Classes are going well. After the initial feeling of being overwhelmed, I feel that I’m starting to get my bearings. The good memory I inherited from my parents is helping a lot, as it has throughout my academic career. Also knowing a bit of Chinese, even as illiterate as I am, has helped tremendously with understanding many of the terms.

This stuff awes me. I haven’t started the pulse diagnosis at all yet, but we started learning about face diagnosis in our medical assessment class. The concept that tremendous amounts of valuable information can be found in minute microsystems is not new to me (there’s a Hermetic axiom: “As above, so below; as below, so above.”); but actually beginning to learn about these microsystems is very exciting. And learning that obvious facial features have meaning — and that it works — is, well, freaky.

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So after another week of memorizing details about the various meridians and a few associated points, learning about the vital substances, learning about the five elements, and practicing some qigong, my brain is pretty full right now. I’m taking the next few days to decompress.

But I feel really good about this school. It feels like a good mix of the features I wanted in a school: Small class size, eclectic curriculum, skilled instructors, and strong emphasis on the details of diagnosis and particularly pulse diagnosis. I’ve had a few clinic treatments and observed a few, and compared to other school clinics I’ve been at, this school is far more comprehensive in its assessment process.

Overall I’m quite content. But the past few weeks have seen a dramatic shift for me, in the direction of the intellectual, and I find myself paying less attention to my body, if that is possible. And that imbalance has a tremendous potential for severely hindering my progress and my health.

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I’m a week into my classes. So far, so good; we’re just getting started in the basics of things like yin/yang and the meridians. Nonetheless, already I’m beginning to feel vaguely panicky.

The reason, I think, is this contact with a foreign paradigm. I’ve succeeded fairly well at the science classes that I’ve taken in the past — and probably would have continued to do so if I’d wanted to — and I think success in any endeavor really relies on internalization. Well, it’s not only the academic classes that support the internalization of the Western scientific/medical world view, but also the culture. Any time someone talks about anything that relates to those fields, be it pregnancy, illness, massage, the environment, the weather, cars, computers — it relies on a certain underlying framework of language and thought, of linear causality, that we live and breathe because it is reflected virtually everywhere. And this paradigm is excellent at explaining the world and our bodies. But it is, in fact, just a world view, one perspective of many.

The Oriental paradigm is a different one, I’m just starting to learn. Simply discussing yin and yang forces me to slow down and reevaluate who I am and where I am and how I relate to the world, simply because by reading and thinking about such things, I bring them into myself, I begin to internalize them. But because it’s a very different way of relating to the world, I feel a bit overwhelmed by the surrender of my familiar points of reference.

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Malik Rahim, a veteran of the Black Panther Party in New Orleans, for decades an organizer of public housing tenants both there and in San Francisco and a recent Green Party candidate for New Orleans City Council, lives in the Algiers neighborhood, the only part of New Orleans that is not flooded. They have no power, but the water is still good and the phones work. Their neighborhood could be sheltering and feeding at least 40,000 refugees, he says, but they are allowed to help no one. What he describes is nothing less than deliberate genocide against Black and poor people.

New Orleans, Sept. 1, 2005 - It’s criminal. From what you’re hearing, the people trapped in New Orleans are nothing but looters. We’re told we should be more “neighborly.” But nobody talked about being neighborly until after the people who could afford to leave … left.

If you ain’t got no money in America, you’re on your own. People were told to go to the Superdome, but they have no food, no water there. And before they could get in, people had to stand in line for 4-5 hours in the rain because everybody was being searched one by one at the entrance.

I can understand the chaos that happened after the tsunami, because they had no warning, but here there was plenty of warning. In the three days before the hurricane hit, we knew it was coming and everyone could have been evacuated.

We have Amtrak here that could have carried everybody out of town. There were enough school buses that could have evacuated 20,000 people easily, but they just let them be flooded. My son watched 40 buses go underwater - they just wouldn’t move them, afraid they’d be stolen.

People who could afford to leave were so afraid someone would steal what they own that they just let it all be flooded. They could have let a family without a vehicle borrow their extra car, but instead they left it behind to be destroyed.

There are gangs of white vigilantes near here riding around in pickup trucks, all of them armed, and any young Black they see who they figure doesn’t belong in their community, they shoot him. I tell them, “Stop! You’re going to start a riot.”

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An e-mail from an EMT who rushed to New Orleans to help in the aftermath of Katrina. From New Orleans Indymedia:

As everyone can see now, the situation in New Orleans is only getting worse. People inside have been out of food and water for days. The million or so people who used to live in and around New Orleans now have no homes, no jobs, and no paychecks. I was in New York during September 11 and the weeks that followed and I say the following with complete certainty: this disaster is so much worse than September 11 that they are not even comparable. Maybe people are already saying this, or maybe it’s not a fashionable sentiment. Either way, it’s true.

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