Stephan: A few hours ago for the first time in a week I was able to get out of bed and go further than the six steps to my bathroom, and the first thing I wanted to do was to write all of you and thank you for your concern and healing intentions. I am not sick with an illness like Covid or the flu. About three weeks ago the specialist physician who was treating a wound on my right foot, prescribed two antibiotics that set in motion a series of toxic cascading reactions that disordered my entire system and finally left me as sick as I have ever been in my life. On Monday he wanted to put me in the hospital for C-Diff, which was very scary because my late brother had developed C-Diff and it led to his being hospitalized for weeks. It very nearly killed him, and he never really fully recovered. Bascially, as I understand it C-Diff is a breakdown in the body's entire digestive process leading to dangerous toxicity, which sets in motion a whole series of others things. Instead, I turned to my primary care physician, Fernando Vega, who set me on a more holistic approach that seems to be working. That and the loving care and nursing of my wife Ronlyn is what kept me going. Plus your healing intentions. For days I did not eat anything, just forced water, and have lost a great deal of weight, which I did not need to do. If things continue to go well I hope to be able to resume SR on Monday, but had to get out of bed to come to my office for the first time to thank you. Your many emails, and texts, not all of which I have even been able to read yet have meant a lot to me, are deeply appreciated, and I thank you.
Stephan is very sick with a negative reaction to a medication prescribed by one of his physicians. He is bed-bound and unable to work, and will not be able to do Tuesday’s SR. He asks that you hold him in healing intention.
Stephan: Culture is the product of the aggregate of large number of individual choices. An American culture is changing, as Charles Blow lays out. This what is driving the christofascist MAGAt world mad. The generation coming up have different priorities and aspirations.
Credit: David La Spina/The New York Times
When I was young, everything in society seemed to aim one toward marriage. It was the expectation. It was the inevitability. You would — and should — meet someone, get married and start a family. It was the way it had always been, and always would be.
But even then, the share of people who were married was already falling. The year I was born, 1970, the percentage of Americans between the ages of 25 and 50 who had never married was just 9 percent. By the time I became an adult, that number was approaching 20 percent.
Some people were delaying marriage. But others were forgoing it altogether.
This trend has only continued, and we are now nearing a milestone. This month, the Pew Research Center published an analysis of census data showing that in 2019 the share of American adults who were neither married nor living with a partner had risen to 38 percent, and while that group “includes some adults who were […]
