Malcontent

LL, after reading MM's blog went "Well, what can I say... she's... a malcontent."

Sitting here in my torn jeans and T, somewhere out there in a very generic call room, feeling - something - at the back of my mind, I can't help but feel that LL is dead wrong - that people like MM need to find people who are grounded, like yours truly, to talk to.

Because I remember what I was like before the running started - the same existential fears, the same worries about the world around me, the same frustrations, the same wry throw everything over your shoulder conclusions - i'm no angel, no politician, no - body. Worries for another person and time and universe.
I remember when I was still a kid always badgering my dad with Whys and How Comes till he'd tell me to shut up and eat my vegetables. And even beyond that, till the Mother told me to quit harrassing my dad - but my dad had all the answers, my dad was the Wisest, you see. Good old Dad. If he'd paid me any heed he'd have noticed I pre-empted the flu vax long before it happened - one of the questions was why can't we take viruses and make them inject our own DNA back into our own cells?

So I learnt over time that there were no answers for a lot of the questions I asked - there were plenty of answers for other questions, but they didn't seem worth asking. I don't know what it was that drove me back then, but I just had to keep wondering, and thinking too much. (Was it You that told me once upon a lifetime ago that I think too much? Hmm perhaps it was.)
Why do we hurt each other? Why war? Why genocide? Why hatred? Why military expenditure? Why dictatorship...

Too many questions with no answers.

Gradually you learn to tune out the questions; there's just no point repeating yourself ad infinitum. You get battered by the reality of life; somewhere along the way you mess up and are left with a lifetime of regrets. You become self-centered and with each passing heartache you feel a little less like thinking, and a lot more like running.

And suddenly you're here, trapped.

In a call room with a leash attached to your mobile phone.

In a country with an iron grip around your whole life.

And there's so many places to run, but all the roads lead back here.

You wear black a lot for some undiscernable reason, and the other doctors let slip what they think one day by stating that they guess you went to goth parties a lot overseas. Your mother watches you leave the house and does a double take that you're going to work in... those ripped jeans?

Pause, and rewind. My god. This is me.
Closet rebel. (pun intended)
Bein worn down by the system.
Cookie cutter cutout citizen.
Dreaming of a better future, somewhere else.

I remember You asking a few years back - what happened to us, the best and the brightest?

People tell me that it's no better elsewhere, all systems are flawed. People are racist out there. You'll never belong.

I remember Su. and B. And all the other people of significance I once knew. How many of you are left here?

How many of you were willing to choose building a protective little bubble around your life to block out the world around you to living somewhere where you didn't need the bubble at all in the first place - and could just get on with the living.

It's true. I'll never belong out there.
But I don't belong here, either. Not in the land of the blue pill. Not somewhere safe where everything's fine because there's no crime, no deviancy, no poverty, no "badness".

I've said it countless times.

A society needs all these things to function properly. People need these things to remember to fear, and remember when not to; to remember when to laugh, and to remember when to look twice. To stop feeling superior over things that don't matter and patting themselves on the back over things that are so, so very trivial (a hub! a hub! my kingdom for a hub!) and to start feeling worried about the things that really do.

A country needs helmsmen who know right from wrong and good from bad.

I need somewhere where I can remember who I am, and where moral ambiguity isn't a daily routine, but something I can keep at bay; something tangible and dangerous that I can choose to shy away from.

I'm not. Grounded.
I don't know if I'm malcontent, age has changed a lot in me.

But I know that I am not content.
I want to be - of course I do. Who doesn't?

Not so very long ago I had my own little bubble, and a year and a bit just flew by so very quickly. I had a vague dream that I could cling to, a small shelter from the reality of the world around me. And then the walls came down, and I was clingy. Who wouldn't be? I didn't choose the red pill, it was forced upon me.

And then there were questions again, questions that I had escaped since the last time around - a year before. Questions I had escaped since my teenage years.

Why do people hurt each other?

What's the point in trusting people - everyone's in it for their own self gain. Everybody has an agenda.

You can offer your trust to someone, and make him or her aware that you know that you're exposing yourself to his or her mercy - armed with the knowledge of your insight -- they still abuse that trust, perhaps with a cleaner conscience.

Then wherefore trust?

I'm old enough to know the answers - there are no answers, and its not my pasa. I'm also old enough to know that sometimes you just have to.

And sometimes you don't.

*****
It happened again; I've been around for so long I've seen two cycles now.

The hospital, let's call it Old Chang Kee to humour the ex, I promised her I'd write like this someday... was embroiled in a mass casualty.

"Simulated" patients came boiling into the hospital, and doctors were activated by the hundreds to show the world how capable we are of handling a disaster.
And in the aftershock... I mean aftermath, I'm sure some minister will receive a glowing report about how well we did, and how much we learnt.

And I, caught in the thick of it, couldn't help but remember another time and place, and think as I watched the system start to buckle - fucking amateurs.

It shouldn't be this way; not after so many trial runs in the past. The system has no forethought, no redundancy. The loopholes have not been closed, the lessons from the past are still unlearnt. Next cycle will see a new brainchild fall on its face, and bring a new batch of glowing reports.

If you want to plug the gaps, then fucking run the scenario countless times over till you've spotted them all.

You don't need a huge one day drag-on-forever affair to prove a point. You don't need your simulated patients being run around the hospital by exhausted anaesthetists to prove that the system works, when it really doesn't.

Back in the day, somewhere in the UK we just sat down to a lot of sheets of paper. We had an objective in mind - to find the loopholes. All of us, from the lowly SHOs to the senior consultants. We had a disaster scenario clearly painted out to us (not wondering halfway in what kind of disaster just happened anyway? What's going on??) and not just to some invisible senior staff far removed from the real world in their command posts.

The times were made up. The delays were calculated based on real-life analysis.
The chokepoints became obvious. Brainstorming was done and comments welcome from the ground up.

Not this sham we pulled which culminated in us milling around bemused, waiting to ferry our triple-stacked patients up to the wards from the filled beyond capacity emergency department.

Technology speeds up simulations. Why can't we fucking learn from the rest of the world? Just have an electronic exercise. Plug in the variables. Create plans. Create contingency plans. Test them on the simulation. Perfect your game.

And then when you think you have it sorted, hold your grand full-fledged exercise. And audit audit audit. The times, the chokepoints... and the clinical care. Shouldn't a disaster scenario be about checking standards of care provision as well? Isn't that the crux of healthcare - not just number crunching?

On number crunching - how the fuck can you run a mass casualty exercise without going into army triage mode? What kind of moron imagines they can save the world when the twin towers come crumbling down?

*****

That's what troubles me, all too often, about living out here.

We're a first world country with a third world mindset. We don't look forwards. We don't think.

We do what we're told. We run. We hide.

We leave it to someone else, who has the brains, the power, the authority.

We are nothing, and our views are for naught.

And one day when the men in white find this, we are someone to squash, and to silence, with another nice presidential tea or lunch.

*****
I read her entry about CERN and remembered a time when I would have wondered the same.

I recall telling a friend wryly once the nature of reality and Schrodinger's cat in the box. And how reality doesn't have to tie up the way we know it, as mere... specks on the face of this universe, coming to grips with our own reality through the magic of science.

Just because this looks like a light switch doesnt mean that when I flip it a rack of nuclear missiles won't rain down on Iran, triggering the end of the world...

We know it's not true within a certain confidence interval, but we'll never know for sure.

Who's to say what happens when you break reality up into its smallest fragments? The think tanks postulate Higgs Bosun; I'm sure trekkies and sci fi addicts would love for a rip in the space time continuum to materialize.

I'm sure life will just go on, and tomorrow we'll land on mars and we won't even bat an eyelid.
A century from now we'll probably still be screwing each other over in life, love and international relations, just the way we always have.

But it's an interesting thought nonetheless. Maybe it'd actually be a good thing if something unthinkable happens. Maybe if Stephen King comes real, instead of Arthur C Clarke, we'll actually learn something from the madness we call our humanity, for once.