Dental Care, Dental Tourism, and Humanness

There was an excellent article in the Huffington Post this morning about “dental tourism” which is well worth reading. It’s about USAers going to Mexico to get dental care that they could not afford nor find in the USA, but also has pertinent words about medical tourism in general.

I have already written a post about going to Mexico for dentistry, but have found such a good dentist in Canada – Dr. David Mady in Windsor, Ontario, only 200 miles away - that I no longer need to go to Mexico.

Getting good dental care in the US, particularly if you’re poor, is excruciatingly difficult and expensive. Dental insurance is pitiful and I often see people here in Dayton, Ohio, who just have all their teeth pulled out because they can’t afford dentistry.

I have often wondered how a millionaire could enjoy his yacht and still be aware, as he must be, of all the children who have tooth pain in his own community. How can he do it?! Everything is known and remembered and is permanent, despite attempts to evade or deny.

But what touched me most about the HuffPo article, despite being on a specific problem that appalls me, is the last paragraph quoting one of the dental patients who travels to Mexico from the USA for dentistry:

“Those guys are professionals. They work quick. They work as a team,” Rodman said. “They’re just as nice as they possibly could be. They treat you like a person, you know? You’re not just cattle run through there.”

Doesn’t that last sentence just ring your bell? “They treat you like a person, you know? You’re not just cattle run through there.”

The solution of every social problem I have encountered seems to me to require that we deepen our humanness – by which I mean our ability to see a situation from the Other’s point of view. I taught a sociology course for many years entitled “Contemporary Social Problems,” and that was the hard lesson of it for me.

Florence Nightingale "Cassandra"

Florence Nightingale's 1850 essay entitled “Cassandra” has received an immense amount of scholarship.

It's about the absurdity, horror, evil, and counterproductiveness of trying to exclude women from full life, which I believe basically to be a form of mass murder.

The essay is concentrated, passionate, deeply insightful and intelligent, and based on experience.

The version which I have just read is about thirty pages long, from The Feminist Press. Strangely, I have been able to find only a very few brief excerpts and abridgments online, even though it was written in 1850.

I think that this essay contains all the essentials of the problem, the problem of the devaluation and exclusion of women, the problem which I think is the most fundamental, important, problem in the world.

Here is just one short passage that struck me strongly:

We set the treatment of bodies so high above the treatment of souls, that the physician occupies a higher place in society than the schoolmaster. The governess is to have every one of God's gifts; she is to do that which the mother herself is incapable of doing; but our son must not degrade himself by marrying the governess, nor our daughter the tutor, although she might marry the medical man.

But my medical man does do something for me, it is said, my tutor has done nothing.

This is true, this is the real reason. And what a condemnation of mental science it is! Low as is physical science, that of the mind is still lower.

Women long for an education to teach them to teach, to teach them the laws of the human mind and how to apply them - and knowing how imperfect, in the present state of the world, such an education must be, they long for experience, not patch-work experience, but experience followed up and systematized, to enable them to know what they are about and where they are “casting their bread” and whether it is “bread” or a stone. (p. 39)

Is Trump A New Low or Has It Always Been Like This?

My friend thinks Trump is a new low, what with caging and separating children, the constant lying, the fear-mongering, and all that. Pinker and Gates and people like that think life is getting better. But I myself think that it’s always been this way.

I grew up in the USA during 1950’s and remember what high school and Pennsy Prep were like. I remember my university and graduate schools being essentially poison.

I saw what the USA did to me for opposing the Viet-Nam and Iraq invasions and crimes, and I remember the assassinations.

The “Howl” resonates from long before Lear to the Now of organized crime, the medical industry, consciously enshrined selfishness, the “elites.” Two twelve-year-old girls on my street alone got pregnant this year and that very bright ten-year-old girl from the next street who visits me once in a while loves books but has never been to a library in her life.

Sarah Silverman came the closest in her Thanksgiving Monologue that I can come to seeing a positive development – the fact that Trump is so absurd that more people than ever can see The Great America for what it actually is. And then there is Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and all the uncounted millions who support them and wish them well and thank them.

I look at this now, as an old man close to death, and feel that Trump is not a new low, but that it has always been like this. Perhaps that is in accord with what I think is the answer to the theodicy question: Namely, evil exists so that we can know, appreciate, the difference.

Visions of the Blind

Once in a while I come across a few lines in my reading that just resonate throughout my being, and I record them in my note book, and find them inside me ever after, with warmth and joy and light.

It happened this last week while I was reading a scholarly article about whether or not people who are blind from birth have vision during out-of-body experiences. (They do!)

The article itself is memorable but what struck me most inside it was the testimony of a blind-from-birth lady of what she saw while she was out of her body. The authors of the article interview her and write, p. 111:

“... she then "rolled out" to find herself lying on grass. She was surrounded by trees and flowers and a vast number of people. She was in a place of tremendous light, and the light, Vicki said, was something you could feel as well as see. What the light conveyed was love. Even the people she saw were bright and reflected the light of this love. "Everybody there was made of light. And I was made of light. There was love everywhere. It was like love came from the grass, love came from the birds, love came from the trees." Vicki then became aware of five specific persons she knew in life who were welcoming her to this place. Debby and Diane were Vicki's blind schoolmates, who had died years before, at ages 11 and 6, respectively. In life, they had both been profoundly retarded as well as blind, but here they appeared bright and beautiful, healthy and vitally alive, and no longer children, but, as Vicki phrased it, "in their prime."

Now, every syllable of that rings with me and the thought of sharing it with even one other person feels like heaven, too. And even beyond that, comes the vision that my friend Colleen is there. Now.

Colleen Large and Me, Victoria, BC, Summer, 2018.

Some Meta Remarks, Particularly on The Generals and Norman Morrison

The ending of the Old Year and the beginning of the New Year is always a special time for me. There is the excitement of wondering what the New Year will bring, wondering what presently-unimaginable thing I will be looking back at exactly one year from now.

Perhaps I can post more articles on this blog during the coming year than I did during this past year. I would like to do that.

The reason I didn't post very much during this past year was that I was out upon the land most of the year, in the USA and Canada. I rented out my home in Ohio early on, then took off, at seventy-seven years of age, to see what I could see for a year, while I was still able. I saw a lot, connected to a lot, and survived it so remarkably well that I am going to try it again for an other year.

Helen Keller said: “Life is either a daring adventure or it is nothing.”


There are just so many topics that have preoccupied my mind recently that I need to write about some of them, particularly the subject of psychopathy (generally meaning sociopathy, anti-social personality disorder and even malignant narcissism) and the subject of Near-Death Experiences. I have been reading recently in these areas and am just astonished at how much has been done in them in during the last twenty years, never mind forty years.

I have also been astonished to see that two of my blog postings over the past year which have received the most “hits,” the most read around the world, have been my review of Thomas Hicks' book, The Generals, and my article on Norman Morrison.

I wrote those two articles right out from my soul, very much expecting that there might well be only one single soul out there in the rest of the whole world who would read them or understand them. I knew that I spoke the truth.

I also did absolutely nothing to promote them, nothing to draw attention to them. And yet they are two of my most popular, most-read, articles.

Amazing. Provoking.

“Fear: Trump in the White House” by Bob Woodward

I was travelling, camping, talking with people across the Canada, when Woodward’s book came out in August of this year. Every bookstore I visited was sold out of the book. “It’s freaky,” said the bookseller in Owen Sound, “We sold out the first day.”

There was great interest, due to Woodward’s

reputation as a truthful, informed and courageous reporter. He uses a tape recorder, and has “access.”

But what I was looking for even more than the reporting and quotes was his insight into Trump himself. He uses a March 31, 2016, quote from Trump at the beginning of the book just before the Note to Readers:

“Real power is – I don’t even want to use the word – fear.”

He draws his title from it and uses it a couple times later in the book, but does not seem, to my eyes, to develop much of that insight into Trump. Perhaps in his wisdom he just assumes that ordinary people like me will be able to see from all the reporting in the book that Trump works and plays with fears.

But where I could really see what he thought was in the last paragraph of the last page of the book, where he writes of John Dowd’s resignation as Trump’s lawyer. Dowd, very experienced and astute, supports and likes Trump and was aware of his limitations, resigned because Trump would not take his advice.

Woodward’s last paragraph reads:

But in the man and the presidency Dowd had seen the tragic flaw. In the political back-and-forth, the evasions, the denials, the tweetings, the obscuring, crying “Fake News,” the indignation, Trump had one overriding problem that Dowd knew but could not bring himself to say to the president: “You’re a fucking liar.”

It’s not clear to me that this fatal flaw directly relates to the”Fear” of the tile, but it may. Woodward reports two pages earlier Dowd as saying something that gets a little closer to the fear idea. He is telling Trump that he doesn’t have to worry about being impeached and says:

They’re not going to impeach you. Are you shitting me? They’re a bunch of cowards, the whole town. The media, the Congress. They’re gutless.

So perhaps that was the fear that Woodward was referencing – the fear, the true cowardice, within not just Washington but the US public itself.

Canadian Comfort

I’ve been in Canada for the last three months, taking a break from my life at home in the USA. Certain realities catch my notice quickly here.

The first thing I notice when I cross the border into Canada, which I do several times per year, is that my body feels more relaxed here.

I also feel hopeful. It’s as if the very fact that there is a place so close by which is not Hobbesian, not basically violent, reaffirms that feeling.

What I call “the Hobbesian view” brings a sense of urgency and doom with it, and a dismissal or diminishing awareness of the fundamental power of love and cooperation.

I notice here at least twice a day, every single day, some act of helpfulness or kindness, whereas I almost never see such things in Dayton, Ohio.

These observations may seem naive at first, and I am very aware of stereotyping and the weakness of national character studies. But the reality is nonetheless there and cannot be dismissed.

I’ve given a lot of thought over the years to the game of hockey, which I myself consider to be brutal, yet here seems to be considered honorable or even symbolic of the country in some way. I admit that I haven’t figured it out, that it seems anomalous to me. Even mature women here admire the game. Perhaps it’s one way of dealing with the inevitable reality of brutality in life, in the world.