Thank You for Your Patience!

More posts will be coming soon...

You may have noticed that I haven’t posted here in a few weeks. That’s because a few weeks ago, my family started madly packing up all of our books, toys, clothes, kitchenware, and everything else, so that a week ago Saturday, we could drive to the airport and get on a one-way flight the Hell out of California.

So we’re in Kentucky now. Surrounded by all those boxes that we were packing up not so long ago, opening them up again and trying to figure out where everything goes. And all the while being dimly aware that several hundred miles to our north, a bunch of truck drivers are working hard to bring down the pharma-fascist state that we’ve all been living under for the past two years.

I’ll be posting more in the coming days and weeks. Right now though, I just wanted to tell a very short story about something that happened to me on my first trip to China, back in 1986.

I was staying in what had once been the Astor Hotel, in Shanghai. In 1986, it was the Pujiang Hotel - and more of a hostel than a hotel. Once-luxurious suites had been turned into dorm rooms, lined with simple metal beds and nightstands, and a shared bathroom. A few years later, it would become home to the infant Shanghai Stock Exchange, and the last time I was there, it was being returned to its former glory as a luxury hotel.

One morning, I woke up in my simple metal bed, and a voice in my head - that’s the best way I can think of to describe it, and yes I know how it sounds - said “you are going to die” and then either “today” or “here”. The meaning I understood was that I was going to die either on that day, or on that trip.

Nothing like that had ever happened to me before, and it scared the Hell out of me. But then I thought about it for a moment, and I just said: “No.”

I did end up getting sick on that trip. I had a bad cold, visited a Chinese hospital, got some powdered herbs that I put in hot water and drank every day, and got better after a few days. But I didn’t die.

I thought about that weird experience today, because how I felt in that moment when I said “no” is kind of how I feel now. We - those of us who care about freedom, who care about bodily autonomy, and who are damned if we are going to leave the world in this shape for our kids to grow up in - are up against some of the most powerful forces in the history of humanity. If they want to lock us all up, or shoot us all, they are capable of doing it.

But there is no upside to not fighting them - just as there was no reason for me not to say “no” in that moment to the gloomy premonition. If it was true that I was going to die, then saying “no” to that couldn’t possibly make it any worse. And that’s kind of where we are now. If we don’t fight this thing - and it is a thing - now, and it wins, if it gets the power that it wants, then we lose everything that matters.

So that’s it - that’s my story from a Shanghai that doesn’t exist anymore, for a world with a shaky future. I’ll be posting more, sporadically, in between emptying boxes and learning my way around this new place.

Thanks for your patience!