Free Radicals (expanded version)

Like a maple tree, our bodies grow from a seed; gathering stellar dust and organic nutrients found in their planetary environment into a trunk and limbs, in order to fashion an individual that is also part of the web of life. In the case of a human being, we know that our bodies can feel, ponder and even walk out of the garden where we have come into our individuality.

Some of us pause, wonder, and feel indebted to the whole in which we experience ourselves as an integral part. Others, if they ever did pause and wonder, find themselves dedicated to filling up their baskets with things that are not nailed down so firmly that it isn’t worth their trouble to pry them loose. These people are like what are called “free radicals” in a human body, which become detached from the overall healthy functioning and cause diseases like ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis) to ravage the host.

We live in a society in which this kind of freedom (the freedom to roam ‘free’ among the commons and scoop up everything not nailed down, as if they were tokens in a game of Monopoly) has drastically curtailed the freedom of human beings and maple trees to grow from seeds to a healthy maturity, in unison with the web of life in which they live.

I had a good friend, Foster Hall, who lived and died with ALS and I think of him when I think of our society suffering, as his body suffered, from the presence of free radicals.

“Free radicals are missing an electron from their outer shell. That makes them unstable, so they go and steal an electron from the molecules in your skin cells, or from your blood cells or from wherever they can.”

That seems a fair description of the lack of balance that allows a few billionaires to steal so much that Musk ‘owns” more than what 50% of what all Americans together own.

Now that Earth’s bounty is being stashed away in private baskets to such a radical extent that Earth herself is crying out in distress (like free radicals stealing electrons from neighboring molecules until the host dies), sane people everywhere must wonder if anything can be done about this self-immolating economic insanity.

Unfortunately, ALS remains an uncurable, terminal disease of the human body. And it appears that the prevailing economy, which allows Trump and his minions to roam through the commons taking billions along the way, is creating a comparable momentum that damages everything it touches. Perhaps we have to acknowledge that both ALS and the prevailing extraction economy are both fatal conditions, which we can diagnose but don’t know how to cure.

Yet Foster lived his life on terms he created through his boundless appetite for life, even though his time on Earth was shortened and physically curtailed by the ravages of ALS. I’d like to ponder whether his example provides any insight applicable for the rest of us.

I’ll have to go back in time, since Foster died five years ago and for the last several years of his life, he could no longer move any part of his body as a way to communicate. But during the years in which we founded Friends in Time and worked together on behalf of others with ALS (and MS), Foster was the one I followed when we visited people who were home-bound by their neuromuscular diseases.

Foster not only inspired others who were struggling with the challenges of their disabilities. He could come up with solutions that were possible because he could put himself inside the situation of the person we were visiting. I still remember one visit with a man who had been the New Mexico Tennis champion and who could now no longer move his arms. Ian wanted to use a device called a spirometer without requiring his mother, with whom he now lived, to hold it for him. Foster came up with a simple solution that not only allowed Ian to exercise his lungs whenever he wished to, but also returned some independence to his life. Foster had me (the one who could lift his arms) use Velcro to attach the device to the edge of a bureau so that the tube and mouthpiece were within reach of the lips and teeth of the tennis champion, who could still use his legs to scoot his wheel chair next to the bureau.

Foster lived inside the condition of people with ALS and could act on behalf of those who—like him—wanted to remain as active as possible, whatever came their way. But there were also those who just didn’t want to keep going. Their daily, irreversible losses must have felt too momentous to try to resist, and their remaining capacities not worth prolonging through the kind of heroic effort that Foster maintained.

The discouragement that I witnessed in people with ALS, who didn’t want our help (for instance, to be set up with a computer and “augmentative communications” equipment, which Friends in Time offered for free), seems especially relevant now. I am subject to this kind of discouragement as I witness the apparent impunity with which the free radical billionaires exert their will over our world. It really can feel that our virtual-reality-extraction economy is the private playground of people who are the engineers and custodians of its hidden workings. This feels so like the way that a fatal disease like ALS takes control of the communication and distribution systems operating within the body, allowing free radicals to steal oxygen before it can reach the cells that die without it.

What can we do about this discouragement? I know that I am not alone in feeling it.

Joanna Macy, along with other strong, caring souls, tells us that we need to grieve the losses we are witnessing in our world. As a survivor of suicide (my son, Jon, died seven years ago), I am familiar with the need to acknowledge loss and grief so that we don’t spend our remaining life-force trying to act as if their suicide never happened. Grief poetry and psychologists alike remind us that there are realities we have to go through if we are to come out the other side relatively free to live again; while our efforts to evade our new reality guarantees that we will remain haunted by it.

Yet, I can’t seem to figure out how to apply this truth to the situation our world and society are currently in.

Perhaps the difficulty I have in finding a way to accept what is happening politically, socially, psychologically, educationally and economically in our world is that the free radical analogy for the robber barons in charge is more than a metaphor. Perhaps our society really is suffering from a terminal disease. Perhaps–just as free radicals keep stealing electrons from healthy molecules until they kill a human being’s body–our society will continue consuming the products whose clear-cutting extraction methods are destroying land and sea, rendering fish species unable to propagate, land unable to provide the nutrients needed for anything to grow in it, and living beings starving.

If that is the death sentence that I have been unwilling to accept, then I really need to try to learn from Foster’s example.

Just as the family and caregivers of someone who dies after their battle with ALS are free to live their own lives–perhaps with better karma than those of us who have been exempted from such a severe challenge in our own lives–perhaps the ones who come after our present generation of human beings, will have earned a better future. And I hope that animals, when they are no longer condemned to live in tiny cages, standing in their own feces, will live long lives alongside this new generation of human beings; beings who will know not to scramble after unhealthy products that allow the free radicals to keep ransacking what has been given to all who live here.

We can hope that this new society will protect all its members, human and animal, while cherishing the open space that lets everyone be free to be themselves in this living world.

And if our present generation–on whose watch the world has been sent reeling into the daily catastrophes of war and climate collapse, as politicians and legislators ignore the realities that everyone can plainly see–should experience a spontaneous healing and see a new path forward, then what a gift of grace that would be.