I haven't said a word at Open Salon in several months, re-adjusting to life in The United States and Spokane, Washington in particular where summer just started a few days before the fourth of july. But this morning I saw one of Ms Emma Peel's brief exhortations to read a new contributor . . . and read this I have.

(The following can be found on Kevin Lee's blog as the last and very bottom comment on being cannon fodder in the "health-care system" wars.) . . . 

Mr, you and I are contemporaries; I'll be 59 on August 11th, and I know from what you've said that you must be that age too, or close to it. I'll tell you one thing, buddy; I hate the laicism, liaison between physicians who are STEADFAST members of the American Medical Association and drug salesman who are STEADFAST members of the Chamber of Commerce and corporate one-time or former biochemists who are now STEADFAST members of some grand nameless lobby whose STEADFAST financial contributors certainly include Phizer, Baush & Lomb, Proctor & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, etc., etc., etc. . . . And I'll just say one more thing here before I go to my own untended blog to let off some more steam (and there's a goddamned site more where this much has already come from!) . . . when I had my own asthma attack one night last week, at least a friend was standing near by yelling encouragement to me (well, not really yelling) "Suck it up, you gotta just suck it up, man." That sort of thing. So, after this bicycle enthusiast finally got to his feet he stumbled or staggered toward the gate which opens both ways, and he goes along the alley in a brief fit of mortal terror of losing his life to the bodiless grip of suffocation. Yes, it felt like I was being suffocated, as though someone were pushing a pillow down over my face. So, I KNOW how you felt, and how you feel whenever that happens: like you're 100 feet underwater, and someone has just shoved his hand into your stomach forcing out the last of the air in your lungs . . . and you still have to swim, swim up to that shimmering light called a surface.

Don Stacy