Hanging on....

I saw an allergist today to try to comprehend the head congestion and leaden lassitude that has nailed me down for the past month. Not Covid-19, good, but what then? I’ve been needing multiple naps, exhausted by short walks, coughing and blowing my nose. The doc finds I have a low-grade, lingering sinus infection, probably acquired during the weeks of hazardous smoke in late September, when the air was full of bacterial toxins. What tipped her off was my complaint of a metallic smell emanating from my skin since early October. “Ah,” she said, “that confirms what I was expecting.” Take a low-grade infection and add leaf mold allergy, and it all makes sense. We’ll knock it out with antibiotics and antihistamines. 

Meanwhile, when I can prop my eyes open, I’ve been reading Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson. She diagnoses the toxic mentality that has poisoned my country since the settlers came to this continent with their own pathogens. She says “racism” is not a useful thing to call it. She calls it “caste,” and she tracks its similarity to the way caste functions in India and how caste functioned in Germany in the time of Hitler.

In 1935, Jews were stripped of citizenship, prohibited from displaying the German flag, denied passports; the architects of the Reich used American caste laws as their model. She writes, “While the Nazis praised ‘the American commitment to legislating racial purity,’ they could not abide the ‘unforgiving hardness’ under which an American man or woman who has even a drop of Negro blood in their veins counted as blacks. ‘The one-drop rule was too harsh for the Nazis.’”

It is like breathing fresh air to have the myth of American freedom and democracy blown wide open to the truth, like the myth of white Americans’ harmony with native people at the first Thanksgiving.