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As is always the case in a crises, there are those who find an opportunity for personal or political gain. These skirmishes are usually between opposing groups of differing ideologies. In Michigan, the latest battle has Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer squaring off against Trump. This appears to be a fight to the death that will likely have far more collateral damage than anything else.
For the Democrats, the economy is their foil with which to end President Trump’s campaign for a second term. The COVID-19 virus has provided Whitmer with a “raison d’etre” to kill Trump’s economic gains (under the assumption that no president can get re-elected if the economy is tanking). And while many of us see that as an old strategy that cannot work in today’s more politically savvy culture, you would have a hard time convincing Whitmer or any other “blue state” Governor of that fact. She has doubled down on her naive strategy, ensuring that this will be her “Waterloo”. Case in point is the Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs (LARA), which is responsible for regulating all of the state’s pharmacies. Up until February, pharmacists operated as they always have, dispensing medications, researching issues that come from doctors and hospitals...and doing the things that pharmacists do. That all changed on March 19, 2020. That is when President Trump announced that HydroxyChloroquine would be approved by the FDA for off-label use to treat the virus. But even before Trump’s announcement, the pharmacist community was already experiencing something they had never seen before. Prior to Trump's announcement, doctors familiar with HydroxyChloroquine were already talking about using it for the Coronavirus outbreak. The drug had been on the market for 60 years with an exemplary track record of safety and efficacy, making it an easy choice..since its formulation already showed great results as an antiviral medication. And that is precisely when LARA stepped in and sent a letter to all pharmacists stating (without analysis) that physicians were writing prescriptions for HCQ to friends and family members. and therefore due to short supply (also unsubstantiated by LARA) HCQ prescriptions must be filled only for malaria, arthritis or lupus to ensure enough supply for existing patients (despite the overwhelming evidence that more COVID-19 patients would die as a result). Once Trump came out with the statement regarding FDA approval, the gloves came off. According to one pharmacist in the Detroit area who spoke on condition of anonymity (out of fear of losing her job as well as her career) the licensing board (LARA) threatened to revoke licenses and requested pharmacists to snitch on doctors who were filling prescriptions for the drug. All of this was done in the absence of any regulations governing state pharmacies that would have supported such a heavy handed decision. From a legal standpoint, it would appear that barring pharmacists from filling Hydroxychloroquine prescriptions might be a bridge too far for Governor Whitmer and her Democratic colleagues. A bridge that, according to the pharmacist we spoke to, will be defended to the bitter end.
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Hello friends. I have a request. I want you to listen very very carefully.
No, not to me. I want you to listen very carefully to everything that is occurring around you and everywhere on this beautiful world. Listen to everything you hear. Pretend that there is something important in every bit of information. Treat all incoming data as if it contained a valuable hidden meaning and that if you don't listen openly you will miss it. In 1963 John Fitzgerald Kennedy started something that he was not able to finish. What he started was bigger and more important than you can imagine. What is happening now has everything to do with his plan. It was a plan that would not die. It was a plan than could not die. And it was a plan that a group of exceedingly brave people have worked tirelessly to ensure that it did not die. Those of you my age remember how after Kennedy was assassinated our heroes were then taken one by one by one in a relentless string of hopelessness that seemed to have no end. And then we fell into a defeated stupor. We gave up believing that we would ever have those feelings of real hope and empowerment again to the extent that we were rendered incapable of recognizing them no matter who came along. I want to tell you with all the love in my heart to dig down as deep as you can for that recognition of what is right. Leave no stone unturned. Look through the messenger and listen! This is not about what sounds right or what your facebook group echos back what you want to hear. This is something so profoundly right and good that no person or group can put it into words. It can only be felt on a very deep soul level. I want you to have the gift of that feeling. I want you to have this feeling so profoundly that you will crumble to the floor weeping tears of joy all the way down. So listen carefully with all your heart no matter who utters the words or who writes the words or who sings the words. Right now is the time to have those eyes that see and to have those ears that hear. The waiting is almost over. The Beginning is Near. Most of you would agree that we don't have much choice about where or into what circumstances we're born. We just, one day, realize that it happened and this is what it looks like. After a while, if things are going okay and your parents aren't complete lunatics, you begin to identify with your situation and take on the attributes of your family and friends. Kinda how a dog tends to look like their owners after a while but that's a different story. Well, that's how it was with me. My parents were democrats, my grandparents were democrats and my friends were democrats. Hell even my godfather who was a CIA agent was a democrat.
I was only 8 years old when JFK was assassinated but oh man was that a game changer. The next year my mom was so depressed she had to be hospitalized and the year after that my dad died from complications of diabetes. Now I'm not saying that the one was the cause of the other but dyed in the wool democrats take these losses to heart with sometimes serious repercussions. My parents loved that man both as a leader and as a person. It was a great loss politically and emotionally. Not long after that we democrats were treated to the same emotional devastation when they took Bobby Kennedy and then Martin Luther King. One right after the other and attended with the same questionable circumstances as to who actually did the killing and why. We were under siege and our survival depended on our being strongly committed to carrying the banner of democracy. Well I carried that banner for Jimmy Carter, George McGovern, Walter Mondale, Mike Dukakis and Bill Clinton. Some of them won. Most of them lost. But it was Clinton's election after that long dry spell that rekindled my spirit as I, like most of my democratic brethren, saw Clinton as someone who could bring back that sense of empathy and goodness in the Oval office. But something went wrong. The changes that he said were coming either didn't or they came in a form that was eerily similar to what the Bush's had done. Our policies towards third world countries were just as imperialistic as ever. Our healthcare system was just as rapacious and profit centered as ever. And then there were the salacious scandals, the drug running through Mena Arkansas and the trade deals that sent almost all of our good manufacturing jobs to Mexico and China. What the hell was going on? Why was a democratic leader acting like a New World Order Globalist? The answer was simple. Bill Clinton was a Globalist. In much the same way that Republicans who freed the slaves and supported their right to vote morphed into greedy corporate machines the Democratic party that I knew was being infected by that same dark force. Now we have Republican leaders fighting for liberty, small businesses, family farms and real security while the democrats were hanging out with Jeffery Epstein, going to Spirit Cooking parties and engaging in debauchery that would make the Governors of Sodom & Gomorrah green with envy. The evil virus had simply jumped from one group to the other. But now that virus has a problem. It is killing the host and it's got nowhere else to go. More and more people around the world are waking up to the existence of this virus that has plagued mankind for thousands of years and they want very much to eliminate it from our midst once and for all. You can see it happening. They are leaving the Democratic party in droves as I did. They are turning off their televisions as I did. And they are adding their voices to the growing din of never again will we be manipulated by corporate media and Rockerfeller schools and Hollywood's sick fantasies. We are witnessing a grassroots paradigm shift the likes of which has NEVER been seen before in all of history. But there are many of you who still believe in being a Democrat because you cannot see these changes. You sit precariously on a fence that will soon toss you off like an irritated mule and you will fall. Hard. You might fall on the side of light, justice and empathy. Unwillingly at first but you'll be okay. And you might fall on the dark side by embracing all the things that darkness represents because that was who you really were to begin with. Either way you will move through this transition on your own locomotion or hurled like a rag doll into a very different future. Now is the time to think very carefully and make choices that come from your heart. For that is the only way to really know. They say that life is like sailing. I oughta know. At the age of nine I was tossed about, for six long years, like a cork in a squall. Up until that time I had what most would consider a pretty idyllic life. I had a stable and loving home life, a large extended family and a summer home on a beautiful lake in the mountains of New Hampshire. But when the storm came it came up quick and hard. My father was dying. He had a disease called diabetes. And that, given the current state of medicine, was pretty difficult to live with. Over time he just got more and more angry and did less and less what was needed to keep himself healthy. And as he slowly slid into disrepair my mother who fought tirelessly to save him slid into an even deeper depression as if they were racing to a finish line nobody wanted them to reach.
But as they neared the end it was my mother who crossed the line first by losing her mind and was committed to a mental institution. A year or so later my dad finished his run and left us for his ultimate home port. Us kids also had to go somewhere and so we did. My two older sisters went to Dad's brother's family and my younger brother and I went the my mom's parents. Now you might say this is a sad story. And you wouldn't be wrong but it's not the whole story. After the loss of family life I had all sorts of people telling me things like how much they loved me and how things would be better as they proceeded to send me off here and send me off there to places I never asked to go to and doing things I didn't particularly want to do to the point that I stopped trusting anything that came out of their mouths. Every time I turned around I was the new kid, in a new environment always trying to figure out how in the hell I got there and what I was supposed to do now that I was there! Under those circumstances you learn pretty quickly how to survive. And somewhere along the way I learned a thing or two about other things besides keeping my masts up and my keel down as they say. I learned how to learn then taught myself how to live. I had a couple of things coming into this world that helped me out quite a bit. One was my insatiable curiosity. You know, the kind that kills cats and such. Mine would've killed a mountain lion. And the other thing was my non-stop motor that seemed to run at full speed and never run out of gas. That was a pretty volatile combination if left to its own devices but give it some focus and I could drill down into a subject like a diamond drill. And so, for the rest of my life, I proceeded to look into, uncover and analyze every subject I took a fancy to. I didn't stick with any one thing for too long. As soon as something more interesting came across my bow I'd be off chasing that one down. For some that kind of lifestyle would be too crazy, too inconsistent, too lonely. And for sure I never made a million dollars as a top expert in any one field but I got something even better. I got knowledge. I got experience. I got understanding. I got to feel what it was like to hold a golden eagle on my arm and look into it's majestic eyes. I got to teach an owl to come to my call and land on my fist. I learned how to pick up a porcupine without getting quilled or a snapping turtle without losing a finger. I wasn't there to become a veterinarian or anything like that. It was just a job I enjoyed doing because it was interesting. I learned how to convert sunlight into useful things like electricity. Or how to make hot water from spinning magnets. I've taught myself how to make computers do terribly mundanes tasks really, really fast! Or make a broken car run like new again. These were engaging and fun projects that taught me much more that just the task itself. There was physics, thermodynamics, electromagnetism and all the math and literature that goes with that. Some of it was pretty high level stuff that admittedly was beyond my ability to fully comprehend but that was okay. I wasn't intending to work for NASA. Wouldn't have wanted to even if I could. I learned that a sanctuary wasn't just in a fancy building. It was on a mountain top, watching a full moon rise on the winter solstice or on a lake watching the islands across the way light up like a Thomas Kinkade painting with a triple rainbow super imposed against a dark post storm sky. I'm not a painter but I can more than appreciate fine art when composed by nature. It can take a lot of work to climb a mountain. Especially a high one, in the wintertime. But for me that wasn't work at all. The moment I stepped out of the truck and donned my backpack, sometimes weighing upwards of 65 pounds, I became light as a feather. Pure joy has a way of doing that. Kinda like anti-gravity but without all the techno stuff. I've crawled through mud and under walls through water to stand in the most majestic halls man has never built. To find, measure and map places no man has ever seen before like a astronaut of the underworld. I've flown a glider and a hot air balloon to see the earth like a bird does. I've taken a stand against war, been jailed for trying to stop foolish people from building dangerous contraptions that harm life and taught young men how to honor the sanctity of same. These are not careers. Life is my career. I have done these and countless other things not because I was paid or because I was compelled to do so by the whim of another but rather because it was there. And I wanted to learn about it. And I did not want to leave this amazing, beautiful and glorious place until I have seen and experienced all that I can. For that is why I am here. And for no other reason. |
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