(Ballintoy Harbor, Northern Ireland)
It’s September. School is starting, and it’s time for the annual series of essays about “What I Did On My Summer Vacation.”
My summer vacation was mostly not vacation, but an intensive bout of teaching and travel in multiple places and various languages. So you may have noticed that I have not done a whole lot of writing over the summer. (Or maybe you haven’t, because you have a life and aren’t paying that much attention to me. I understand!)
At the beginning I had ambitions, maybe we should call them fantasies, that I’d be able to teach twelve-hour days and somehow squeeze in a commentary or two or a final chapter to my book The Movement We Need. But after the first few weeks, the illusion wore off. I realized my main priority had to be to do the work in front of me, stay healthy, and get enough rest and relaxation along the way to stay sane.
So I taught in Canada, in Switzerland, France, Ireland and Catalonia. I rode on planes, trains and automobiles–some of which I drove, even on the wrong side of the road with a stick shift! That despite, during our actual vacation, my husband’s extreme nervousness in the next seat over, which he expressed in extremely annoying ways: “Don’t pass that car!” “Just follow the slowest car.” “You’re on the wrong side of the road!” Well, occasionally I was on the wrong side of the road but not very often, and I didn’t hit anything! Plus our marriage somehow survived.
So, all in all, I had a productive summer. I truly love teaching live people in person face to face, and Europe makes that easier as they still have NGOs and government programs that support alternative education. In fact, there’s a refreshing sense I encounter in Europe that people still believe the government should do nice things for people. It was a relief, after months of Trump and DOGE dismantling every good thing our government once did, on the grounds that it should either become an arena of private profit or simply eliminated so that every penny of public money could be siphoned into the pockets of the morbidly rich.
I improved my French (I have now passed 1000 days on Duolingo and can sometimes almost carry on a conversation), I improved my Spanish. I saw beautiful places and inspiring projects, which I’ll write more about later.
But my most striking moment of illumination came on a rainy morning in Derry, when I stopped into a pharmacy to get some Tylenol—this predating the present controversy and in any case, my chances of being pregnant with a child who could turn out to be autistic, or pregnant at all, are nil. The pharmacist advised me that in Britain, acetaminophen is called paracetamol. I brought two packets up to the counter to pay for them. “How much is that?” I asked. “75 P,” he said. In U.S. dollars—approximately $1.02.
I nearly fell over. At my look, he gave me a kind smile. “Yes, we’ve had Americans here before”, he said. “They got a prescription over here, and, ha ha, they tried to pay for their medication! We don’t pay for medication in the United Kingdom.”
It’s not that I didn’t know this. In the past, I’d had to replace an asthma inhaler in England, and I did have to pay, but a tenth of the amount it would cost in the United States. Plus the pharmacist was extremely apologetic about charging me anything at all.
It was still shocking, a moment of radical awakening that I wish every American could experience. Why would a common medication be ten times more expensive at home than in Northern Ireland—scarcely the world’s economic power house? Where is that money going? Who am I subsidizing? And why are we putting up with this shit?
I flew home on September 11th, to find the news completely taken up with the murder of Charlie Kirk and all of its aftermath, including the canceling of Jimmy Kimmel. I haven’t said much about it, partly due to jet lag, but mostly because so much was being said that I truly felt I had nothing original to add. I believe murdering Charlie Kirk was wrong, both morally and strategically, although I doubt that his killer was thinking strategically at all. But that doesn’t make Charlie Kirk a saint or a good guy. He remains someone who promoted hate and intolerance. People shouldn’t lose their jobs for saying so, and the cancelling of Jimmy Kimmel is a warning bell of our descent into fascism. But today Kimmel is going back on the air, and that is because of public pressure and organizing. Thousands of cancellations of Disney subscriptions and the public outcry worked. Massive resistance made a difference.
If we can do that for Jimmy Kimmel, we could do that for our own health care, for medicine that doesn’t break the bank with its costs, for the preservation of democracy, for the end to the genocide in Palestine, for so many other factors of oppression. It’s time to rise up and demand a government that works for us and does nice things for people, because we are the people and that’s what we deserve.
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This post has been syndicated from Starhawk’s Substack, where it was published under this address.