I’ve been trying to think of an appropriate metaphor for being able to listen to music again and it came to me:

Listening to music now is like listening to music for the first time after being deaf for six months.

I know, so simple. I keep having to force myself to stop listening and interact with the world outside. I do so reluctantly.

Weasel and I got Taking Liberties from LoveFilm recently and it did a good job of making us grumpy and wanting to change things. Unfortunately, neither of us are in a position to be arrested without potential serious consequences. So what can we do? Write a letter? Great, it’ll get read a couple times then binned. Perhaps this is the sort of thing the counsellor was talking about when she said it helped to get involved with bigger causes. Mayhaps I’ll write a few e-mails and see if there’s anything I can do for organisations like Stonewall or No2ID…

In a similar vein I had a long rant about the US government with BlanketGirl yesterday. The logic of giving away millions of dollars as bonuses to stimulate the economy while at the same time increasing taxes. Logic tells us it would be cheaper and much less hassle to take those millions and use them where you were going to use the increased tax money.

We also touched on the state of fear the media has created. A war breaks out and they’re on the scene before the diplomats. People are so scared they’re moving to communities with curfews. Imposing rules like that just create repressed and angry people who are going to snap in scary ways later.

This idea of punishing everyone with stricter laws to ‘protect’ us from a few nutters. Gunning down ones classmates is still a crazy act that the majority of the population won’t do. The majority who already follow the rules. They’re taking things away from everyone to punish a handful of unbalanced people.

It reminded me of the episode of South Park when Stan broke the dam. It was a parody of the government’s reaction to Hurricane Katrina – they were so preoccupied with finding the why behind the horrible tragedy that they didn’t help the people it was destroying.

Which explains a little bit why we live in a culture that is so fixated on having something to blame. Why we have so many frivolous lawsuits.

Speaking of blame, on my WG list we recently had a big discussion about the cause of WG. I personally don’t think there is a cause. I was fitter and happier than I’d ever been in my whole life when I fell ill. One man on the list says it is caused by some chemicals [e.g. darkroom development] or asbestos. They have offered a number of other suggestions like stress, silica, infections, a family history of autoimmune conditions or a combination of them.

When I said that none of those applied to me he said that I couldn’t know the contents of every building I’d been in. Which is fair enough, but what I don’t understand is that if it is something like asbestos, why isn’t WG more prevalent? Only eight people per million are diagnosed each year. I followed two sisters and literally thousands of people through my schools over the years, so I would expect more people to have WG or other AI condition.

Also, WG doesn’t hit a particular demographic or socio-economic class. It hits globally, any age, any gender with any number of symptoms. If it was caused by some outside source, how do we explain the babies or children that are diagnosed? Do we assume family history?

One woman said that she didn’t think she had a history of AI in her family but when she got diagnosed all these relatives came out of the wood work. That’s fair enough, but my family is very close and we love a good gossip. When I fell ill my Mom asked all my relatives to prey for me. So if there was one lurking somewhere they surely would have mentioned when I was diagnosed. BlanketGirl has a AI condition, but since we’re in the same generation I don’t think it counts as a history.

In the end I think we all mostly agreed that it was going to be some genetic predisposition to an AI condition that was potentially helped along by exposure to something nasty.

The only common link between us all is that we’re human and we have over-active immune systems. I think is it unproductive to try and find something to blame. We are better off taking care of ourselves and just accepting that this has happened and deal with the consequences as best we can.