask to take for one whimsical reason or another.

But that was then. He’d never met a week like this one: so many new folks came in The Gate, donation in hand, that keeping his promise to himself was…well, let’s just say that his strength is also his flaw: HE KEEPS HIS WORD, NO MATTER WHAT. So while he stretched himself out like an old rubber band, I started cooking things — what do YOU do when you see your beloved with his arm stuck in a tar baby ? A tar baby crafted by a man who KEEPS HIS WORD…

(Psst — I’m going to wiferly suggest in future that he limit his responses to X number a day rather than push it to the limit. We’ll see if I get through — I’ll keep you informed if I succeed in saving him from himself. That is, if I remember. Heh. Well, who could have known the Donor’s Door would be so crowded this time?).

As I write this, on the sixth day of the WQF, our observant Jewish readers will have long since begun their Sabbath. It’s about an hour since the candles would have first been lit here, if indeed there were any Jews to light them in the backwoods of Virginia. You’d have to travel — oops, no traveling shoes on the Sabbath — about fifty miles from where we are to the nearest synagogue. Come to think of it the building may be a former church. Whatever, it makes a fine synagogue and due to its venerable age it’s now considered “historic” — a point which amuses our European friends who are used to ancient history — like the parts of the Roman roads one can still see here and there. Not to mention the medieval piles of cathedrals — places to visit with a camera, but no one wants to worship there anymore. Or worship much of anywhere else, either.

If I believed in reincarnation — which I don’t but it’s fun to entertain ideas — I’d swear I was Jewish in one of my former lives. Every year I can hear Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur calling my name. Having our own intensely festive New Year celebrations — more akin to the bacchanals Christendom had to replace as the Roman Empire fizzled out — in the cold dark of winter seems out of whack somehow. Late December is more logically the time to pile high the duvets and crawl under them, taking a book with you. Maybe some oboe music just within the limits of hearing to warm the heart while a fat mug of mocha brought along warms the rest of you.

Surely in my last life (if there was one), in September I ran across bare fields with their patchy remainders of the now-mowed-and-piled rows of drying Timothy grass. Surely in my last life I climbed the fence and dropped into the shaded orchard to look for windfalls the hornets hadn’t gotten to first. Even the looming prospect of school couldn’t have interfered too much with the happiness brought on by the suddenly humane dry warmth of Indian Summer.

But perhaps September’s other-worldly memories have more to do with the long custom of starting the new school year then. Big kids would’ve finished the harvests and little kids were freed from tedious eternal weeding and digging potatoes. A fresh academic start could be carefully maneuvered to avoided looking at last year’s potholes of delayed papers and lost homework. This year would be different from all the others, we’d promise ourselves.

We promised ourselves this quarterly fundraiser would be different, too. We’d each get our respective posts done on time — even done early, said I! — but life sure does interfere with the promises we make, doesn’t it? One good thing happened for me: I SEEM to have begun being able to write again. I’ve been silent for so long and yet now, even in January, the silence is melting. It may be the subject matter: I don’t have to deal with the depredations of our governing classes or the murderous intents of our evil enemies. Remember when George Bush got into such trouble for saying the truth out loud? The words “Axis of Evil” haven’t been heard in the halls of Washington for a long time. Come to think of it, not much truth is uttered there. Lots of promises, no delivery. Or as they enjoy intoning in Texas, “all hat, no cattle”. Inside the Beltway, there’s not even a hat. Oh wait, there’s Obama’s golfing cap; does that count?

The “friends” I’ve chosen for this turn around the course is a site I’ve mentioned frequently in our comments. On occasion I’ve even left news feed clips for the Baron from this place: Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty.

I’m sure most of our British readers have a passing familiarity with Acton’s name at least. Even over there I doubt he gets much play anymore but many people probably know some version of his famous quote about the ability of power to corrupt those who have it, and of course the more absolutely one holds power, the more likely is one be corrupted by it. Thus our would-be King and his mighty pen, signing directives and making them de facto law.

But Lord Acton said a whole lot more than that. He’s known for his aphorisms rather than for a rigorous body of work. If I recall, he stayed too busy in politics to get it all down on paper. I’ll bet you haven’t seen many of these, though. Even some of those quotes we’ve seen have been credited to others; I doubt he cares anymore. After the quote about corruption (because we like the familiar) the one most likely to make us think is his idea about property (he and Frederic Bastiat, both, focused on property laws, though the latter may have been more overtly Christian in the milieu of anti-clerical France. Acton didn’t need to be).

Lord Acton said this:

“Property, not conscience, is the basis of liberty. For the defence of conscience need not arise. Property is always exposed to interference. It is the constant object of policy.” (I’ll return to this idea later)

And he said this mind-bender for those of us who thought it was something else:

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