I spent most of my life avoiding the healthcare profession … not from antipathy but from the awareness that others almost always needed access far more than I did. That changed for me at the end of 2015, although I still avoid bothering any of “my” healthcare professionals for anything that isn’t fairly clearly urgent and I’d like to maintain as low a level of contact with doctors, clinics, hospitals, and other outposts of the profession as much as I can. That said, most of the doctors, nurses, and other professionals in that line of work I’ve dealt with have been professional, competent, and (within normal limits) friendly. This doesn’t mean I don’t take Arthur Chrenkoff‘s concerns quite seriously:
Not actually the official symbol of Britain’s National Health Services … probably.
If it’s up to our health experts – doctors, scientists and researchers, administrators and bureaucrats – we will never return to the “old normal”. If it’s up to our health professionals, COVID restrictions – border closures, lockdowns, masks, social distancing, etc. – will go on and on in the foreseeable future. The advent of COVID and its never ending mutations and strains might, in fact, mark the end of our life as we knew it and herald the “new normal”, ever under the shadow of a rolling pandemic.
Why? Because our health experts and professionals are enjoying it too much.Before you get outraged at my imputation, let me assure you I don’t mean the medical-industrial complex out there is hooting with joy and cracking up bottles of champagne to celebrate every new variant. By and large – and not being able to peer inside the souls of men and women I prefer to give them benefit of the doubt, though you, my reader, might have a different opinion about just how large in “by and large” is – they are honourable people with best intentions at heart. They want to save lives, prevent needless pain and suffering, minimise risks and banish sickness, save the grandmas from being killed and save the young from unforeseen long term consequences of what for them is generally a mild infection. These people take their Hippocratic Oath seriously, even those who are not medical practitioners and so not explicitly bound by it.
No, by enjoyment I really mean the satisfaction of what ancient Greeks called thymos, and which can be broadly translated into contemporary realities as the the desire to be valued and the desire for recognition.
What war is for a soldier, global pandemic is for a health professional – most might never wish for it, but it is what they have been preparing for their whole lives. It’s their time. It can be frustrating being a health expert during ordinary times; you are just one of many different voices competing to be heard about your priorities, opinions and your vision for a better life for all. Now, you are centre stage. You are important and respected. People, from a next door neighbour to the Prime Minister or the President, seek your guidance, listen to you, act on your input, appreciate your expertise. You finally have influence, real influence, if not actually a degree of control. What you say goes. The media hang on your every word, punters out there are your captive audience, leaders feel more or less strongly obliged to follow – after all, you’re the expert, you know what you’re talking about, you have the answers. Finally, you count, you really count, big time. Years of hard study and years of hard work have come to fruition, previous frustrations fall away. Millions of people appreciate your contribution and are grateful for your public service. You are a hero who is trying to keep the dragons at bay, save people from harm and death. This is not your everyday toil, patient by patient or a demographic by demographic; hell, this is the entire population, the whole humanity. There can’t be anything bigger or more important than that. Professional and public rewards are nice, but it’s not even about that – it’s the satisfaction of job well done, of having made a difference, of having made an impact, having done good.
Once you have tasted and experienced this God-like power to order entire societies according to your best designs, once you acquire this unparalleled position, with its influence and its quasi-saintly public status, do you really want to give it back and retreat again into the previous obscurity when hardly anyone listens to you?
We have, at least, 18 months of data to peer at by now. I think that any rational human can see that the pandemic didn’t turn out to be the Black death, but instead is more like a bad flu, and not even the worst flu such as the 1918 pandemic. I feel that the over reaction by the health care community and the politicians were driven by a generation of “safety-ism” people who can’t let their children walk to school alone. They have no perspective on risk management, it appears, and what is worse is that the politicians are just mortgaging the future to support this “zero covid” approach. It is materially wrong, not sustainable, and frustrating to deal with. The whole mask mandate thing tops it off. Prior to 2020 the literature on masks and viruses was pretty well set. Masks don’t stop a virus from getting in, and they limit spray of spittle but don’t do a thing about aerosols escaping the mask. It is covid theatre, and it makes people feel good, but does nothing to prevent the spread.
Comment by Dwayne — August 12, 2021 @ 13:42
Safetyism is the besetting sin of western culture in the current year. I’ve got a post scheduled for tomorrow that looks at that particular ailment among the Millennials. It’s specifically about the “maternal” orientation of many young people of that demographic and it’s reinforcing my already naggging concern that we (late boomers and Gen-X’ers) have been failing to provide proper masculine role models to our kids and even for our grandkids to balance off the “Grrrrrrrrrrl Powrrrrrrrrr!!!” the entertainment world has been overdosing on for thirty years or more.
Comment by Nicholas — August 12, 2021 @ 13:56