A couple of thoughts, one each for the concepts of freedom and courage.
First, in this topsy-turvy 2020, the word freedom is bandied about almost exclusively by Right Wingers who want to carry semi-automatic weapons into Subway shops (where they can buy sandwiches made with a substance that at least one country has declared not to be bread) and more of them — Right Wingers, natch — who can’t bear the tyranny of having to wear face masks during a global pandemic.
This is a new paradigm inasmuch as, when I was a pup just coming into awareness of national and world events, the freedom heralders and carolers were almost exclusively on the Left. Republicans weren’t calling for freedom in the 1960s; no, hippies and anti-war protesters and civil rights activists and drug culture aficionados were shouting the word from every rooftop.
Again, in the now, those who agitate for, say, racial equality and marijuana decriminalization rarely, if ever, use the term. It has been snatched and owned by The Other Side.
What Does She Stand For?
The truth is, freedom means everything and anything and, as such, really means nothing. You realize, of course, that every single nation, today and in decades past, has crowed, in so many words, that it is the lone and most vigilant defender of freedom on the globe.
What do you think the architects of the Third Reich told their followers about their nation? That it was a crushing dictatorship? Hell no! Dr. Goebbels and the rest of the Nazi big shots all told their fellow Germans that they were free people, that if push came to shove and war broke out, good Germans would be putting their lives on the line for their own freedom. The government of Putin’s Russia tells its constituents they have freedom. Same with Kim’s North Korea. Everybody’s free in their own country; those who aren’t free, the poor slobs, live elsewhere. That’s a universal on this planet.
American Black people fought overseas in the Philippines, World Wars I & II, and on the Korean peninsula even as, at home, they were yoked under Jim Crow laws, legalized voter suppression, and the rotting, ancient remnants of Reconstruction-era apartheid. Those American Black people told themselves they were fighting for freedom. Perhaps, as I’ve written herein before, they actually believed they were fighting for some vague promise of freedom. No such promise seemed forthcoming for American women — Black or white — in the 1940s, though. They rolled up their sleeves and worked in factories for the cause of freedom (they would have gladly informed you) even though the vast majority of them couldn’t own homes under their own names and were compelled by law to submit to sex with their husbands even if the latter were stinking drunk and/or stinking, period.
So what does freedom mean?
I’ll be damned if I know.
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Guts
Here’s the case of an Indiana woman who lost her job because she told a couple of newspaper reporters a truth.
Kimberley Jackson was a discharge planner for NeuroBehavioral Hospital in Crown Pointe. The New York Times was doing a piece on “patient dumping,” the practice of nursing homes to eject patients who are no longer “profitable.” These extended care facilities transport patients to hospital emergency rooms when, for instance, they need care above and beyond the absolute minimum a for-profit corporation is willing to provide or their extended care coverage is running low or even if their personal wealth is becoming, shall we say, insufficient.
The nursing facilities come up with any and all excuses to label such patients as as in need of immediate extraordinary care (they’re too often not) so they must send them to the ER. Once there, the patients are now the hospital’s problem. The extended care facility has effectively washed its hands of them.
Just Leave ’em There.
I suppose the practice makes good business sense but, in terms of human decency and health care, it sucks. The patients find themselves in a limbo, banned by the nursing home and not all all in need of emergency care. What would happen to them? Who knows? Worse, who cares?
Kimberley Jackson appears to have cared.
By the way, being a discharge planner does not imply that Jackson was responsible for people’s bowel, bladder, sputum, and bleeding schedules. Jackson’s job was to help patients who either stayed at her hospital or had visited its emergency room find proper care after they left the place. Hospitals these days run on an assembly line system: Get ’em in, fix ’em up, and get ’em the hell outta here as quickly as possible. That, hospital administrators have determined, is good business. As such there must be some professional in each hospital who helps patients and their families figure out how they’re going to be cared for, properly, once they’re shown the door.
So she’s quite familiar with the plight of people who been evicted from nursing homes and dumped on her hospital’s doorstep.
As such, she told NYT reporters Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Rachel Abrams how her particular hospital responded to the practice. I should say, her former hospital. She was fired for blabbing to the reporters.
Jackson says she didn’t know it was her hospital’s policy for unauthorized employees never to speak with the media about goings-on there. I don’t buy it; everybody who works in a hospital has it pounded into them from day one that they are to STFU when reporters come nosing around. That way, nobody’ll divulge any potentially embarrassing details. Hospitals, being for-profit businesses (even when they label themselves non-profits) have, after all, brands to protect. Those, my friends, too often are viewed as equally vital to a hospital’s interests as the public’s health.
More likely, Jackson was so repulsed by the patient dumping practice that she felt compelled to reveal all to the reporters and damn the torpedoes. Either way, Jackson showed real courage is speaking with Silver-Greenberg and Abrams.
Jackson was a whistleblower. For my dough, whistleblowers have 23 times more guts then a whole platoon-full of semi-automatic rifle-wielding militiamen.
He Can Learn A Thing Or Two About Courage.
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