by Mike Bendzela
During the twelve years I was a volunteer Emergency Medical Technician-Basic in my little town, I arrived onto scenes with patients suffering varying degrees of distress. I would first assess them, then help stabilize and package them for transport to the hospital; and if I was lucky, I would be assigned to drive the ambulance. It wasn’t that I minded assisting paramedics in the back with “bagging” (ventilating) critical patients or performing chest compressions on them; it was just that when the rig was rocking Code 3 on the way to the hospital, I was in danger of throwing up all over the floor in back. The medical term for this is kinetosis.
In those years I got to witness a fascinating phenomenon in a few patients who had suffered blunt force trauma to the head. Some patients who had not been rendered unconscious, and who were not so severely injured as to be completely incapacitated, existed, for a brief time, in a little window of reprieve–a period of grace, as it were.
Following trauma, a patient’s sympathetic nervous system fires up; the body is flooded with hormones such as adrenaline, and the capacity to feel pain diminishes. Most non-essential bodily functions are temporarily suspended, but the mind exists in a state of both intense excitation and preternatural calm. Perhaps this is a survival mechanism, evolution’s way of allowing an animal to keep its wits about itself long enough to crawl out of further harm’s way.
Our crew was called along with the sheriff to the scene of an adult male who had been bludgeoned with a baseball bat in bed by his wife, to whom he had served divorce papers. She then shot herself in the stomach with a revolver and called 9-1-1, claiming an intruder had attacked them. (Much of the background of this call came to us only weeks later.)
By the time we arrived, the wife-assailant was being treated by another crew, and our patient was sitting up on the edge of his bed, bloodied but conscious. He sat there quietly, leaning one elbow on his knee, the other arm cocked on his hip, and he looked at us with his head tipped to one side, as if listening to some music in the background.
He had been sleeping during the attack, so he had no idea what had hit him. He seemed to be breathing regularly, without any blood obstructing his airway, and he acted for all the world as if nothing had happened to him. He was in that period of grace, waiting, in his dim bubble of consciousness, for “What next?” to happen. To call it “denial” or some such thing would be incorrect. It’s more properly “altered mental status.”
We said his name, but he didn’t respond; he just swiped blood from his nose with his hand and kept on listening to his background music. We had to somehow coax him onto a backboard and stabilize his head with blocks and do so immediately. . . . At that point, the patient became combative, confirming that he had suffered a traumatic brain injury. The sheriff’s deputy assisting us had to wrestle him down and put him safely in handcuffs.
This is but one example of a personal disaster I witnessed, yet I struggle to comprehend the implications for that poor guy. And whenever I glance up from my neighborhood to try to assess the traumas of the wider world, the effect is nauseating: The territory is so vast that comprehension is impossible. If there is one lesson I’ve learned with age, it’s that I don’t know anything near what I thought possible to know when I was younger. The best I can do is cast my net from the microcosm into the macrocosm and hope I get a catch.
Here goes: All of us in the United States are in our own period of grace right now. We do not yet know (or barely know) what has hit us, and the reality has yet to kick in. There is no assailant in this case, however; this trauma has been entirely self-inflicted, which only compounds the disorientation and sense of disbelief. We look about, flabbergasted, and chatter at each other, seemingly with our wits still about us. How happy to have our reprieve happen during the holidays, with those joyous carols playing in the background.
With open eyes this time–not in the middle of our sleep–we have re-inflicted on ourselves a leader who has proven, with tiresome repetition, to be as unworthy of the job of guardian of this country as a toddler is unworthy to be guardian of small munitions. This is a person who diminishes us rather than lifts us up; someone who has said that immigrants eat their neighbors’ pets, that women who have had abortions deserve to be punished, and that “enemies from within” the populace could be pursued by the military. And yet, republicans have ranged themselves around this disgrace in a vast funnel cloud of complicity. It’s a Red power sweep, and we’re stuck with it, packed Supreme Court, scarlet Congress, Project 25, and all.
The other party has proven itself to be a basket case–call them a Basket of Contemptibles. Never have so many thumbs disappeared up so many backsides all at once. A democrat did not just get whipped by a republican: An intelligent prosecutor got whipped by a serial sexual abuser, a convicted felon × n², an arsonist of democracy, and the sorest of losers. On the face of it, it was a campaign they couldn’t lose, but instead they got their skulls bashed in. You want to shake them and say, What the hell is wrong with you people? The democrats’ embarrassment should be intense enough to scald bystanders.
When one party is compelled to run a felon and the other party cannot crush him, there is something deeply wrong with us that transcends political parties, something profound and mysterious, and I have no idea what the hell it is. We have a dreadful affliction and we cannot fight it off. I knew there was a reason I’ve remained unenrolled in any party for decades.
And now, several foul stars on our horizon approach alignment. As in some tacky, dystopian midnight sci-fi flick, just as the geezer oligarch is being lowered onto his gilded throne, the planet nearly simultaneously passes a historic climate threshold that has not been witnessed by any of our ancestors of the Holocene epoch. Greenhouse gas levels continue to soar upward at a clip Earth’s atmosphere has not experienced in hundreds of thousands of years. Meanwhile, forests ignite, dangerous methane emissions creep steadily out of permafrosts, and wild animal populations keep crashing to further historic lows. And there is one laggard star–the recalcitrant star of petroleum depletion–that, should it, too, budge from its zenith and begin to decline, could tip the current craziness into true mayhem.
It’s not that either candidate would or even could do anything about any of this, mind you; but the incoming befuddled ruler and minions will just continue to deny it all. If a climate or energy crisis erupts, count on the clueless republicans to invoke the Apocalypse.
An unshakeable belief in the cult of economic growth at all costs–the very cause of our stresses and a staple of both political parties–will continue to be served up as the anodyne and cure-all, a hair-of-the-dog cocktail of borrow and spend, drill and burn, swill and belch. So, Salut!, America.
But the period of grace will come to an end; and when the patient becomes combative, who do we think will come to our aid? Who will wrestle us down and subdue us, for our own good?
We’ll find out shortly whether this is just another forgettable false analogy. The thing about parables and analogies is they frequently tell you more about the brain that created them than the phenomenon being described.
In the meantime, may grace be with you this solstice.
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Image
“Still Fall in Maine, 12/08/24.” Photograph by the author. (Inspired by a photo S. Abbas Raza posted here recently.)
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