2025 Life Logs, Day 198: One Million Rising, Making Good Trouble, Lyme Disease
Date: Thursday, July 17, 2025
Weather: Partly Sunny; High Temp 80, Low 69 degrees
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA
One Million Rising, Making Good Trouble, and Lyme Disease … What do these things have in common? The answer is me. I attended the One Million Rising Zoom class last night, I went to the Making Good Trouble rally at the Bourne Bridge rotary late afternoon today, and this morning I found out that the inevitable finally happened. I tested positive for Lyme disease.
I’ll start with the bad news first. I live on Cape Cod where the chances of getting Lyme disease are extremely high. I have a dog that is protected against Lyme, but who probably carries little tick friends into the house all the time. I try to be careful, but I don’t use any tick repellent. So I finally have Lyme disease. Last Thursday, I discovered a tick attached to my lower abdomen area. The next day I discovered two huge red circles on my upper leg and lower abdomen where I had removed the tick. I went to Urgent Care on Friday afternoon and since I had been in one month prior with another tick ‘incident’, they decided it was time to do a tick panel. This is a blood test that shows what tick borne disease you might have. The final results are not in yet, but I tested negative for everything except Borrelia, common called Lyme disease. I have been on doxycycline since last Friday and will find out next steps once the full panel results are in.
Last night I joined 20,000 people on a Zoom call and another 80,000 on YouTube and other streaming options for the first of three classes to teach us how to build the number of people actively resisting what is happening to our democracy. It is called One Million Rising and is sponsored by Indivisible. More than 5,000 of us that watched last night pledged to hold face-to-face training meetings in our towns. The next class is on the 30th and then I’ll be ready to host classes here in Falmouth.
This afternoon I tuned into the weekly Indivisible Zoom meeting which included a guest speaker, Erica Chenowith. She is an American political scientist, a professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and a brilliant strategist. She says the first step in getting the whole of society working towards democracy is to figure out how to get people to show up. Like other experts I hear, she says building the ranks with people who are willing to show up is the first step. How we do that is through initiatives like One Million Rising.
And then this evening, I showed up. I went to a Good Trouble rally at the Bourne Bridge rotary. I’ll talk more about that in tomorrow’s log.
