No going back

 I've been consuming a lot of historical fiction recently, discussing it with other nerds, and all of it points to one thing:

You cannot heal to-first-principles what has been utterly broken. You cannot un-burn a forest. But you can use the ashes as fertilizer to grow something better.

We were talking about Babylon Berlin (which is beautiful and dark and amazingly well done, well worth watching),  and the fall of the Weimar Republic, and I think it has some strong messages for the incoming administration. 

We can immediately reverse policies, but if we blindly put things back to how they were, given the damages done in the world in the intervening time we're going to find perverse incentives in record time and it'll be egg on the face of everyone involved. We should be taking this time to see what stagnant patterns have been torn down by this disaster of a government, of a pandemic, of a year, and see what we can build back, better.

I am heartened that that's the actual campaign title of the incoming Biden administration. We cannot make America great "again" for it was never great. But we can take the things we've lost and use them to fertilize a greater good and a greater equality.

The world has changed

All I knew
This morning when I woke
Is I know something now  
Know something now I didn't before 

I woke this morning to the sound of a conch shell somewhere on the block, blasting three times. In prayer or thankfulness, I believe. It wasn't until a half an hour later when we heard honking and cheers that we woke up enough to roll over and look at our phones and read the happy news.

It's like rising from beneath a suffocating load, after four years.

In November of 2016, I alighted from Caltrain into the arms of someone who did not understand why I was so upset, but who held me and told me (wrongly) that everything would be okay. Even my LJ ramblings from the inauguration show how terribly bad things had got so very very quickly.

Now I feel like I need to make a to do list for him, for them, for the world, of all of the things that need to be fixed and set right.

We need more voter re-enfranchisement; protected voting rights; to un-gerrymander. (This last one we could legislate algorithmically, I feel.) We need to write down and make a legal requirement all the niceties of presidential behavior that we took for granted: they must disclose their taxes, they must divest themselves of their business assets, they must have a transition plan and team, they cannot appoint cabinet members with a clear conflict of interest, they cannot appoint supreme court judges with less than six months left in the term, they cannot. We need to undo four years of batshit insane executive orders: roll back halts on diversity training, stop making statements about the preferred architecture of federal buildings, disallow ridiculous tariff changes and begin negotiations with our trade partners. We need to put into constitutional law some of the items that have been otherwise only legal precedents - marriage should be a right not a forbearance. We need to fight COVID, rejoin the Paris Agreement, tackle the giant holes punched in our government and begin to mend our relationships with the rest of the world. We also need to mend our relationships with the rest of America - stop demonizing the red states and their voters, and make sure that their concerns are heard.

Every item that concerns me, there's a plank for that. (But the anxious doer in me is still making and revising to do lists that nobody in power will ever see.)

But... it's a welcome change from the nonstop grind of pain and fear of the last four years.

---

In other news, the third time was the charm. My appointment at UCSF's Spine Center with Dr. Berven left me with a sense of relief so intense I cried in the office (and alarmed the poor student who'd been working with me - she thought I sounded so in control of everything, hearing that I was looking forward to a surcease of intense pain was a surprise. I'll take it as a compliment.) We're going to try to get my insurance to approve a hybrid approach: two titanium discs between C4-C5 and C5-C6, and a single-disc fusion between C6-C7. This means we're putting a plate only between the vertebra that are functionally between my collarbones, and which normally have the least range of motion. The hope is that, if approved, this approach means that I'll have almost-normal range of motion when we're done.

The surgery pre-op reading is terrifying. I guess I need to write a will beforehand? Any neck surgery is scary but damn, "we could nick your carotid artery and you might die" is... eye opening. There's always the possibility of nerve damage, but also damage to the tendons, to the vocal cords, the trachea and esophagus - difficulty speaking, breathing, swallowing. There's a possibility that it goes poorly, and that I come back in six months, a year, five years, to get it re-done. There's a possibility that it doesn't work, and they have to do something else. I'm scared, but also... I know myself enough to know that I'm getting bored at my current employer, and if I jump I may not have insurance, or good insurance, where I land. I'd like to have this taken care of.

Some part of me feels like I ought to get Lasik after, and just be the best modern cyborg miracle I can be.