Waiting Room

On Monday morning, Joyce and I sat in the waiting room at the Seidman Cancer Center up near Chagrin Falls. I was due for some blood tests + my monthly injection of Xgeva, a drug that helps with bone strength (some other anti-cancer meds I'm on can weaken the bones). (Regular visitors to this blog know that I've been battling metastatic prostate cancer since late in 2004. It's moving into my bones ....)

As I've written here before, there are few places more humbling than a cancer center. People of all ages, all races, in all stages of illness, fear, despair.

The chairs in the waiting room are arranged in rows, facing the TV set (don't get me started!) and the Keurig--two of our most necessary contemporary companions, I guess.

Anyway, I was sitting on an aisle, and I felt (before I saw) a wheelchair roll up near me and stop at the row right in front of me. Its occupant was an older woman--older than I. A woman not well. She had rolled up beside a woman she did not know (this became quickly apparent) and started asking her questions about the center, about procedures there. Someone new, I was thinking.

The other woman--about my age?--answered her questions quietly, then asked the older woman how she was doing. And she started to weep. "I'm so afraid," she said.

The woman in front of me reached out and squeezed her arm, mumbling soft words of comfort. Stroking her forearm.

And I was thinking: These women know nothing about each other--and everything. And then a political thought: And how would they act if one were a Trump supporter, one a resister?

Exactly the same, I thought. Exactly the same.

Cancer--I can tell you--reduces us physically, but it also seems to restore some of the humanity in us, the humanity that, especially these days, we seem to have misplaced.

My Facebook feed these past few months--and especially these past few days--has been electric with hostility. Virtually all of my Facebook friends are former students--from the mid-1960s to the spring of 2011 (when I retired for the second time!). And they are as divided as the rest of the country seems to be. Anger and resentment enflame their words.

What some of these friends don't know (or don't care?) is that they're blasting me. Since the first time I could vote (mid-1960s), I have voted for Democrats. I am moderately liberal (if that makes any sense). I believe in minority rights, in unions, in women's rights, in freedom of speech (even when it offends me). I believe we should not impose our religious beliefs on others.

And just about every day I read posts about how horrible I am--well, not me specifically but people who share my positions. About how I'm a curse on America, about how I should leave the country if I don't like it, about how--if I believe what I do--I'm not even a "real" American.

What is all this vitriol? (And, yes, I know: It flows from both sides.) Why do we hate those who disagree with us? Why do we lump then in a group that we then label as something less than? Condemn them?

I don't "get into it" on Facebook. It's pointless. I don't think I've ever read a stream that concluded with this: You know, you're right! I'm going to change my thinking.

No, the exchanges tend to get more and more hostile--and "friends" become enemies. (Maybe that should be a new category on Facebook?)

Changing our minds is hard--and most of us want no part of it. We'd rather cling fiercely to what we already believe, consult sources we already agree with, ignore (or brand as "fake") any evidence that contradicts our positions. And this is so easy to do in our cyber-age, our age of slanted news networks and publications. It's hard and uncomfortable to think critically, to be skeptical.

I know it's Pollyannaish* to think that we can, you know, just all get along. But why can't we? I love my family members who don't agree with me ... I socialize with the "enemy" in the coffee shop. And those former students I loved when they were twelve and thirteen? I still do. Can't help it--too much affectionate history, I guess. And so I think we need to remember that each of us has a face, a human one.**

And so I wonder: Have we forgotten?--do we even know?--that we're all in that waiting room? That tears are in our eyes? That we are afraid? In despair? And that we so much need one another? And when we feel the illness winning, will we really care about who did what on a football field? Or will we reach for the closest human hand?



*from Merriam-Webster: Pollyanna, heroine of the novel Pollyanna (1913) by Eleanor Porter
** Obviously, we make exceptions for extremists, don't we? Nazis? Anarchists? Fierce haters of every stripe? And this, of course, makes all of this so much more complicated.