i am obsessed with this old man who walks with a mug of coffee in one hand and his princess of a chihuahua on a leash in the other each morning to the Glen Park BART station to get his morning paper. i had been wanting to take a picture of this flower for days and was lucky enough that the old man walked by just as i was taking the picture so you can see the little dog in the distance on the left. she raises her feet with each step and looks about nervously but is so devoted to him. it's beautiful. and he could get his paper delivered, but he doesn't. he takes her for a walk and gets his paper just to take in the morning scene, or so i imagine when i narrate his life as i walk behind him everyday.
this flower reminds me of this article by Nancy Kreiger called "Epidemiology and the web of causation: has anyone seen the spider?". It talks about old conceptions of disease causation as lacking an agent - African-Americans have higher rates of blood pressure but, she says, quoting Charlotte's Web, "where's the spider?" - as in - who is creating the social conditions that create this higher blood pressure? who is invested in and benefits from the structural racism that causes this higher blood pressure? surely, it is not just a matter of what she calls biomedical individualism, of people making poor food choices. so she proposes a model that looks a lot like the shape of this flower as a way of thinking about how problems have root causes that branch out and cause other problems, until finally you can't see from where a thing once came. it struck a chord in me many years ago when i first read it (thanks to my friend and mentor Lisa Moore at SF State) and reinforced my commitment to the upstream orientation of public health: rather than pulling people out of the river, let's go upstream and see who is pushing them in...
this flower reminds me of this article by Nancy Kreiger called "Epidemiology and the web of causation: has anyone seen the spider?". It talks about old conceptions of disease causation as lacking an agent - African-Americans have higher rates of blood pressure but, she says, quoting Charlotte's Web, "where's the spider?" - as in - who is creating the social conditions that create this higher blood pressure? who is invested in and benefits from the structural racism that causes this higher blood pressure? surely, it is not just a matter of what she calls biomedical individualism, of people making poor food choices. so she proposes a model that looks a lot like the shape of this flower as a way of thinking about how problems have root causes that branch out and cause other problems, until finally you can't see from where a thing once came. it struck a chord in me many years ago when i first read it (thanks to my friend and mentor Lisa Moore at SF State) and reinforced my commitment to the upstream orientation of public health: rather than pulling people out of the river, let's go upstream and see who is pushing them in...
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