Comfortably Numb? – the need to change

The Fylde Memorial Arboretum and Community Woodland is but a hop, skip and a jump from our home. Dylan and I often take a walk there. It is a place to simply pause and reflect on what the memorials mean. It is a tranquil place. A place that remembers the courage and sacrifice others have made on our behalf. It recognises a range of wars and conflicts, but conversely is a place of peace. There is a poignancy about the arboretum that I find hard to describe in words. It is the only one of its kind outside of the national arboretum in Staffordshire.

One of the memorials commemorates those who fought in the Sino-Japanese War. This was a war such as we are currently witnessing in Ukraine and Gaza and other parts of the world. It was a cruel and bitterly fought war. Most of those fighting came from Australia, New Zealand, Holland and Britain. Much of the conflict occurred in Burma, a key strategic country for the Japanese armed forces at the time. Sadly, many of those fighting the Japanese were captured and forced to work on constructing what became known as the Burma Railway.

Over the course of just one year, prisoners of war were forced to build some 258 miles of track. They did so in an incredibly harsh tropical environment.  Many thousands of prisoners lost their lives due to the intense heat of the jungle which they were unaccustomed to, the long hours of labour (often 18 hours a day) and inadequate access to food and water. Diseases such as dysentery, cholera, malaria, ulcerated sores and other skin conditions were rampant.

Older readers of this blog will perhaps recall how this forced labour was portrayed in the David Lean’s film adaptation of the book by the French author, Pierre Boulle ‘Le Pont de la riviere Kawai – The Bridge over the River Kwai’. It’s a film still worth having a look at. Burma is now known as Myanmar. On the 28th March this year, the country experienced a 7.7 magnitude earthquake. To date, over 3,000 people have died, as a result, and nearly 5,000 have been injured. There are many hundreds of people still missing.

Rescue efforts have been severely hampered by the lasting effects of four years of civil war in the country. Myanmar has been an almost closed society for many years, but the ruling military party has asked the international community for help in dealing with the disaster. The international community has started to respond. It is not the first time they have done so. They did so in challenging the treatment of Aung San Kyi. She is a Myanmar politician, diplomat, author and more latterly, a political activist. She was born just four months before the end of the Sino-Japanese War and the ending of World War 2.

Whilst she hasn’t always enjoyed a trouble-free political life, Aung San Kyi is credited with successfully moving Myanmar from a military-led nation to one that has begun to take its first few steps towards democracy. The personal cost to her, however, has been immense. She spent some 15 years under house arrest and is currently in prison once more.  In 2022, on a range of what appear spurious charges, she was sentenced to a further 33 years’ imprisonment (later reduced to 27 years). The United Nations, UK and US have remained resolute in condemning her incarceration, which they denounce as being politically motivated. I feel impotent to help her, other than raising awareness of her plight.

I say this because despite all her troubles in 1990, she was awarded the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought and the Nobel Peace Prize one year later. Aung San Suu Kyi used the Nobel Prize money, some £1.1 million, to establish a health and education trust for the Myanmar people. Just to perhaps put that into perspective, the NHS costs £500,000,00 a day to run.

Last week, I was back in the room with Sir Jim (Mackey) and my fellow NHS Chairs and Chief Executives. The mood was different to that of our earlier 13th March meeting. The former was all doom and gloom. Last week’s meeting was more about recognising the need for change. Folk were up for making a difference and doing things differently. And we need to. Covid19 showed how we could do things differently and why we needed to be more open to embrace different ways of thinking. 

As a nation, we need to spend more time on both primary prevention (getting people to live healthier lives), and also secondary prevention (not always turning to the NHS for help as a first response to health-related problems). Thankfully, we don’t have the awful imperative currently facing people in Myanmar, to change and work collectively to relieve widespread societal suffering. I think we have perhaps lived in an age characterised by folk being comfortably numb accepting that the State would always be there to help with whatever problems they might face. Today there is a new reality. In it, we all need to help each other to embrace the emergent challenges and work together as communities to support each other. Sadly, like resolving the troubles in Myanmar, this might be easy to say and more difficult to achieve. But try we must.