I heard it said by some pundits that President Trump contracting coronavirus and now being hospitalized with the disease is a “teachable moment” for this country, and by that they meant that maybe now the naysayers can finally all get on board with the obvious fact that we all need to wear masks, need to socially distance, etc. Yes, it is a teachable moment for that, but it is also a teachable moment for something else. This whole circumstance highlights the gross, stark and utterly indefensibly inequitable healthcare system in this country.

Let me begin by finishing what I started to say in the title above. Dear Mr. President, I hope you appreciate the free healthcare I pay for you to have, wish I had the same. …

As I wish to discuss the Alternate Universes that Americans live in, and the extraordinary damage these splits in the fabric of Spacetime are doing to the fabric of our Democracy, I should begin by first disclosing my own bias, that is which Universe I live in: I avoid watching Fox News (I cannot cope with the acid stomach it induces in me), but I don’t watch CNN either. I confess I have settled upon MSNBC, though not completely comfortably with them since they do sometimes make me wince. But in between winces, I nonetheless do enjoy and am paradoxically soothed by the biting rants of Mika and Joe, the witty digs of Joy Reid, and the exasperated eye rolling of Rachel Maddow capped off by her patented phrase “watch this space” and then dramatic dissolve to commercial, all of them entertaining and informative. …

As I watched coronavirus spread, and the death toll mount, as the federal government under Trump’s leadership uselessly flailed about …. as I watched the economy collapse with tens of millions of people out of work …. as I watched, yet again (losing count how many times now), a black man be murdered by a police officer, this time with a knee on his neck, and then saw the convulsive riots, followed by the inspiring nationwide and then worldwide marches and protests, with black, brown, white, red, yellow people shouting in unison Black Lives Matter ….as I watched all of this with a mixture of tears in my eyes over all the tragedy, but energizing hope in my heart at so many people taking to the streets for justice….I …

I am a blue-eyed, blonde-haired white woman in America, which makes me the very definition of “privileged” when it comes to policing in America. You don’t ever recall seeing a police officer with his knee on the neck of a blonde white woman, right? No, I haven’t seen that either.

Now I was never among those whites who thought excessive police violence against blacks was an infrequent and only occasional thing (I don’t know what planet those whites lived on, but apparently some actually thought policing was equable across races). I most definitely was never among those whites who would turn amazing mental and linguistic somersaults to make the case that when the police did use force against a black person — force that the white person might grudgingly admit was maybe a bit excessive — it was because the black person provoked it, which was just the closet racist euphemistic way of saying that the black person deserved it. Do you remember Rodney King? Do you remember the officers who gathered as a gang to mercilessly beat that man as he lay on the ground, and those officers were acquitted? Why were they acquitted? Enter the mental and linguistic somersault artists mustering the list of excuses that have long been used to defend police violence. It usually goes something like this: It is a dangerous job, a high stress job, and the police officers felt threatened, so they had every right to defend themselves. Yeah, right. Now that was decades ago. And all through the intervening decades, how many names of black victims do we have to list? And how many times were the same tired old arguments trotted out to excuse police officers for inexcusable behavior? Too many times. Far too many times. And I was disgusted by that. From Rodney King forward, again and again and again I was disgusted by the fact that simply wearing a particular uniform and carrying a badge gave you a license, apparently, at least as far as juries were concerned, to do whatever you wanted to do to “protect yourself” as a police officer. Yeah, right. I was beyond disgusted. But, I still remained on my white privilege couch, in my white privilege neighborhood, watching my nice white privilege high definition TV, and doing nothing other than just shaking my head in sadness and disgust at yet another and another and another instance of inexcusable excessive force by police, even to the point of murder, and no consequences for the police, other than maybe, at most, a wrist slap and a demotion to a desk job. …

In many locations across America, there have been protests held to “open up” the country so people can go back to work and the economy can recover. Considering the prevalence of “Trump 2020” flags at these events, not to mention the “Don’t Tread on Me” signs, as well as young men holding assault rifles jauntily pointed downward from their waste (no, dear Freudians, I am not even going to go there), it is obvious these events have been inspired to take place by Fox News and similar media outlets. Or in other words, this is Politics.

And the Science? The consensus is that opening up too much, too quickly would be disastrous and potentially nullify the good (and remember, we are measuring “good” by a current death toll in America, as I am typing, of over 47,000 human beings, that number being less than the number of deaths we otherwise would have by now) that has so far been accomplished by staying at home and social distancing. Scientists indicate easing of restrictions can take place when widespread testing is occuring, which will enable more efficient quarantine measures and contact tracing, and that realistically, we can only finally “get back to normal” once a vaccine is in place. See the article When Can We Lift the Coronavirus Pandemic Restrictions by Tanya Lewis in Scientific American, published on April 6, for more detail on what a scientific approach to opening back up would be. …

First, a disclaimer. While I am going to be doing some ranting and raving here, please do understand I am not one of these people who demand some “purity test.” I do not want to give the impression in what I am about to say that I feel like there is a step by step path here, where a Democrat must support women, equals must support women candidates, equals must support Feminists. I do truly believe in a big tent where many viewpoints and many ideas are welcome, where many candidates are welcome, and in any case, it is not as though “feminist” is even definable these days in any sort of obvious and simple way. Especially since there are “feminists” who are fighting “feminists” (such as, for example, Radical Feminists feuding with Liberal Feminists). So I am not about to rant and rave that the Democrat Party has failed a feminist purity test. …

I am tired of labels. I am sick of labels. I am sick of categories, subcategories, subsubcategories. It seems like it is spiralling out of control, that if somebody somewhere suddenly has a particular “feeling,” then they get to declare yet a new label, a new category to place themselves in and thereby be “validated” — whatever “validated” really means, and I don’t even pretend to understand. But I have this sneaking gut instinct that whispers to me it is not a good thing to so obsessively pursue “validation.” As a “nerd” (there, that is one of the multitude of labels assigned to me, as though I even really care) I looked up the definition of validation: “recognition or affirmation that a person or their feelings or opinions are valid or worthwhile.” The immediate question that came to my mind: Valid and worthwhile recognized according to who? It seems to inherently imply that what other people think about you, opinion-wise, matters and you are seeking their “recognition” to be validated. It seems to me, on the day I was born, that was my validation, and your birthday was yours too, nothing further needed from anybody else — no further recognition, acknowledgement, nod or any other gesture of approval required, wanted or needed — because on the day you were born, you came into existence as a beautiful, special, unique and wonderful person, just as you are, in all your unique complexity, and all that really matters is that you believe in yourself. So why is some category, some label plastered over you necessary to “validate” you? I don’t understand the value in it. And, frankly, I don’t really want to understand. Because my gut instinct tells me that the moment I set out to seek “validation” as something important to me, is the day I set off down a path not very good for my peace of mind or mental health. After all, that would be the path where I give a damn how many “likes” or “claps” I get, as though my sense of self-worth depended upon that. No, I don’t want or need to go down that path. But there is more to this issue of labels than harm done to mental health. There is a bigger harm, the obvious problem nobody even seems to talk that much about. The problem that it is not good to keep chopping us all up into finer and finer subgroups. …

First of all, a bit of full disclosure: I have no moral authority here. In so far as I voice some opinions here critical of pornography, or condemnatory of those who view pornography, that only makes me, in truth, a hypocrite. I have been viewing pornography for more than 30 years now. And not just viewing it. I did a little homemade amateur porn photography of myself and put it out on the internet — in my much younger, not-so-very-wise days. Of course, in the present day, the way so many people, especially young people, are gleefully sexting one another, the fact I did that would be greeted with a big yawn, but I did this in the “olden days,” before there were iPhones, before camera phones, back when the whole “internet” concept was still in its very early stages, and so it was not yet so blasé a thing to do, me doing my own little home porn photo shoot and then uploading it to a website where couples shared such amateur porn images. I did it. I enjoyed it. I was very pleased with myself at the time (like I said, young and not-so-very-wise). And I was enormously pleased when my stuff kept getting five star ratings and guys commenting on how hot I was, etc., so I get it, how that can be an addictive ego boost to a woman. And I therefore have no moral authority here to be condemning porn. However, I am hoping that maybe, for that very reason, more people will “hear me out” on what I am about to say. Because I do “get it.” I get it why people watch and enjoy porn. I get it why a woman might enjoy participating in some pornographic footage. I get it all. And I do not agree with those who say all porn should be gotten rid of. That is too simplistic. That is too black and white. The real question is, which shade of grey? The shade of grey that is out there most predominantly in porn is what I want to condemn. And the shade of grey that is a completely different kind of porn, in all respects, so different that it shouldn’t even really be called “porn” but rather called “erotica,” is what I want to praise and encourage. …