Hello my fellow progressives and healthcare providers,

Thought I'd let you know I'm going to the Netroots Nation Convention (formerly Yearly Kos) in Austin Thursday-Sunday.  I've been planning it for a long time and am really excited.  There are a lot of great panels and discussions being offered and an opportunity for me to meet some of the people I've been blogging with for the last year.  If you have any issues you'd like me to explore, write about, relate to the other bloggers or to some of the politicians who will be there (Nancy Pelosi, Howard Dean, Wes Clark, Rick Noriega, and more), let me know.  I've posted a link to the convention program below.

In facing future scenarios that involve:

•an increase in possibility of extreme weather and storms,
•a critically transforming climate,
•a money economy disrupted and threatening collapse,
•an energy economy based on declining supplies of oil and other non-renewable fuels,
•an observable diminishment of water and food resources,
•a threat of pandemic disease occurring in an ever destabilizing social environment,
•where the medical emergency establishment is understaffed--undercapitalized, unprepared, (see)
•the possibilities of mass migrations in the first world countries mirror the horror in Darfur...  

You guys may be beginning to know me as the shrink who has to work with herself about the global stress I feel when facing the inevitable consequences of climate change and energy/resource depletion. These effects will eventually force us into an unimaginable life style change if we don't begin to act now. I writhe in my own frustration knowing that we could minimize the coming meltdown by just joining together with others to envision a new way of living.

...it will wash over a populace in panic!

How may we even begin to prepare for the panic that will occur when mainstream awareness of our most likely future scenarios begins to dawn? On that day, I want to have something in place! I refer you to my previous post: "Peak (Everything?) Stress Syndrome", and Peak Oil Blues (written by my new netroots colleague, the peak oil shrink), which will give you some background for making sense of this continued effort I'm making here, today. My intention is to bring more awareness and direction to these pressing needs by repeatedly giving voice to this topic in my writings.

My dream vision would be to set up a niche, a sanctuary for all of us who are having "peak everything stress syndrome". There are many folks out there suffering situational depression--symptoms of PTSD because of the "early" knowledge we have about the global crisis we are facing. By "early" knowledge, I mean we are advanced thinkers, we see ahead of the mainstream consciousness, and realize what the future will require of us.

As a psychotherapist in private practice, and as a stakeholder in the larger human community, I am participating in some upcoming training offered by the International Critical Stress Foundation on "Changing Perspectives on Disaster" and "Group Crisis Intervention". I am sure the community-at-large will need my skills to weather the upcoming storm arising from the combination of climate change, energy depletion, population glut, and economic disruption (what I'm calling the "Peak (Everything?) Stress Syndrome"). As individual and public awareness dawns (by degree or by cataclysmic proportions), we'll see varying effects on people of differing age and socio-economic status. The ensuing crisis will require debriefing and crisis management.

Yesterday, I was reading an article ("Making a More Perfect Constitution") by a professor, the director of U. Va.'s Center for Politics, Larry J. Sabato, who has spent the last ten years developing his dream of Constitutional reform and is publishing a book explaining his reasoning and his proposals. He indicated that such a process of reform (as is currently outlined in our Constitution) would likely be a ten year process. I commented that if we were to apply our energies to a ten year process of reform, it would better serve us to focus upon curbing the current abuses and excesses of corporate power, the henchmen of which are taking egregious liberties with our common good. Corporate interests have, over the last thirty years willfully and strategically infiltrated our government, our economy, our environment, our healthcare, and now are directing our military in an unlimited war with the Middle East for control of the supply and price of oil while we have been asleep at the wheel!

Although I understand political debate and editorial comment is your passion and an area in which you are honing your skills, my intention for writing this piece was not, in any way geared to initiate a debate of an adversarial nature. It was, on the contrary, more a venue for me to express my feelings of shock and grief about such an unexpected and unprecedented occurrence as the collapse of an Interstate Mississippi River bridge—an integral part of a highway and bridge system whose safety and maintenance I and most people in this country have learned to trust in the same way we were given to trust authorities and governmental leadership as children to be wise and responsible--dependable. It seems more and more in these years since the turn of the century, we have been forced to witness and adapt to disastrous occurrences far outside the range of normal or, at least, usual experience. We could at the least hope that those preventable disasters would be held in check by the authorities to whom we have entrusted our confidence and collective funds.

"My country ‘tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty
Of thee I sing.

Land where my fathers died,
Land of the pilgrim’s pride,
On every mountainside,
Let freedom ring!"

I saw the film, "Sicko" yesterday (July 2, 2007).  I went, thinking it would be another typical Michael Moore film, where the reporter advances paparazzi style upon his prominent prey, exposing the latter’s part in the perpetration of some seedy operation.  He would catch him at his worst—coming out to pick up his morning newspaper in pajamas, no make-up, and stumbling a little with a hangover.  His voice would be gritty, his mind foggy, but he’d soon realize he’d been bamboozled—you’d almost pity the poor guy, except you deeply despise his deeds.

Well, I have to say, the film really moved me.  Michael Moore stayed pretty much in the background in the scenes of the movie while narrating it.  He didn’t intrude on or embarrass in a big way more than one poor befuddled

Apparently there is some dispute these days about the source behind and the composition of the entity known as the "Axis of Evil". The phrase lives on in infamy for those of us who are still just as bowled over every time we hear it as when it first rolled flamboyantly out of Bush’s mouth in the State of the Union Address on January 29, 2002. And clearly, the intention and the force behind its fabrication, has not faded in the least. News is the Bush-Cheney team is still pandering war propaganda to the American people and to the world—this time in preparation for an all out forced regime change in Iran (one of the "big three" which includes Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, if you didn't know).

But because of a better informed and more skeptical American public, there is realization by the war-marketers that something stronger than  

Progressive thought, emotional intelligence, finding your voice