I look back on the Crazed Covid Crapola era

September 4, 2026

Remember that day, March 11, 2020, when the entire world was suddenly brainwashed by linguistic bullshit?

 

Whenever I walk into nearby Kroger, I’m confronted with a large sign advertising FREE FLU SHOTS. Yuck.

Kroger’s flu sign reminds me so much of those “storied” covid years, starting in 2020 precisely on my dead doctor dad’s birthday, March 11, when the corporate media suddenly mind-controlled the American public into total F.E.A.R. (false evidence appearing real), via a world-wide rollout of weird phrases. . .

Geez! Just reading through the above list makes me feel weirdly, psychically and emotionally, contaminated.

If I had been “alienated” from society before, that rollout and its poisonous aftermath trajected me into the stratosphere!

It’s been going on seven years, and I still see people with masks driving alone in closed cars. It’s rare, but it does happen. Meanwhile, we endured the “fifth amendment Fauci” display 113 times. But then, what did I expect? How many people in this life are capable of admitting mistakes? Am I?

I still wonder what my doctor Dad would have said about that massive cultural psy-op. Given that he was utterly against what he saw coming, the integration of independent physicians into a “medical system,” I have a sense that the two of us — who had devolved into total polarity, with, for example, him lambasting me for “wasting your good brain” on astrology — would have been utterly sympatico in this arena.

Meanwhile, after many decades of working holistically with my own health (while remaining totally “insured”), at one point this year I decided to see if I could re-enter the medical SYSTEM. Just for a check-up. What a fool. Still stymied. To hell with it.

 

 

Gloria Steinem Death prompts reflections on my own personal “origin story” as a “feminist”

September 3, 2026

Yesterday, Gloria Steinem, 92, died.

We “second-wave feminists” are exiting this plane.

Which pulls me back into remembering . . .

1964. I was married to Patrick, who was pursuing his MA in Architecture from Harvard. Not quite 22 years old, with two small sons, we had just arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I was, as usual, in the doldrums. What had become of my life? It was obviously not my life; pregnancy had “forced” me to marry (given my then allegiance to strict Catholic upbringing), and basically, I personally saw no future that was actually mine. I was a functionary, period.

Enter Nancy, the wife of another Harvard student, classmate of Patrick. She and I began to have coffee together, in the mornings at my kitchen table with a view of the Charles River, 20 stories below. I could and sometimes do, date the beginning of my real life to those morning coffee dates with Nancy.

It didn’t take long before we were speaking intimately, finding ourselves digging deeper and deeper, divulging personal feelings about our lives, the direction they were taking, our mutual frustration. Indeed, we were, without consciously realizing it, beginning to see our lives sociologically, in terms of the “roles” we were playing.

Note: we weren’t “blaming” men. That way of twerking the situation, and the inevitable politization, polarization, was NOT what we had in mind. Our men were in “roles” too. And, likely, none of us, male or female if we really looked deeply, were happy about it.

I had never thought about “roles” before! Nor had Nancy.

One might say now, that we were actually seeing how we were “plugged into the matrix.”

Or: one might say that we were seeing, getting an actual perspective on, the “framework,” the “overton window” through which we perceived the external world.

Get it? This was a HUGE DEAL. Anytime we step outside a limited frame, to notice the frame itself, we open to infinity. Or we can. But very people realize this. It’s too scary. So most people just place each frame within another larger one. But what if, instead, we use that opening to let go of limits of any kind?

 

Glorida Steinem was one of the pioneers who played a role for us. But Betty Friedan, at least for me, her book, The Feminine Mystique, was my own personal wake-up call.

Her femous remark, “the problem that has no name,” haunted me. I read this book before we landed in Cambridge, while we were living in the D.C. area, right after it was published, in February 1963. I was still completing my B.A., had one child already, with another on the way.

There was no one, I repeat, no one, with whom I could discuss this “problem.” I was alone, and desperate for company.

 

My morning coffees with Nancy, in 1964, without our realizing it — all we knew was that we were so glad to connected in a real way, stripping off the masks — were among of thousands of tiny, but it turned out, extremely fertile seeds that evolved into “the women’s movement.”

Our two-person connection was soon joined by “consciousness-raising” groups everywhere.