I have had a hard week. It was capped off yesterday by a woman upon whom I’m doing a very large dental case, who came in and told me that she can’t stand to watch Biden on TV, that he makes her physically ill, and that she did not watch the press conference but heard that he was incapacitated and mentally deficient. I was so tired of dealing with all the things I’ve had to deal with this week that I said not a word. There is no way I can possibly say anything That would alter her perception, she’s not here for political conversion I said to myself, so just don’t comment. Believe me, it took everything in my power to grit my teeth and just keep my mouth shut. Quite frankly, I’m getting to the point at this age where I can’t stand listening to this shit anymore, and if there were some underlying reason for me to retire if I could, which I can’t, it would be so I don’t have to talk to the assholes.
That being said, another thing I can’t stand dealing with is when one of these people comes in and says something about the good old days. I actually have a speech for them which goes something like this: you know, the good old days were not so good. If an ambulance pulled up in front of someone’s house, likely as not you never saw them again. If someone had a blockage around their heart, they died. If they had cancer that was not immediately locally resectable, they died. If they were in an automobile accident over 35 mph, there’s still a good chance of being killed even though the damage to the car may have been minimal. Women died in childbirth often, and things were so primitive that multiple births such as twins or triplets were a giant surprise to the physician and mother when discovered in the operating room in which they were giving birth. Men, by the way, were not permitted in the operating room when I was young. Medical syndromes were poorly understood, if at all, and children died routinely from inability to diagnose. If someone were allergic to penicillin and they were subject to say, chronic lung infections, they often eventually died if it progressed to pneumonia. Almost every suburban neighborhood had DDT sprayed daily or every other day during the summer to kill mosquitoes, and God only knows what effects this had upon us as we age. Where I lived the pollution from the Rohm & Haas chemical plant was so heavy that with the wind blew in a certain direction we could not go outside and play because it was overwhelming stench and there was no one to call, no appeal, and quite frankly nobody cared. The Amazing thing was that the parents of children who could not go outside we just shrugged their shoulders in resignation, and talk about how big business always had their way so no use complaining.
There were no consumer protections, if you bought a car that had multiple defects and was essentially unusable because it was constantly breaking down Continuously, tough beans to you. In my lifetime you could go to a shoe store and have your feet x-rayed many many times in the same visit in order to see if your shoes fit correctly. The exposure to not only the customers but the staff must have been enormous and I do not believe that anyone ever did a study showing premature death of shoe sales people but I would bet from that era there was a lot of cancer. It was like Madame Curie all over again. but you know what? Almost Nobody cared, or seemingly nobody. It took decades to begin to straighten all this out and here comes the right wing who want to send us back to the golden age of male landowners voting, second class citizenship for people Whom they feel are deserving of such, and street justice a.k.a. lynching as a form of extrajudicial punishment.
My mother , in 1929 at the age of 12, started smoking. She told me that even then they referred to cigarettes as coffin nails, but everyone assumed that something else was going to kill you first. There was a lady on our block who was 82 years old and everyone was in awe of her. Today’s equivalent would be 106. Most people assumed tgat even if they reached Social Security recipient age, that it would only be used for a very few years, if at all. Speaking of our block, there was a rumor going around in 1961 that the fellow who lived next door to us made.....-gasp- ten thousand dollars a year! I remember another neighbor said to my father, “if I made that much, I wouldn’t have to worry about anything for the rest of my life.” Such was life in those days.
But in fact you don’t have to look that far back for issues which would not present themselves today. When I was in training, we had in our kits boxes of rolled up asbestos which we used for casting metal crowns and inlays . There were fibers of this cancer-promoter all over the laboratories and in our lockers and on our clothes, and where I went to school there would be 165 of us in two rooms with low ceilings and no ventilation tearing or cutting the strips of asbestos. In addition, we used a material to make custom trays for dental impressions the monomer of which was the most vicious smelling solvent type liquid to this day I have ever smelled. It was definitely cancer-causing, and when I would leave lab both as a student and as a professor, every fold in my body arms legs and elsewhere, itched maddeningly because of the presence of this material in the air. I know this is anecdotal, but of the 165 in my class three have died or dying from pancreatic cancer, and we are only in our late 60s. God only knows what’s to come but needless to say, they don’t use that material anymore.
All of this constitutes the myth of America and it’s mythical exceptionalism. I am very tired as I stated at the outset of the assholes and I’m worn out from attempting to explain to them the simplest Concept or idea. If they don’t believe in the germ theory of disease, and thus refused to wear a mask, then what more can I do? Nothing. The fact of the matter is, these people believe in their hearts that the two greatest mistakes ever made in America were the freeing of the slaves and the constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote. They see America is going downhill from those points. The inherent hate and racism in this country runs very deep, and in fact the Civil War is apparently never-ending. The next five years will determine the fate of the Republic: whether it stands as a democratic state, or reverts to corporate feudalism run by tinhorn Mussolinis.
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