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If you have been fully gainfully employed, a commuter, usual 9-5, and want to give yourself a culture shock about the prevalence of disease in your society, try this. When you do get a day off. Go to town. Or city. Not the shiny expensive bits. In your usual working office hours. The old high streets. Now look around you, at people. Really look. The illness and disability and advanced decrepitude rate is staggering. Society can separate you from seeing them by the social divide of a commute. 5 comments
When I first crashed out of my employment with a crushing depression in my thirties having been employed constantly beforehand, away from either office life or rural life, and emerged from my cocoon to take the first ginger steps back to society, that's what I noticed. The reality of society was shielded from me by hours, every day of my life. It's like there was a whole other society that shuffled and limped, and they were far from old. Taking it slow, I saw them. When I had not before. It's not like I'd been blind to suffering before. I was always the type to put a large note in a surprised and desolate hand, I knew not to judge, and just to help, to give someone breath. I'd talk to homeless people, mad people on buses, I wasn't the type to shy away. I always listened. But even now years later I still register the shock of that day, when I realised it wasn't a few people. It was half the town I didn't see. The sheer scale of need. It was that day that became the watershed. The day that crystallized the way I think today. That absolute hatred of eugenics, and fascism, and corporatism. I could see the plays and the segregation and the huge underclass of wronged and injured and broken people it was creating. ..and I resolved never to be part of it again. To always see people. My people. I was a night owl, an after hours guy. In my teens and twenties I barely slept. Thought I'd seen everything self destructive and seedy, lost and losing itself, but that held nothing compared to the day. The night had it's noir, seemed dramatic, and perhaps it was. Where the dramatic dysfunctional go to their stage play of life. But the days. Between the rush hours. That's where you saw people broken by the system and not themselves. That's where our society had failed. |
Gregory's Server
Then remember most vulnerable people, given a choice won't go out in a pandemic. Many are housebound. You're only seeing the walking disabled, the functional afflicted. There are many more.
Always remember when you work and commute, you only see half the people in the world. At best.
Things, are not ok.