Re: a political being

    By your definition, it seems to me you’re damned (or political)
    if you do & damned (or political) if you don’t. 'For evil to flourish,
    it requires only that good men to do nothing....etc’. Yet surely,
    to be at all useful, the word must imply some degree of active
    participation.

    The decision of our then government, several years ago, to limit
    the insurance cover for patients in private psychiatric hospitals
    meant that the outfit where I worked was forced to close down.
    The overheads had become too great. The management boards
    of the other similar institutions in the country made various approaches
    to the ministers concerned. In the event, they were unsuccessful &,
    in our case, a few old ladies & gents had to move into less tender-
    minded homes while my buddy & myself took semi-retirement into purely
    outpatient practice where we made rather more money for a very great
    deal less work.

    You could, I suppose, call these approaches ‘political’ acts, though
    they seemed to me more like good old golf-club networking, backstairs
    corruption ... whatever ... made by people who thought – mistakenly
    as it turned out – that their incomes were threatened. In our banana
    republic they were the most realistic steps to be taken - & they nearly
    worked. They certainly came much closer to succeeding than have
    the ‘political’ outcry, the speeches & party manifestoes which act as
    conscience-salvers & crocodile weepings to accompany the continuing
    & gradual subsidence of quality in the psychiatric services for our
    public patients.

    Scottie B.

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Received on Tue Jul 29 11:56:19 2003