My husband and I are standing in the crowd at Tucson’s Rialto Theater in 2018, and Amanda Palmer is yelling at me.
Or at least, that’s how it feels.
She and Neil Gaiman (RIP, all my heroes and gurus - why do you ALL have to be creeps?) are on a weird tandem tour; he’s reading from Norse Mythology; she’s alternating with Dresden Dolls hits. At some point toward the end of the night, she invites - ok, demands - a crowd sing-along of Sing, a minor-key call-to-action that’s anything but gentle:
There is this thing keeping everyone’s lungs and lips locked
It is called fear and it’s seeing a great renaissance
After the show you can not sing wherever you want…
I’m a whirl of conflicting emotions. I’m…not a joiner. I don’t appreciate compulsory crowd activities. And yet. Sing is such a raw, emotional plea that it seemed not just unsporting, but actively cowardly, to stand there with my lips locked. But I did, as everyone around me went “ahhhaaaahhhhhaaaahhhh” and Amanda Palmer shrieked “Mother[fluffers], you’ll sing someday.”
I did penance by becoming obsessed, belatedly, with the Dresden Dolls for months afterward.
Keen observers of my Monday and Wednesday posts these last few weeks may have noticed that we’re following a light thematic trajectory up through the chakras. Last week was the heart, meaning that this week we’re at vishuddha, or throat, center of communication and expression - of speaking our truth.
Usually, this blog deliberately steers in a pretty politics-neutral lane, concerned with the individual work we can do to move, soothe, and nourish our bodies and minds. For today, though, I’d like to pivot just slightly and do a little proverbial throat-clearing. Some of the things that have been on my mind and a little stuck in my throat - probably not coincidentally, all related to rural health and well-being:
My gynecologist is retiring early. This is no trivial thing: the rural clinic where she works and where I go for primary care visits (I already drive an hour if I need to see a specialist) has been impacted by recent cuts to Medicaid and is relying heavily on rural health grant funding that requires a certain patient-per-provider-per-day minimum. Unfortunately for people with female anatomy, women’s wellness visits (which require taking your pants off) take longer than standard-issue annual check-ups. In a truly delicious irony, my local clinic needs to reduce its services to stay in service.
My community has, recently, been a flurry of food drives and donation initiatives - not unusual for the holiday season out here, except that this year’s 43-day government shutdown came with the holiday bonus of a pause in SNAP benefits - a first in the program’s history (usually, benefits are funded from a USDA contingency fund during a shutdown.) By way of explanation, my former agency did something else unprecedented: took a partisan position on a public-facing website.
I don’t have the words to describe the sinking feeling, and then rage, that this message inspired, except to say that I pray that we can all agree, at a minimum, that allowing people to go hungry over a political dispute isn’t just bad politics, it’s bad human-ing. As of this writing, the shutdown has ended and SNAP is again being distributed, but food insecurity is a heck of a thing to play games with.
A major new solar initiative has been approved in my county, generating heated debate over the highest and best use of our local farmland. At risk: 1500-3000 acres which would be repurposed for solar panels. On the surface, this seems fine - necessary, even, in a state maybe most famous for coal mining. Problems and challenges abound, however, not least among them a very low level of public trust toward any company coming in to a community with big promises of money and energy and jobs. Folks around here have seen this movie before. It’s unclear how and if the promised construction jobs will materialize, given a lack of local specialized knowledge; it seems likely that most construction labor would need to be imported from other states. Opposition is mounting and credible information is hard to come by, putting those of us who would like to see the Mountain State be a little less coal-dependent in the awkward position of potentially opposing a renewable energy project. It may not matter anyway: last year the West Virginia State Legislature passed SB171, “prohibiting county commissions from adopting any ordinance, rule, license requirement, or other authorization that exceeds state law, rule, or regulation regarding agricultural operations.” In essence, if the state okays something on agricultural land, there’s really nothing the county can do.
All of this bleak-sounding news is offered, simply, in the spirit of a public service announcement that used to play on the Washington DC Metro: if you see something, say something. I don’t have ready answers to any of these issues - they’re what the economists like to call “wicked problems.” But I do hope - particularly during this holiday week - that each of us can draw up the courage to say what is on our minds - allowing for the discomfort of civil, difficult conversations with the people we love - trusting in our connections to each other.
And if things get difficult, Amanda Palmer has an old-fashioned suggestion that feels more like a command:
There is this thing that’s like talking except you don’t talk
You sing
You sing
Below: audio version of this post and an 18-minute practice for the throat chakra
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Bravo! That's a powerful PSA.
Thanks for sharing your voice.