Eight Years Ago
(Biographical • )
Almost every adult American remembers where they were or what they were doing when they found out the World Trade Center had been attacked.
But as for us, we also will never forget the day before.
→ B.Dunn, Sep 10, 2009, 11 41 am
May 4, 1970
(Biographical • )
Exactly 39 years ago, I was sitting in the grass leaning up against the back wall of the high school gym, cutting classes along with a neighbor kid, figuring we’d bug out on the upcoming senior assembly because we were graduating no matter what at this point, so fuck ‘em.
The day up there was a lot like it is today down here – blue skies, pleasantly warm, spring in bloom. The sound of gunshots wafting gently toward us on the breeze. Only today down here it’s an anti-social neighbor shooting what sounds like an automatic rifle off his back porch, probably into the Brazos River, the better to make sure none of us get any fishing done. Up there it was something else.
“Nah, those weren’t gunshots,” my friend told me. “Maybe firecrackers. Maybe blanks. They wouldn’t use live ammunition.”
A lot of people said the same thing later. Sure they would, I always thought. Why not? What’s the point of calling in the National Guard and arming them with a bunch of wooden sticks?
The rest of the day was history, as it turns out. We had to go sit in assembly after all, because they dragged everyone inside to tell us that some college students had just been shot, and the radio was falsely reporting there were crazed hippie snipers on the rooftops. Then they posted all the guys on sports teams in pairs at building exits. I was assigned to the elementary school wing, where I was supposed to tell all the panicked moms coming to pick up their kids about the snipers, and how we recommended just staying in a crying, scared gaggle in the classrooms. The smart ones just looked at us like we were morons, pushed past us and went home.
I wasn’t on campus where the action was that day, and I’m not going to get into the history behind it, or the details. Although between my own minor related escapades and those of my friends – and my father, who was head of business operations including campus cops at Kent State at the time – I got plenty of details.
To me, the Kent State shootings are like the knee injury I got playing high school football at approximately the same time. They both were in their way watershed events for me, they both sucked and they’re both tucked away inside a memory box I keep somewhere in my head. It never seems to serve any useful purpose to reexamine them, but I still find myself doing so every few years.
The neighbor kid sitting next to me on the grass back then began turning into a raging alcoholic and serious drug abuser in the days and weeks and months after the shootings. I had problems of my own. In fact, townies like us who grew up there suddenly found ourselves awash in cheap, plentiful recreational drugs. I have no idea where they all came from.
Another bad president was in charge (Richard Nixon), another war was in progress (Vietnam) and, at least up there in Ohio, it was another period of extreme polarization (you were either a hippie or a redneck). But I can’t really say there were anything but superficial parallels between the politics or social phenomena then and now.
Me and my friends weren’t part of the deep-seated Country Joe and the Fish anti-war movement of the time. We were too busy being young and shallow and stupid and discovering everything for the first time. By the time they started drawing ping-pong balls with our birthdates on ‘em, Vietnam was starting to wind down and they were drafting fewer and fewer kids. My ping-pong ball had a high number. Your fate was a matter of random chance. It was our older brothers and cousins who paid the price for that war.
I think our general malaise back then stemmed from something simple: We had always just assumed we could do whatever the hell we felt like doing, but it turned out we were wrong. It turned out the same government that supposedly was out there deploying the troops to keep America free could also bring the troops to your hometown and shut it down if they decided to. And even though we traveled in and out of town for our little rotating poker games unimpeded by “marshal law,” living in occupied territory felt wrong.
I don’t have anything profound to say at all about the Kent State shootings. They happened mostly because of a comedy of errors and a confluence of randomness, fear and stupidity on the part of an organization of social misfits and several political and institutional leaders. It was bad for the country, it took a long time to get over it and there was no great lesson to be learned as a result, unless it is that cynicism and mistrust of authority are rarely ever misplaced.
→ B.Dunn, May 04, 2009, 01 26 pm
Last Chapter For Jeff
(Biographical • )
My brother Jeff died last week of complications arising from a shoulder operation, during which an Ohio hospital gave him a blood transfusion with hepatitis-contaminated blood.
He was a 50-year-old blue-collar rebel. He parachuted, flew planes and rode motorcycles when he was a younger adventurer.
He leaves behind a wife, a son and two daughters.
I haven’t been able to write a thing about this until now, and I still find I’m unable to say much. He was on a list to receive a liver transplant. Some doctor thought he was strong enough to be able to handle interferon in order to fight off the hepatitis before a new liver came.
He wasn’t strong enough. They took him to the hospital with a serious staff infection in his shoulder, which spread throughout his body. He got pneumonia and his kidneys failed.
It is extremely difficult for me not to believe that the American medical/insurance industry failed him if it/they did not kill him outright.
I still have work to do learning to deal with his loss, but it’s his widow and his children who will continue to suffer from this.
I hope he and I can put in a vegetable garden together someday if it turns out there really is such a thing as heaven, they have something approximating dirt there and they decide to let me in.
→ B.Dunn, Apr 02, 2006, 06 52 pm
Comments? [3]
Help for my Brother
(Relatives • Biographical)
When I was 9, my family lived in the little town of Salem, Indiana. I have a younger sister and four younger brothers, and one of them, Jeff, was an escape artist. Beginning when he could toddle fairly well, at age 2 or 3, he would constantly try to hike his leg over a little section of fence that separated the back yard from the front, and the street.
Usually he would catch a pant leg in the wire, and he’d be busted. But every once in a while he’d make a clean escape. Once he turned up at a gas station a block away. Once at a house farther than that, where he grabbed a dog by the tongue and got bit. Probably it made Mom crazy.
I figured he was bored with the back yard and was scouting for adventure. He was always first over the wall.
The day before yesterday, I found out Jeff is going to die unless he’s able to get a liver transplant. His liver has stopped functioning, the culmination of almost criminal medical negligence suffered upon him more than 3 years ago.
Jeff likes the outdoors. For more than 20 years, he worked as a linesman and a telephone installation and repair guy for a big phone company in Ohio. They tried to promote him a few times over the years, but always to a desk job, and he wouldn’t come inside. Consequently, he spent a lot of his time lugging ladders over his shoulders.
He developed rotator cuff problems, and his doctor recommended shoulder surgery. He had to be given blood during the procedure. The blood the hospital gave him was contaminated with Hepatitis. Jeff developed several physical problems. My view as an angry brother living far away is that his doctors put little effort into finding out what was wrong. Finally, after weeks, one of the doctors he’s seen diagnosed it as Hepatitis C.
By this time – three years ago – it’d caused serious liver damage. He was told there was a treatment available, but that his liver wasn’t strong enough to handle it yet. They told him his liver wasn’t damaged sufficiently to warrant a transplant.
He became increasingly disabled, and a few months ago he was hospitalized because he couldn’t control the swelling in his ankles. His doctor fiddled with some medication and after a few days he was released. Then he switched doctors. A blood test was recommended. The prognosis is that his liver has stopped functioning.
Before he can get on a list, he says, the new doctor has to certify that he isn’t drinking alcohol. Jeff enjoyed a few beers now and then, but hasn’t had a drop for three years, once he found out he had liver damage.
Now he’s in the hospital again, trying to control the swelling in his ankles again. And waiting to be “certified” so that he can wait and see whether a liver will be made available before he dies.
Jeff and the rest of my family don’t know I’m writing this. I’ve been told there’s nothing I can do. But I’m trying to keep my anger at bay – anger at the hospital that poisoned him and the uncaring insurance payment gobblers masquerading as doctors who couldn’t even be bothered to order blood tests to find out what was wrong with him until their negligence had made swiss cheese out of his liver.
I’m trying to keep my anger at bay by writing about what’s happened, and to ask for help on his behalf. Jeff, I hope you won’t mind buddy. What can it hurt at this point, huh?
Jeff has led a simple life since his early stint as escape artist. He worked for the same company for probably 25 years. He married a great wife and has been raising three young kids. And he likes to spend his spare time growing fruit and vegetables. Like me, he got the farmer gene.
He’s a good guy, salt-of-the-Earth.
And he’s going to die unless someone donates a liver and unless some doctor with the power of God declares that Jeff is more deserving of a new liver than the other 17,700 people in the United States waiting for one.
I don’t trust the medical bureaucracy; look what they’ve done to my brother. But what can I do? Not much, but a little: I’m going to find out how to become an organ donor. I had my driver’s license so dedicated many years ago, but when I moved to a different state, I didn’t keep up the designation.
When I find out how it’s done, I’ll post the procedure here.
Even if it doesn’t help Jeff, I want to encourage anyone reading to please consider designating yourself an organ donor. In death, we can extend and improve the lives of many people.
I’ve read the statistics, and my legitimate fear is that Jeff won’t last until he gets to the head of a transplant line he hasn’t been allowed to enter yet.
If you’re an organ donor, I’m soon going to ask you to designate your liver to Jeffrey Allen Dunn. That’s what I’m going to do, as soon as I find out how.
If you’re reading this, take a minute to cut and paste the text and send it to everyone you know. Maybe it’ll reach someone who can help. Tell ‘em it came from here, bobdunn.com You can contact me at bob-at-bobdunn-dot-com.
In the coming days I’ll tell you more about Jeff. You’d like him; he’s a good guy. What else can I do? I can’t just do nothing. So I’m asking for help for my brother.
→ B.Dunn, Apr 19, 2005, 10 24 am
Comments? [3]
