Christianism and I, and How It All Became Personal

When the current wave of Christianist policy first washed over America, I was not among those who might later say that they did not know. I knew. I knew about women forced to bear defective infants because late-term abortions were prohibited. I knew about medical scientists forced to move overseas if they wanted to continue their work on therapeutic cloning and other newly prohibited technologies. I knew that government "recommendations" for prescriptions of pain medications had been "tightened," and that physicians who exceeded those "recommendations" were tried and imprisoned for drug-dealing. I knew that one renowned specialist was convicted on testimony about his "nudge-nudge, wink-wink attitude" when explaining the government's "recommendations" to his patients, and so doctors, talking to patients in pain, now made an extra effort to sound sincere. But I was not any of those people, and so I did not go very far out of my way to speak out.

And if I had, what good would it have done? The suffering inflicted by our recent Administrations was not about to be condemned by the Christians, who make up the majority of my fellow citizens. Their belief, however nominal, is that suffering is a precious gift from God. If someone suffers, from oppression by our government or from any other cause, then either God has decided that the victim deserves to suffer, or God has graced the victim with an extra opportunity to earn salvation points with Jesus. A Solidarity movement (like the ones that brought down the Communist regimes of East-Central Europe) would have been, in Christian America, unthinkable. So how much could I have accomplished? And what would the payoff (or payback) have been? I had arthritis of the knees (and other joints) but the pain, even at its worst, was not beyond what could be relieved with over-the-counter pills. Otherwise, my life was (and is) very good.

And then one day, moving a big old computer monitor to the side to make room for a new LCD panel, I felt a spiral of pain around my right leg. It was evening, and so I took a sleeping pill and planned to call my doctor's nurse the next day. The next morning, as I got up from bed and sat down to scan my e-mail, the pain shot up to an intensity I had never imagined possible. The pain was so intense that all was overwhelmed: I could not work or think or focus my consciousness on anything besides the pain. My wife had already left the house for work, and I could not get up from the floor until the evening, when she came home and got me up and took me to a hospital emergency room.

It turned out that a ruptured disk in my spine had crushed my right sciatic nerve, amplifying the pain in my knee a thousand times and turning all sensation from the leg into amplified pain. After an injected shot, the physician wrote out a prescription, explaining that I was getting the strongest pain medication that he could prescribe for sciatica, and that it was limited to 20 pills per week, to prevent withdrawal symptoms when I no longer needed the pills and stopped taking them. Each pill started to work about 15 minutes after I took it, and after a few minutes of relief the pain began to grow again. It grow slowly, and for some two hours I still was able to think and work. At the end of two hours the total pain returned.

I was 3 weeks from the end of the quarter, teaching senior and graduate classes three nights a week, to students who worked full time in the day and then sat in my class from 6 to 10 PM. I was proud of my students, too proud to cancel their classes with just 3 weeks to go. I kept 14 of the pills for my morning chores and to fall asleep at night. I used the other six to cover my teaching hours. Looking at my colleagues, I saw that they knew, and would do the same. For the rest of the day and the week I was one with the pain, and could neither do or be anything else.

Then came the end of the academic quarter, and the operation. The surgeon prescribed a time-release pain killer, and warned me not to take it until after the operation. I took one on my way out of the pharmacy, and the pain withdrew into the background for the rest of the day. I still felt the pain, but now I was again able to feel other things, to think and to focus my mind and to live. This was what I should have been prescribed from my first day in pain. This was what I would have been prescribed, had American physicians been free to practice medicine without fear.

Two months after the operation the pain had gone down enough for me to stop taking the pills. I had the withdrawal symptoms: like two days of a mild flu. And to prevent this, I was forced to spend three weeks in indescribable pain?

And thus it was, that the cliches I had ignored for decades came to meaning in my life. I had not had enough interest in politics, and so politics took an interest in me. Only then was my consciousness raised, and the personal became political. And I started speaking the truth to power.