Letters to the Editor
AJCalhoun
Published Letters: 964 Editor's Choice: 127
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I Worked in a "Beautiful Hospital"
[Read the article: The Beautiful Hospital]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]In southern California. Everything worked. We had plenty of pretty doctors (both sexes) and a beautiful environment. We were well-endowed. It was crazy! A pair of chart-hurling French neurosurgeons (brothers), an EP doctor with anger issues who tossed a scalpel at a cath lab nurse because she didn't respond to his command quickly enough, the occasional celebrity patient... surreal. Until I sprung something in my cervical spine during a code and haven't been able to find work since that doesn't require a decent dominant hand. But the point is those places and those kinds of people do exist.
I watch the utterly unrealistic "House" because a) it is wonderful escapism and b) I love to solve puzzles. OK, I also knew a guy like him (contracted to a big military hospital) and I kind of relate to that "Do something even if it's wrong" philosophy that comes from having also been an EMT for 32 years. And a firefighter. And I agree, "Scrubs" is more real in most ways than the other current medical dramas that make no sense. But they are all wonderful escapism. And after a long day of...well, not doing much of anything at the moment...or when I do get to work...I love to escape into a medical fantasy world.
The message that nurses are undervalued, abused and left to deal with the aftermath of understaffed hospitals with inadequate available providers is not lost on me. There are two different things going on in this piece, and they're both worthy of a good ponder. One is just a question of television's representation of "reality" (which I thought was a given) and one is far more serious: It's hard out here for a nurse. Or allied health professional. This latter point cannot be driven home hard enough, so if anyone got that out of this, the failure to recognize TV as escapism can surely be forgiven.
Thanks for a thought-provoking piece. I hope there are more to come.
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Go figure!
[Read the article: What was Charlie Crist thinking?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]A Republican with a decent streak. How can this be? I keep telling you people there are a few of us here and there, in loosely organized cells, waiting for the opportune moment to dump the neocon idiots. Charlie has just given that applecart a little shove. "Courage and principle." Not items many politicians carry on display. Charlie Crist had to be stealthy, too, in order to get to where he could safely pull this stunt. He's a sharp cookie and part of that Third Way thing I keep harping on - where everybody just does the right thing at the right time. (The right time being when it is doable).
It's April in Maryland, just outside DC, and it's supposed to snow tomorrow. That may just be a sign from above that I should move to Florida. Or at least start looking for the deed to that swampland my old man bought years ago. Its value just went up.
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Doubt, paradox, character and faith
[Read the article: Something to believe in]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Near the end of Ms. Steinke's article the light finally comes on, blindingly: "Life is brutal, full of horror and violence. Life is beautiful, full of passion and joy. Both things are true at the same time. The paradox extends to my own being."
"God" rains on the just and the unjust alike. The Universe is impartial. There may be no "divine plan" but there is natural law, and whatever "god" we may choose to relate to, it is the other one, always some other concept, that is closer to the truth. While we may not be able to change natural law we certainly can become great natural lawyers, attorneys of the spirit, and do incredible things by acting on one force with another: our own.
This is the "miracle" of Easter, Tielhard's "tiller of the world" that we may, if we doubt and question and study enough, seize and change the direction of forces and events. This is Tielhard's "fire descended upon the earth", the paradoxical "warrior's way" that Castenda relayed from don Juan. Yes, it appears in every form of spiritual discipline - even into atheism: "The task of a warrior is to balance the terror of being a [hu]man against the wonder of being a [hu]man.
It is a glorious, bloody, violent, dazzling, light-filled, wondrous paradox, and in it everything, every doubt, every question, every crisis of faith is tied together and answered.
As the late Ernest Becker put it, faith is not an act, but a character trait. It is what pulls us through the eye of the needle of doubt and despair and reconciles the paradox of our being.
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The man called Sentex
[Read the article: Something to believe in]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It may well be, since this keeps happening here, that others don't really care what you think - or don't think - and so they keep on thinking, out loud. If you find it that fatiguing to read about this silly stuff, when you clearly see it coming, why don't you simply skip on to something that does interest you? Or pehaps just go for a walk. It's spring.