I don’t do politics in my blog
posts, but it’s hard to read the news at present without being swamped by
endless election promises and propaganda. I don’t know about you, but the constant
so-called political analysis, claim and counter claim, the character assassinations
are becoming extremely tiresome and depressing. In fact in this house, we are totally fed up with with what is going on. Sadly, it appears whatever the choice
people will make on the 12th December, we might still end up with a
very divided society. And then there is the weather. Many people
last week had their lives turned upside down and inside out by the weather.
Some parts of the UK had a month’s rain in just one day and flooding was the
almost inevitable consequence.
Listening to the news and seeing the
pictures of those areas affected was heart-breaking. Whilst thankfully it has
never happened to me, it did to my best friend and the disruptive consequences
lasted for years. During last week, the devastation of past floods was re-played
and reasons sought for why there appears to be an increase in flooding. A
number of people were trapped in a large shopping centre in Rotherham. It is a sprawling building built on a flood plain, and it’s almost inevitable that if we keep
making planning choices like this, we will keep reaping the destructive consequences
of our decisions. The most often heard reason for these floods was global
warming and climate change, and what we were doing (or no not doing) that was having such
an impact on our weather.
Amidst all this debate came the announcement
from Collins Dictionary that the word of the year was ‘climate strike’ – (which
I think is actually two words if we are using strict Scrabble rules). Apparently,
the term was first used four years ago to describe pupils refusing to attend
school in protest over global warming. It is a term most often associated with
the young Swedish environmental activist Greta Thurnberg. Last September she
became the face of a world-wide series of demonstrations (involving 185
countries) protesting against the failure of governments to act on climate
change. The Guardian newspaper, reporting on a huge mural being painted on the side
of a building in San Francisco, yesterday described this remarkable young lady
better than I could: ‘At the age of 16, Thunberg has already reached the exalted
status of Nobel peace prize nominee, leader of a movement to reclaim the planet
for future generations, focus of Donald Trump’s mockery, and hero among
progressives and young people’ Now,
not many of the politicians currently vying for our votes can be said to be
worthy of such recognition.
As well
as ‘climate strike’ (which does look like two words) the Collins Dictionary
also recognised other terms including ‘non-binary’, indicating an individual’s preference
not to be identified as a male or female; ‘double down’; ‘influencer’; ‘hopepunk’
(apparently a TV genre); and ‘deepfake’. Now you may recognise most of these
words as well, but they are not something that I have heard crop up in conversation.
Something
else I didn’t recognise last week were the rationale behind the stories I read
in Rolling Stone and the New York Times about someone called T.I. (real name
Clifford Joseph Harris Jr.) who is a rapper, which allegedly is some kind of
music genre, and not something around a chocolate bar. It appears he chose to accompany his 18-year-old daughter to her
yearly health check-up. Now when I say accompany, this was not just driving his
daughter to the GP’s surgery, this was actually being in the room as the consultation
took place. I think this would have been outrageous enough, but it was revealed
he was there to ascertain whether his daughter was still a virgin or not. Not surprisingly,
his choice to do so, and talk about it, spiked a huge backlash on social media.
I don’t intend to add to his daughter Deyjah’s probable trauma at this
intrusion into her personal life, however she did use social media to ‘like’ comments that
called her father’s actions ‘disgusting’, ‘possessive’ and ‘controlling’. Other
commentators, those with real science behind their observations noted that
there is no such thing as a so-called virginity test. Have a look at this excellent story on the subject published in Friday’s Guardian newspaper (and
there are other newspapers than this one – honest!). Personally, I think T.I.
will come to regret the choices he made and the consequences that will follow.
And
finally, my last story from last week comes from the weekly Death Audit we
undertake at my hospital. We hold a belief that looking at deaths can teach
us lots about medicine and the care provided to individuals. Carefully
reviewing all death is as much about understanding the science of what has
happened as it is about understanding the human condition. The week before
last, a man in our hospital care died. Last week, his wife died with us. Grief
isn’t an illness, but it can be more lethal than most of the illnesses treated
by the good folk at the hospital. The so-called ‘Widowhood effect’, has been
found to double the death rates in the three months following the death of a
spouse. Men are more vulnerable than women. Clearly there is no health without
mental health. We can’t always choose what happens to us, despite what others (including politicians) might tell us is the case. The consequences of the choices we make are not always
predictable. Just as we should recognise that broken hearts aren’t just
metaphoric, we should more readily accept that sometimes the consequences of
our choices are not what we might have intended.
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