Here's the Bones, Where's the Meat?

This never occurred to me. Not once. That Americans are against Health Care because they think it actually costs tens of thousands of dollars for a broken arm, hundreds of thousands for a complicated birth, millions for cancer treatment.

I’ve had these same drops before living in the UK. They cost me seven GBP.

It’s the exact same drug, same steroid, same strain of antibiotic. But somehow the US gets away with charging $100 for a generic non brand version of a drug which is easy to create and widely used. It’s downright robbery, but also a form of eugenics through poverty and class warfare. You keep the poor poor by making sure basic necessities remain unattainable and then you make it seem like the norm so no one fights it.

The rest of the world is not like this.

I’m in the exam room, post diagnosis and with pill bottles in hand, and in walks the one nurse I’ve been able to speak to the entire time. She pats my hand and tells me (and this is verbatim—I will never forget this conversation as long as I live), “I’m so sorry. We had to run those tests, and they are expensive. You don’t have insurance so you will have to cover the full cost.”

I start crying.

She continues, softly, as if telling me someone has died, “It’s going to be three hundred.”

I start sobbing, certain I’ve misheard, certain that I would be absolutely fucked, broke and going into debt in a foreign country. “Thousand?” I clarify.

Her entire demeanor changed, and she looked at me as if I had sprouted four extra heads. “No,” she says, “euros.”

I went to the UK for graduate school, and being there for that long meant I had to buy insurance for the duration. 18 months was something like £800 (this was in the early 2010’s). I, being American, figured “oh ok, that’s the premium and if I need serious medical care, I’ll get charged deductibles and all other kinds of fees at the time of care), because that’s how it works here.

Some time in the early part of that winter, I got incredibly sick. I’m immunocompromised, so sometimes that happens. But being a broke ass grad student in a foreign country, and dealing with unrelated financial abuse from family members, I figured I couldn’t afford going to the hospital. I figured I’d go to their version of Walgreen’s (Superdrug, and yes that is really that store’s name, load up on cough drops, some OTC meds, and try to ride it out as best I could.

One of my friends in my program came over to check on me and offer help. When she got to my room and saw how sick I was, she asked why I hadn’t gone to hospital. I was near tears and said I couldn’t afford it.

This is when I suspect my friend knew she was dealing with an American who was ignorant of how socialized healthcare actually worked, and realized that I couldn’t really be reasoned with. So she said, “I’ll pay for it- let’s go.”

Off we went to hospital, my friend did the talking bc my voice was so shot. The receptionist said, “as you don’t have an appointment, you may need to wait quite a bit.” I heard that and figured 5+ hours was at least what I was in for.

23 minutes later, my name was called.

My friend went back with me, bc I was pretty out of it. The nurse leading us back apologized for the “huge wait” because having a sick patient wait “nearly half an hour just for medical care” was unacceptable. I was stunned.

The nurse and doc asked some questions, looked at the medical records I had on my phone (bc I was a foreigner with very little medical history in the country), did a few rapid tests. The whole time, I’m seeing an old-timey calculator ringing up charges and freaking out… even though my friend said she’d pay, I was so conditioned to believe this would cost a fortune.

About 30 mins later, the rapid tests confirm I have both bronchitis and pneumonia. Doc writes me a prescription for some serious heavy-duty meds. My American ass is thinking, “ok, so now I go home, wait for 4 days for the pharmacy to fill it, then go get it.” The doc tells me that there’s a pharmacy counter on the way out, and I can stop there to collect the meds before heading home.

I’m skeptical but thank him. My friend gets me to the pharmacy counter. I give my name and hand over the paper, fully expecting to be told that it’ll take days to fill. The pharmacist turns around, pulls a bag off the shelf, hands it to me. Because my meds were already filled and waiting.

Me: you had them already?

Pharmacist: of course- there’d be no point in sending you home without medication, that’s why you came here. To get medical help.

Me: that’s so fast? (I am very confused)

Pharmacist: well, we expect people to have these illnesses at a higher rate this time of year, so we do our best to stock up on our end.

Me: that’s so nice? Also, what do I owe you?

Pharm: sorry, love?

Me: what do I owe you? For the medication? And the visit. All of it, how much do I need to pay?

Chat, her whole fact changed. She realized I didn’t just sound funny because I was in respiratory distress. I had an American accent. She reached over and patted my hand.

“Love, that’s what the health insurance is meant to be for. You’ve already paid for this. We’re not taking extra money off you, we don’t do that here.”

The entire visit was less than 2 hours, absolutely free, and everyone worked to be as efficient as possible in the goal of providing comprehensive healthcare for me, the patient.

Once I got home with the meds, I did actually recover pretty well (and relatively quickly, as far as I’m concerned). I talked to the friend after, and she admitted that she knew it was going to be free, but that I wouldn’t or couldn’t understand that in the brain fog of serious illness, so she said what she had to in order to get my stubborn (and terrified of bankruptcy) ass to the doctor.

GONCHAROV (1973) dir. Martin Scorsese

“It funny because for many years people thought Goncharov was the main antagonist of the film, after all, he’s the one everyone’s out to get, right? But it seems people are starting to understand that in actual fact, it is time that is the main adversary in this story. There’s never enough of it and that torments a lot of characters, especially Goncharov, because he’s fighting so desperately to find his place in a world that is so keen on keeping him ostracized.”

for anyone who doesn't know, wheelchairs are very expensive and insurance will usually only cover one every five years or only cover a new one if your needs have changed significantly. the expense is especially true for anyone who has complex positioning needs (i.e. requiring tilt/recline/elevation in power wheelchairs, general group 3 power wheelchair needs, one arm drive for manual wheelchairs, etc.). as with so many disability related issues, those most impacted by their disability are most at risk of harm when adequate support is out of reach.

This is a huge thing in birds where males get the vast majority of the attention since they often have more visually striking plumage. I personally think the female red-winged blackbird is the most commonly misidentified bird in North America because of this problem.

A side effect of this phenomenon is that a lot of the time bird art depicts only males, so I LOVE when I get to see belted kingfisher art and be like omg it’s her!!!

Some icons are reproduced below:

An earlier depiction (c. 2020) of Apollo as a girl clad in a simple tunic and playing with other children. Figures are smiling and the image is brightly colored, indicating a celebratory outlook toward knowledge of the future.

I don't think Harry Potter is the biggest symbol of JKR's bigotry. I think the most flagrant sign of that was how she responded to critics. I watched her become radicalized in real time. I watched how she doubled down on her racism when she was called out for the ways she promoted her tragically mid fantastic beasts movies. I watched her chase marginalized teenagers with a double digit follower count off of twitter for daring to criticize her thought process, and no one with any kind of power standing against her because she was the one who was paying them. This isn't to say Harry Potter is without flaws. This is to say she really didn't give a shit about that. Getting rich and powerful is a hell of a drug, and she had enough sycophants that she had no reason to care about what her critics were saying.

She was convinced that she was a martyr; a voice for the unheard; a leader for the ages, so of course her detractors were the bad guys. And I think we should take this to heart. We should see this as an example of how easy it is to get radicalized; if you think of yourself as a paragon of virtue, you are going to think that whatever you see as good and right is an objective fact. Most people don't know this, but the majority of terfs start out as trans allies. You are not immune to propaganda! You are not immune to falling into dangerous ideologies!!!

This is why the most important thing you can do as an activist is to listen. Do NOT think you're above being wrong; do NOT develop a god complex; do NOT form an identity out of being right all the time. Involve yourselves in the groups you claim to speak for. Listen to trans women; share resources that help trans women; familiarize yourself with the diversity of experiences that trans people have and the struggles they face.

#but in the wake of her going off the deep end people have twisted that into#''she was always a hateful bigot and hp was actually a nefarious attempt to corrupt children into sharing her bigotry''

#and like#no#she was once a well-meaning fairly progressive normie who just didn't think too hard about her own background assumptions about the world#and then she got famous and then she got older and she got radicalized by people who targeted her on purpose because she had#enough money and cultural caché to turn into real influence

#and she was completely unprepared to defend her worldview from people who were telling her that her knee-jerk reaction was always right#and anyone who said otherwise was not only a jerk but also a dangerous villain who wanted to hurt her and other innocent women and girls

#and y'all are not nearly as immune to those tactics as a lot of you think you are

#fuck the ghoul that jkr has become but the story of how she got here is not the story of a crypto-fascist who made it into mainstream#it is the cautionary tale of a normal decent person who fell down a bad rabbithole and got swallowed up by a hate movement

#re-writing history so you can pretend she was always evil won't protect you from sharing her fate

#you have to put in the effort to interrogate your own biases and your own knee-jerk disgust reactions#you have to take a minute every so often to step back and CHECK if you have ended up in an echo chamber bubble and touch grass a little

#because radicalization doesn't happen overnight and it can happen to any of us#it's very easy to let yourself believe that you're Correct and anyone who disagrees with you is Obviously Evil

#you have to force yourself to double-check that notion from time to time and to hang onto EXACTLY what it is that makes the other side wron#you can't just say ''well they're conservatives so obviously they're evil'' because that is how you wind up at ''these men are hurting youn#''girls by PRETENDING to be women in order to take advantage of the protections feminists have spent decades fighting for! and we shouldn't#''even be surprised really - men are awful after all. all they do is TAKE from women and PREY ON young girls. we all know this from our own#''bad experiences with men. and we were right to hate them for it! you see!!'' and whoops now you're a fucking terf