'Hunter Gray' hunterbadbear@hunterbear.org [marxist]
2014-07-03 11:51:58 UTC
The subject lines above are the opening sentences from a note sent me by a quite good friend on one of our discussion lists. She's obviously referring to the relative paucity of posts by me. I'll be doing more posting in due course -- we have had our local challenges hereabouts -- but, on the other hand, I don't plan to over-do posting and burden people who are already very busy with their lives.
The Navajo saying, heard consistently in ancient and contemporary times, "The world is a dangerous place" , is hardly open to dispute. In our own "old days," some decades ago when newspapers were the main media venue, and radio news was given in brief intervals, it took at least a little while for the Horrors to reach us. No escape from the hair trigger media these days.
A stray thought: We haven't heard the "catchy" Obama campaign quip from 2012 lately: "Osama's dead and General Motors lives."
Part of our family here is still recovering from a very tough late winter and spring, a significant component of which was a strange flu that struck many people, including our whole family in these parts -- those of us here at Sandy Lane and Josie and Cameron and their three little ones who live not far away. I escaped the worst of it. It struck Eldri especially hard and the assistance of myself and Maria is still much with her. Josie is also a great help. We keep Eldri from doing too much and we also keep her full of food. As her strength returns, we see good pieces of sunlight. It seems happily apparent that much more of that is not far ahead.
My lupus has never returned.
It's clear that I do not have any diabetes. There has never been any known evidence of that in the family out of which I come. I incurred diabetes early on in the Lupus War because of heavy doses of Prednisone. I have always resisted chemo drugs with consistency -- supported in this by my eventual and excellent primary care doc, medically conservative, who assisted me very capably over a crucial seven year period until he moved on. (In the past three years, very disturbing correlations have been found involving chemo drugs for lupus and lymphoma.) I was also assisted by other good forces, "things seen and things unseen." When we phased out the Pred for Plaqenil, an anti-malarial drug that works well in lupus situations, the diabetes went away.
Occasionally, slight signs of diabetes seemed to occur for very brief periods of time. My doc and I didn't jump to conclusions and the signs invariably departed. In time, although we used words like "phantoms", the term "false positives" would also be accurate. After my faithful doc left, I've had several different physicians, all residents. The first was fine, the second more or less OK, but the last one jumped on what he perceived as a "diabetic" sign. He was not a good listener. One of the diabetic medicines he prescribed struck me as not good and, although we filled that prescription, we dumped that one in total.
I did with him, as I sometimes do with western med people, dangle my bear claw and speak of Bear Medicine. That always brings them up short very nicely.
The other pill -- milder -- began to pose problems familiar to me: low blood sugar. While there is no diabetes in my family line, there is certainly the "reverse" -- hypoglycemia. My mother's saying "A hungry Salter is a crabby Salter" was heard by all of us over the generations. Food is the antidote for that.
So when signs of hypoglycemia began to occur, I ate a bite of whatever and the low blood sugar indications left immediately. Very early one morning, Eldri and I were talking -- and I suddenly became extremely riled at a situation involving humans -- geographically far from us. My degree of anger was not rational. All of the signs of low blood sugar were super paramount. Forthwith, I ate some Apple Fritters, everything subsided, and I felt most pleasant within a very few minutes.
(My traditional fare, as a working organizer and elsewhere, has always been five cheeseburgers and a pitcher of ice water.)
Bottom line: I am done with any diabetic meds. At the same time, I am done with doctors and most western medicine, except for grandson/son, Thomas, an MD, now just arrived at Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN. His good spouse, Mimie, is also at Mayo's as a PA. And Thomas, as he regularly does, will soon be attending the annual conference sponsored by the Association of American Indian Physicians. This event, held in Denver this year, consistently has a substantial emphasis on traditional Native medical approaches: preventative and healing -- always on and within a spiritual framework.
Took out my favorite hunting rifle the other day. It's a Browning/Winchester 1886 45/70 lever action, High Grade, with gold inlaid bears and deer.
Thinking about next fall.
Yours,
Hunter Bear
HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER JR] Mi'kmaq /
St. Francis Abenaki / St. Regis Mohawk
Member, National Writers Union AFL-CIO
Check out our massive social justice website
www.hunterbear.org The site is dedicated to our
one-half Bobcat, Cloudy Gray, and to Sky Gray:
http://hunterbear.org/cloudy_gray.htm
See my piece ON BEING A MILITANT AND RADICAL
ORGANIZER -- AND AN EFFECTIVE ONE (Mississippi et al.):
http://crmvet.org/comm/hunter1.htm
See our very full COMMUNITY ORGANIZING
page -- with a great deal of practical material:
http://hunterbear.org/my_combined_community_organizing.htm
See my new expanded/updated "Organizer's Book,"
JACKSON MISSISSIPPI -- with a new 10,000 word
introduction by me. This page lists many reviews.
And this book is also an activist's how-to manual:
http://hunterbear.org/jackson.htm
The Stormy Adoption of an Indian Child [My Father]:
http://hunterbear.org/James%20and%20Salter%20and%20Dad.htm:
(Photos)
The Navajo saying, heard consistently in ancient and contemporary times, "The world is a dangerous place" , is hardly open to dispute. In our own "old days," some decades ago when newspapers were the main media venue, and radio news was given in brief intervals, it took at least a little while for the Horrors to reach us. No escape from the hair trigger media these days.
A stray thought: We haven't heard the "catchy" Obama campaign quip from 2012 lately: "Osama's dead and General Motors lives."
Part of our family here is still recovering from a very tough late winter and spring, a significant component of which was a strange flu that struck many people, including our whole family in these parts -- those of us here at Sandy Lane and Josie and Cameron and their three little ones who live not far away. I escaped the worst of it. It struck Eldri especially hard and the assistance of myself and Maria is still much with her. Josie is also a great help. We keep Eldri from doing too much and we also keep her full of food. As her strength returns, we see good pieces of sunlight. It seems happily apparent that much more of that is not far ahead.
My lupus has never returned.
It's clear that I do not have any diabetes. There has never been any known evidence of that in the family out of which I come. I incurred diabetes early on in the Lupus War because of heavy doses of Prednisone. I have always resisted chemo drugs with consistency -- supported in this by my eventual and excellent primary care doc, medically conservative, who assisted me very capably over a crucial seven year period until he moved on. (In the past three years, very disturbing correlations have been found involving chemo drugs for lupus and lymphoma.) I was also assisted by other good forces, "things seen and things unseen." When we phased out the Pred for Plaqenil, an anti-malarial drug that works well in lupus situations, the diabetes went away.
Occasionally, slight signs of diabetes seemed to occur for very brief periods of time. My doc and I didn't jump to conclusions and the signs invariably departed. In time, although we used words like "phantoms", the term "false positives" would also be accurate. After my faithful doc left, I've had several different physicians, all residents. The first was fine, the second more or less OK, but the last one jumped on what he perceived as a "diabetic" sign. He was not a good listener. One of the diabetic medicines he prescribed struck me as not good and, although we filled that prescription, we dumped that one in total.
I did with him, as I sometimes do with western med people, dangle my bear claw and speak of Bear Medicine. That always brings them up short very nicely.
The other pill -- milder -- began to pose problems familiar to me: low blood sugar. While there is no diabetes in my family line, there is certainly the "reverse" -- hypoglycemia. My mother's saying "A hungry Salter is a crabby Salter" was heard by all of us over the generations. Food is the antidote for that.
So when signs of hypoglycemia began to occur, I ate a bite of whatever and the low blood sugar indications left immediately. Very early one morning, Eldri and I were talking -- and I suddenly became extremely riled at a situation involving humans -- geographically far from us. My degree of anger was not rational. All of the signs of low blood sugar were super paramount. Forthwith, I ate some Apple Fritters, everything subsided, and I felt most pleasant within a very few minutes.
(My traditional fare, as a working organizer and elsewhere, has always been five cheeseburgers and a pitcher of ice water.)
Bottom line: I am done with any diabetic meds. At the same time, I am done with doctors and most western medicine, except for grandson/son, Thomas, an MD, now just arrived at Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN. His good spouse, Mimie, is also at Mayo's as a PA. And Thomas, as he regularly does, will soon be attending the annual conference sponsored by the Association of American Indian Physicians. This event, held in Denver this year, consistently has a substantial emphasis on traditional Native medical approaches: preventative and healing -- always on and within a spiritual framework.
Took out my favorite hunting rifle the other day. It's a Browning/Winchester 1886 45/70 lever action, High Grade, with gold inlaid bears and deer.
Thinking about next fall.
Yours,
Hunter Bear
HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER JR] Mi'kmaq /
St. Francis Abenaki / St. Regis Mohawk
Member, National Writers Union AFL-CIO
Check out our massive social justice website
www.hunterbear.org The site is dedicated to our
one-half Bobcat, Cloudy Gray, and to Sky Gray:
http://hunterbear.org/cloudy_gray.htm
See my piece ON BEING A MILITANT AND RADICAL
ORGANIZER -- AND AN EFFECTIVE ONE (Mississippi et al.):
http://crmvet.org/comm/hunter1.htm
See our very full COMMUNITY ORGANIZING
page -- with a great deal of practical material:
http://hunterbear.org/my_combined_community_organizing.htm
See my new expanded/updated "Organizer's Book,"
JACKSON MISSISSIPPI -- with a new 10,000 word
introduction by me. This page lists many reviews.
And this book is also an activist's how-to manual:
http://hunterbear.org/jackson.htm
The Stormy Adoption of an Indian Child [My Father]:
http://hunterbear.org/James%20and%20Salter%20and%20Dad.htm:
(Photos)