Maybe it’s all hype. Maybe the Covid 19 virus scare is a manufactured emergency. Maybe……………. However, I think we can learn some things from it that I bet, the families of those who have died wish we had all learned earlier.
- Maybe we need a new medical system. All those millions of people who don’t have medical insurance or who do have but, after paying their premiums, can’t afford to go to the doctor, will be spreading Covid 19 just as they spread the flu, strep throat, and a host of other illnesses that cause compromised people in our society to die. If those people could go to the doctor, would they? That would depend on whether or not they could get time off from work or, if they are children, whether or not their parents could get time to take them.
- We need for every person in the workforce to have sick time. When I was a young worker, it was a given that there would be paid sick time. I never had to worry about whether I could take time to go to the doctor or whether going to the doctor and then staying home until I healed would cost me my grocery money. In fact, when I was in the Navy, I went to the doctor without paying him, and if he gave me a bedrest chit and I DIDN’T follow it, I was in trouble! And, what about parents who don’t have sick time, so can’t stay home with a sick child? They send them to school to infect all the other children.
- Federal funding for schools depends on student attendance. Over the years, student attendance has become such an issue that if a student is out sick too many times (it was 9 days a year when mine were in public school) parents get a threatening letter from the school. This is one way to ensure epidemics.
- Personal hygiene has gone by the wayside in our culture. Bathroom breaks are scheduled in the public school, so if you sneeze and then blow your nose, there is no way to go to the bathroom to wash up. More families than not eat supper separately so the phrase, “Wash up, Supper’s on) has gone by the wayside. When I was a kindergartner, my teacher came into the bathroom during bathroom breaks and made sure every child washed up before leaving. I think that teachers don’t do that anymore. Potty training used to include washing up after using the toilet. It was an ingrained habit by the time children were able to attend school.
This is only a few examples of the way we’ve set up our culture in the last 50 years to ensure that illness is passed from person to person. Isn’t it time to change things? Isn’t it time for a decent medical model, a different work ethic, a better approach to personal hygiene? And, isn’t it time to do something about the economy (not the market but the actual economy that people live) so that parents can afford to take time off, feed their children healthy food, and be able to pay a doctor bill? HIgher taxes for medicare for all, doesn’t seem too bad if it keeps your child or your parents healthy. If you make over a million dollars a year, wouldn’t higher taxes make sense if it meant that other people could take time off from work to heal before they infected your children or your elderly mom? Maybe it wasn’t so bad in the 50’s when the rich paid more and the middle class were able to take the precautions necessary so it didn’t spread the flu so far and so wide that thousands of people died annually and we just considered that a fairly normal statistic. Instead, our intrepid leader is going to cut social security, medicare and medicaid. More sick, fewer seeing doctors for it and more spreading of disease. Maybe we could take a really close look at the flu statistics we keep touting and think seriously about how to bring those into a more compassionate set of numbers. 34,200 people died in the 2018-2019 flu season in the US alone. That’s a pretty significant number when it’s a family member who dies. Covid 19 hasn’t come up to those statistics yet, but what if it does? Will we change business as usual at that point? What not do it now?
Teri's Healing Tides 