No Before Times to Be Had: Part One
In returning to writing on this site I have done three long multi-segment series now: Envirakido, Knowing and Nudging Terroir, and Mental Health Disorders and Illnesses: Editing, Curating and Protecting. These were all efforts to create a bit of a foundation on which to build safety for yourself in preparation for what our diminishing empires will place on you as additional burdens.
During my three-year hiatus from this site I have had the opportunity to learn a tremendous amount more about healthcare systems, and certainly more than I even knew back when I started this site in 2011.
The healthcare system looms large for those with chronic conditions just as the legal and enforcement systems loom large for those who are victims of crime. We have expectations that these systems can cure us and right wrongs. In developed nations we do more than have expectations, we wield expectations as our birthright and they are woven into all of our social constructs of what is just and fair.
It is a significant shock to some to discover that these expectations do not match our current and, most likely, future realities.
If your expectation has been that the healthcare system would contribute either to your recovery from a chronic condition, or to the lessening of your misery, or at the very least to the basic protection of your survival, that is not the reality of healthcare now or for the foreseeable future. Many of you have known this for a very long time already.
The pandemic is not transformative so much as revelatory. And yet still the vast majority will continue to choose to be willfully blind to these revelations.
It is perhaps unsurprisingly well-timed that, after decades, Lana Wachowski is now resurrecting The Matrix with a new movie announced to release at the end of 2021. As many of you know, the rabbit logo here at EDI arises from the reference found in the original Matrix movie which in turn references Lewis Carroll’s book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:
“Follow the white rabbit” is the advice given to the protagonists in both the book and film. In Carroll’s book following the white rabbit moved Alice from reality to a world of fantasy and illusion; in the Wachowski’s original Matrix film, it moved the protagonist, Neo, from illusion to reality.
At the time I created EDI, I chose the white rabbit as the logo as it embodied the challenge to examine our belief systems that we fervently protect as real when, in fact, they are all cultural illusions.
The realities we face, and will face, are stark and not the stuff of fantasy novels or movies. If you choose to follow the white rabbit today, it will not lead you back to Before Times or even into a freeing or fulfilling present-moment reality.
And we should not kid ourselves that our stark realities are particularly out-sized or novel. We are collectively, most of us reading this piece, the global minority. We are the hereditary beneficiaries of colonialism – incontrovertible proof readily made available through the fact that I write in English. And that is not to say some of you reading this may have come from the global majority where you were not raised in our rarified environments of expectation and entitlement.
If you choose to spend the mere eight minutes to listen to Prime Minister Mia Mottley of Barbados speak at COP26 (below), the delineation between the hereditary beneficiary or excluded member of our modern world is not blurred.
However, I do not condone comparative suffering as that is a true rabbit hole of divisive misery. We can each put our own real suffering into a broader context, but we should neither foist our opinion of what constitutes valid suffering on others, nor should we accept others foisting their opinions that our suffering is “not as…” as is necessary to be allowed a voice or to be believed.
“We say, “I cannot help but feel pain, but I can choose what I do about it”.
This is wrong.
When the pain is bad enough, it does not matter: you will scream.”
I came across Kerry Spencer’s piece today and I extracted the above quote as it was a revelation. It is a universal truth. There is a pain that, when it arrives, will give you no choice. And it spares no one, no matter how protected and entitled their world might have been to that point.
But until the time that level of pain arrives, and even in and around that time, Choice is your greatest ally, your north star and your most secret and powerful shield.
Next week in Part Two I will talk about advocating for yourself and others in the context of our current and future realities in healthcare and in life.
