Having spent more than my share of time in the hospital, I really do think it changes you. I joke in the ER at their attempts to protect my bodily dignity. It's always check your dignity at the door. The RNs get it, having seen just how humbling it is to end up somewhere that you have no control over pretty much everything, no matter how much they try to help patients. It really is an awakening in terms of life events where you just have to go with the flow and try to get through the experience.

My dad recently had a serious hospitalization for a perforated appendix, the scourge of our family (as in me, my mother, my uncle, my cousin, my grandfather, and now he had appendicitis, which defies medical explanation for causation) and his experience was another reminder that time is not on our side. The scars that it leaves, physically and mentally, aren't things that I've successfully left behind. Every time a family member lands in the hospital it inevitably dredges up the memories that I've buried but not reconciled and having him suffer the exact same affliction simply underscores the trauma even more.

I guess what I'm saying is that it's been hard right now. I'm trying to work through the flashbacks and nightmares, but it's been a rough few weeks. The concert was a highlight for me but the day to day has been an exercise in subsisting. My dad's ok, thankfully none of us have died from the appendicitis although we all had a close shave, so I have to think that things will improve from here. God, at least I hope so.

Although the first band I ever saw was They Might Be Giants, Counting Crows holds the top spot for bands I’ve seen the most. Once in NC, once in MD, and now this is the fourth time in NYC (FarmAid on Randall’s Island, Central Park SummerStage, Roseland, and Ford Amphitheater in Coney Island). I also missed two others I had tickets to, one in Montclair which was canceled, and one somewhere else in NYC that I forget.

Yet I will always remember that they were the first concert I ever cried at, back in NC, since the performance was so raw and their songs spoke so much to the pain in life as well as the joy. That’s what drew me to their albums in the first place, back when albums were the only way to really know an artist, not just iTunes downloads. Much like Joshua Tree from U2 was a masterpiece, August and Everything After was a revelation.

What also set them apart was the variation in live shows. Mediocre artists simply replicate their songs on stage, beat by beat. Spectacular artists add in extra verses, riffs, solos, and draw you in even when you don’t know what lyric’s coming next despite knowing the album by heart. Adam Duritz has always done this every set I’ve seen him perform, and every time it adds to the experience by leaps and bounds. It’s coming straight from his penchant for poetry that happens to be set to music.

As an unexpected bonus, and emotionally enhancing the night, the journey to the show was an experience in freedom I feel that I haven’t had in a very long time. I stopped at Nathan’s, bought two chili dogs and a lemonade for two homeless guys, and got a lobster roll afterwards for myself. I walked across the Coney Island boardwalk with an almost full moon overhead, saw the improvements made since Sandy and smiled. I took pictures that let me capture parts of these moments, and gave directions to follow me to two lost drunk girls heading for the concert. I watched lightning flash over the Brooklyn Cyclones stadium, and when I got to the Amphitheater saw another amazing, funny, and heartfelt performance. I left during Holiday in Spain as an encore.

I was free, something I think you can’t appreciate unless you’ve been somewhere you don’t have those seemingly simple options, and having my recent hospital stays makes me appreciate it all the more. It’s the unique ability of Counting Crows to evoke that pain and the joy inherent in the war called life which gets me out of my apartment and to Coney Island to share those feelings. It’s that opportunity to feel which allows me to be able to give to others and feel good about it despite my own issues. To have that success in the simplest of things, and surmount my own difficulty to be in moments like these is priceless in my mind. I had a purpose and a destination worth the mental and physical effort. No wonder they hold my top concert spot.

I just caught Good Night, and Good Luck on TV and as much as it resonated back when it came out, it’s even more powerful now. Edward R. Murrow was an incredibly brave journalism professional that reported all during the London Blitz and later took on Senator McCarthy. During the McCarthy era he even changed what the national conversation was by exposing the hypocrisy and lies suffocating the country with fear.

Trump seems like the new McCarthy. Not only is it about fear, but the inability to be criticized, the personal attacks thrown at anyone daring to question him, and the complete inability to put anything in context on a national or international stage which seems to define both of their “reigns” so far. Have we really gone back to that isolationist fear-mongering stage?

In general I don’t often discuss politics, mostly because part of my family is staunch Republican so there are just areas where we have to agree to disagree. However, the rhetoric for a blanket fear and hatred of Muslims sounds more like going back to denigration of an entire group regardless of the people involved, and injuring far more innocent lives than those who would be active terrorists.

Yes, Communism (more like dictatorship, not the original philosophy) had its time and place in the Cold War as a threat. But more Russians and Chinese in that same period were imprisoned or killed by their own governments in their own countries than in any other countries elsewhere in the world. Any type of national paranoia as an ideology, leadership asking citizens to turn in other citizens for crimes that are as simple as attending a meeting somewhere, or reporting neighbors for real or imagined slights tends not to end well.

We were on a national, pointless witch hunt that luckily Murrow helped stop by allowing the public to see the actual footage of Congressional hearing failures, Constitution violations, and McCarthy’s ineptitude. In comparison to a totalitarian society, the people persecuted in the Communist countries weren’t nearly as lucky, since anything reported as anti-government was so severely repressed that those targeted didn’t even know they were on “the list” until they were kidnapped or arrested and most often killed. He would have been dead the night he made his first broadcast asking for answers.

I’m not saying that Trump would bring about a new order where we would be a country without due process or some sort of rationality, and hopefully our defense of the freedoms we hold under the Constitution and the government would win out. But the repetition of indiscriminate hatred and desire to penalize people for simply being a certain race or to restrict their freedoms due to a vague “danger” is what I never want to see. Many of those brought before Congress by McCarthy never recovered careers, some committed suicide, and it brought an awful toll to the nation that never should have been asked for, let alone paid.

I greatly respect Murrow for having the courage to call out that this is wrong, injurious to the nation, and will cause damage for many years for those arbitrarily caught up because it fed on a wrongly directed fear. To stand up and speak out against that took true conviction that this was a necessary step to prevent further damage. We need someone like that now who can gain the ear of the nation and make sure we don’t follow the same path of fear to regrettable consequences. After all, as the saying goes, those who don’t remember history are bound to repeat it.

This movie is a great reminder of one of our major mistakes in allowing fear and hatred to rule, and should be required viewing pre-election this year.

So Good Night, and Good Luck.