Thursday, 12 November 2009
Mrs Throsby asked me last night what will happen if I fall ill, or dear old NewcastleOnHunter grows too big; that is, gets too busy and demanding. “I’ll just switch it off” was my flippant reply. Though in my heart I knew this might be impossible. Surely at the very worst I would give it away, and with luck not to someone who would commercialise it. But what if nobody wished to take it on? This got Mr Throsby on a train of thought about care factor. He reads a blog by a “moderately strange primary health care physician” called Dr. Rob entitled “Musings of a Distractible Mind.” Dr. Rob explains why he doesn’t walk away from an impossibly exhausting job. Simply and succinctly, because “I cannot step into my office without taking the next step. I can’t not care.”
Parents of young children know the feeling; you can’t ever really get away. Teachers know the feeling as well. I have spoken with some very good teachers who, at the start of the school year, wonder how many more times they will be able to pick up the burden of that emotional investment they make in their students. The best teachers don’t see what they do as a job, they care about their students. The best parents are the ones who take the responsibility seriously and invest themselves in the child. The best doctors are the ones who are doing it for more than money, prestige, and pats on the back; they do it because they care.
This resonates with a new element on NewcastleOnHunter, in comments to an article that announced the closure of Kingsdene by Anglicare. It attracted heart-wrenching laments by a relatively ignored group of noble people: carers of disabled. In this particularly extreme case, mothers of severely intellectually disabled. Though they are trying to help themselves and organise, for example with the Carers’ Alliance, several chose the story as a brief rallying point, suggesting considerable depth to both their exasperation and courage as carers. Here they are on the Internet seeking interaction, seeking help, and most importantly, seeking a semblance of hope, a trace of certainty. And answers. Simple acceptance of duty to a loved one is strength enough, but their future teeters in uncertainty with every government decision bereft of compassion and driven by inhumane bean-counter logic. A government whose priority continues to veer from community care, as if embarrassed to display social sentiments in a such a fashionably neo-con world. A government forgetting that a core responsibility of the modern state is to protect the disadvantaged and vulnerable.
Carers fear a time when they are too old to look after even themselves – a prospect terrifying enough for we lucky ones with no dependents but of double anguish to those with helpless loved ones who will survive them into an unknown.
There is a species within the human species: people with empathy, who place concern for others ahead of their own, even to the detriment of personal career, wealth, or well-being. People who stare down fate and what it has handed them. Throsby wonders, often, what all those other humans are doing on the planet.
He wonders also, no matter how insignificant this web site, could he simply switch it off and consign the pleas for help and expressions of empathy to a cyber trash bin?
Could he walk away from wonderful folk like that?
