Stuff

Yesterday's appointments were a real mixed bag. My CT scan started two hours late. Annoying? Mais Oui! Worse yet, I had a panic attack when I laid down on the thin test platform. Not promising. I did manage to calm down and get through the scan.

From there we raced up to the ninth floor (from the sixth) for my meet up with my neurologist, Doc Plotkin. The fab news is that my bean’s cool. I won’t need more surgery anytime soon. The spine? Apparently I’ve reached the not-wise-to-open-up-the-back-again point. So I need an MRI (boo, hiss) and a meet up with the radiation folks to see if they can do anything for me. I don’t need something done right this minute (thank the little baby Bast). This rendezvous is to discuss whether I’ve a future in Diffraction Land.

No pressure, no pressure at all.

In other news, I’ve gotten to the place in Bryson’s, One Summer where he talks about eugenics.

The American eugenics movement embraced negative eugenics, with the goal to eliminate undesirable genetic traits in the human race through selective breeding. (source)

This applied particularly to Black and Brown people, poor Irish and Italians, Catholics, epileptic folk, the blind and/or deaf, etc., etc. If you weren’t of northern European heritage you were considered trash and should be sterilized to keep the country pure (gee, Nazi much?)

Apparently this was a big deal, that is it was something embraced not just by that eras idiot trumpers and the Klan (I’m being redundant here) but by ‘respectable’ scientists, academics and other folk who were mistakenly considered intelligent. 

I only mention it but sterilization was an accepted formal practice on Native Americans up until 1976.

What this brings to my mind are bits my Italian Catholic mother told me. Her family came here in the early ‘20s so she grew up with this prejudice. They lived in the Italian ghetto of New Haven (where I first lived in the late ‘50s). Her parents never learned English. Why bother when, in this time of Sacco and Vanzetti you were damned before you spoke.

When I said to her that I wanted to join the Girl Scouts, she told me not to bother as they didn’t accept Catholics. There was no formal Girl Scout policy but I guess that was the prejudice she experienced as a kid.

Weird shit. Mind you, I grew up in the peace-love-understanding-fest ‘60s. Hating someone because of their skin color or religion, was bizarre as all hell.

And yet here we are again.