Let us look at it from two sides. Good to be binocular, for right depth & field of vision.
First – War & Conflict. A Scoping Review article – on the Blog stream – of Scientific Articles from hardly a week ago this May 2024, in the Journal of Academic Child Psychiatry Reviews – on Interventions for Children affected by war, around the globe. There are just 200 million of them. Children just like ours. The Mothers are Nature’s best Isolettes, ’tis been said. But whether in utero, or in humming incubators in NNUs or just walking around among tents and ruins…in unsafe patches of the world – are they safe?
Second – more close to ‘home’, the Infected Blood Inquiry Report Release Meeting is just around the corner, due in London a week from now – on 20 May. Furrowed brows and sad eyes from a David Owens in 1987, smoke signals going up since more than 60 years ago it seems, from lambs even before. Not all Doctors and Researchers are ‘Goebbels nature’, but some ominous names come up… though none of their associates, minions, satellites, affiliates, penumbra of reflected glory – the poaching enablers. The Inquiry & Report – Recommended by ‘May’ a Jupiter’s orbit ago, and once postponed already. The Lambs, or their survivors – wait on. Some 40 years later. We like Public Inquiries. It feeds our curiosity, makes for light stimulation, morning teatime reading, and nourishes the legal machinery ineffably and dearly. We may remember or not – Colin, Laura, Jonathan, Phil….the list extends. Stories of Resilience burnt out, or lives themselves fizzled out, stories shredded out of sight and memory. Deserves more than Tissue, Cake, astutely bowed and tilted heads in taught pseudo-empathy followed instantly by amnesia and a ‘coming out of role’ with a ‘Phew’ ? I learn that four die every day. We treat Blood like ‘material (human?) resources’ …to be handed out like tobacco, paper & chocolate as once were underneath flags, while larger preventables rolled on unrelentingly – Causatives. Did William Butler Yeats not ‘ramble’ so eloquently: “The Innocent and the beautiful have no enemy…but Time.’
I wish I could sit awhile with Don McCullin – in shared silence. Images etched on my mind. Helpless shell-shock. I am told there are over 10 million HIV orphans worldwide – let alone the non-transfusion lambs. Responsible adults. Our eyes just lock, short-sighted, unfeeling, on a set of Isles – favourite landscapes. Else, we sigh about the Limits of Medicine. The latest BMJ has some titbits too, on Social Health Determinants. Makes for interesting reading on current events and debates. Michael Card’s song The Spirit of This Age … rings in memory’s ears. So True. I abstain… and choose – to appeal, work quietly, research, and hopefully cough up some (any) non-Band-Aid solutions? Not just ‘fill it, shut it, forget it’ – like fuel for passing thought? May we quip with a Steven Wright as he mused equally in irony once about ‘childlike innocence’ as about real-life public solidarity levels : “I remember when the Candle shop burned down; Everyone stood around singing Happy Birthday!’
Maybe it is right to be perturbed -i.e., ‘disturbed’ rightly – by such events, enough to care? Just musing – Yours, Achi – JohnJ.
