Intolerable Cruelty
Jan. 19th, 2005 12:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thessalianThe Barbara Saga continues. She left a note on my desk this morning asking for a couple of sets of notes. She'd rather obviously gone through my carefully ordered stacks of notes (one reported and ready for file, one unreported) because those two carefully ordered stacks had been strewn out all over my office floor when I got in. So I figured they weren't in those piles. And if they weren't in those piles, then they were not in my office. So I tried to ring her. She didn't pick up. So I got involved in doing actual work and the next thing I know, the phone rings -- Barbara, sounding miffed that I hadn't rung her in response to her note. (Ha ha.) So she asks for the set of notes she didn't locate elsewhere and I said that if she hadn't found them in the floor piles, that I didn't have them. She went absolutely apeshit on me about how she shouldn't have to go digging through the notes on the floor and they really should be in file by now and blah blah blah. The patient in question went to clinic on Monday morning. I received the notes Tuesday morning. It is now Wednesday morning and the letter only just got typed; I've been a little busy booking repeat appointments and tracking down results and doing letter corrections and sending off letters that need to get to their destination yesterday. If you really think that 24 hours is a long time for a set of notes to spend in my office, you should try doing my job for just one day. Then we'll see how huffy and up yourself you get about note locations.
The irony? After I got off the phone with her, I went to reorder my notes so they weren't a fire hazard. Third from the top of one of the piles was the set of notes she was after. Apparently we cannot see the forest for the trees in this place, and that's apparently all my fault. So, being the nice person that I am, I ran them up to her. I got reluctantly muttered thanks during which she refused to look me in the eye.
I would give a lot to know why people are, for the most part, so completely without empathy. This was prompted not so much by Barbara's inability to put herself in my shoes for just one minute, but by today's Metro headline. British soldiers (from one specific regiment, they hasten to add, as if that makes it better at all) have been torturing Iraqi prisoners of war and photographing it. I do not for the life of me understand how human beings can treat other human beings that way. Can you really turn around and decide that someone's less than human just because they were fighting against you recently? War on terror my arse; that sort of behaviour is worse than terrorism. Terrorists are attacking a set of ideas and a rather large group; maybe they would be able to go through with some of the atrocities they commit if dealing with individuals, but maybe not, I don't know. And they have religious mania or political zeal as some very weak excuse, though I'm pretty sure every religion has a "do as you would be done by" clause in it somewhere. However, the armed forces of the US and Britain are, if their Commanders in Chief are to be believed, supposed to be there to free the people from the regime that left them fettered, mistreated and terrorised. And those people who have been entrusted to end the terror can look a human being in the face and torture them for no good reason. "War's dirty; bad things happen", said one of the men who was put on trial for this stuff. Oh, fuck you. "Bad things happen" is when you shoot some guy who shot your friend. What was done to the prisoners was just plain fucked up and unnecessary.
Speaking of unnecessary, if I was a prisoner of war and had been tortured and forced to pose for photos of the sort that have been publicised all over the place today, you know what I really wouldn't want? I wouldn't want to think about the fact that half the goddamn free world was seeing me in that position. The newspapers condemn the men who forced prisoners into those poses and took those photos for degrading the prisoners, but what do they think they're doing, printing these things? Some of them, not so bad. Some things should be seen, I'll agree. However, one shot I saw in the Metro was completely unnecessary. I don't care if the faces were pixelled out; I'd know that everyone was looking at me naked in a compromising position, and it'd kill me somewhere inside to think that so many were seeing me being degraded.
So where's the empathy? What happened to the Golden Rule? Why can't people just stop for just one minute and remember that these people all around them -- the annoying ones, the nasty ones, the ones who don't agree with your politics, religion or choice in sports teams, the ones who are trying to shoot you because they happen to be fighting in an army whose CoC picked a fight with your CoC, everyone on the bloody planet -- are human beings just like them? Seriously; the lower animals don't pull this sort of shit, and we're supposed to be the most highly evolved species on the planet. I have a hard time believing that those British soldiers, or all the American ones who tortured their war prisoners and possibly still do, would actually be able to continue that kind of behaviour if they remembered that. I have a very hard time believing that people would still want to print the more graphic torture pictures if they thought about how they'd feel if it were them caught in the flashbulb.
Or maybe I'm just naive, and all the forebrain and the opposable thumbs gave us was the ability to be wilfully cruel to our fellows.
The irony? After I got off the phone with her, I went to reorder my notes so they weren't a fire hazard. Third from the top of one of the piles was the set of notes she was after. Apparently we cannot see the forest for the trees in this place, and that's apparently all my fault. So, being the nice person that I am, I ran them up to her. I got reluctantly muttered thanks during which she refused to look me in the eye.
I would give a lot to know why people are, for the most part, so completely without empathy. This was prompted not so much by Barbara's inability to put herself in my shoes for just one minute, but by today's Metro headline. British soldiers (from one specific regiment, they hasten to add, as if that makes it better at all) have been torturing Iraqi prisoners of war and photographing it. I do not for the life of me understand how human beings can treat other human beings that way. Can you really turn around and decide that someone's less than human just because they were fighting against you recently? War on terror my arse; that sort of behaviour is worse than terrorism. Terrorists are attacking a set of ideas and a rather large group; maybe they would be able to go through with some of the atrocities they commit if dealing with individuals, but maybe not, I don't know. And they have religious mania or political zeal as some very weak excuse, though I'm pretty sure every religion has a "do as you would be done by" clause in it somewhere. However, the armed forces of the US and Britain are, if their Commanders in Chief are to be believed, supposed to be there to free the people from the regime that left them fettered, mistreated and terrorised. And those people who have been entrusted to end the terror can look a human being in the face and torture them for no good reason. "War's dirty; bad things happen", said one of the men who was put on trial for this stuff. Oh, fuck you. "Bad things happen" is when you shoot some guy who shot your friend. What was done to the prisoners was just plain fucked up and unnecessary.
Speaking of unnecessary, if I was a prisoner of war and had been tortured and forced to pose for photos of the sort that have been publicised all over the place today, you know what I really wouldn't want? I wouldn't want to think about the fact that half the goddamn free world was seeing me in that position. The newspapers condemn the men who forced prisoners into those poses and took those photos for degrading the prisoners, but what do they think they're doing, printing these things? Some of them, not so bad. Some things should be seen, I'll agree. However, one shot I saw in the Metro was completely unnecessary. I don't care if the faces were pixelled out; I'd know that everyone was looking at me naked in a compromising position, and it'd kill me somewhere inside to think that so many were seeing me being degraded.
So where's the empathy? What happened to the Golden Rule? Why can't people just stop for just one minute and remember that these people all around them -- the annoying ones, the nasty ones, the ones who don't agree with your politics, religion or choice in sports teams, the ones who are trying to shoot you because they happen to be fighting in an army whose CoC picked a fight with your CoC, everyone on the bloody planet -- are human beings just like them? Seriously; the lower animals don't pull this sort of shit, and we're supposed to be the most highly evolved species on the planet. I have a hard time believing that those British soldiers, or all the American ones who tortured their war prisoners and possibly still do, would actually be able to continue that kind of behaviour if they remembered that. I have a very hard time believing that people would still want to print the more graphic torture pictures if they thought about how they'd feel if it were them caught in the flashbulb.
Or maybe I'm just naive, and all the forebrain and the opposable thumbs gave us was the ability to be wilfully cruel to our fellows.
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no subject
Date: 2005-01-19 01:47 pm (UTC)Such torturing scum are often people with extremely twisted forms of empathy rather than none at all. The Golden Rule only applies to those you consider equals.
no subject
Date: 2005-01-20 01:30 am (UTC)To subscribe to such an opinion at present, is, I fear, not naivety, but realism.