I think a lot about how, if the glorious violent revolution happens, every kid with significant medical needs in a hospital where power gets cut will die.
You can decide you're willing to sacrifice your own life, but you don't get to tell everybody else on the planet that they're acceptable collateral damage.
This gets notes every time it drifts into leftist circles. But here’s the thing: I am a doctor. I have cared for children in hospitals. Vast, intricate supply chains that rely on functioning world governments with trade agreements are necessary to the provision of modern medical care. There is no way to work it so those kids can win if electricity, water, food, or medical supplies like sterile intravenous fluid bags or EKG stickers get interrupted. Forget even permanent disruption, a temporary disruption of the sterile tubing necessary for surgery would mean a lot of kids die of appendicitis. The generators we have as back-up are meant to last minutes, not weeks. And you can say “under my new system, the total violence done would ultimately be less than the violence done by the state,” but it’s easier to say that about a hypothetical kid than one lying on a gurney in front of you. When you’ve been responsible for a life—when you’ve lost a patient, when you’ve been through a Code Blue for a one-year-old—there is nothing you would not do in order to protect that life. I think all the time about what Devil’s bargains I would make for various situations; it’s one of the fucked up things I do. I can tell you that I would kill anyone who tried to cut power to my hospital, or I would die trying. There is no alternative.
The world is too interconnected to allow one part of it to go down. When Puerto Rico got slammed by hurricanes and the US did fuck all about it, we had a nationwide shortage of bagged IV fluids. I was working in hospitals through that. Things we normally do as part of routine medical care, like giving the puking kid with the migraine IV Zofran and Reglan, got a whole lot harder. I was working inpatient during COVID, when there were sudden shortages of pain and anxiety medications we relied on, like opioids and benzodiazepines. There was a nationwide shortage of lidocaine last year and we had to save it for biopsies of suspect cancers. Surgery requires not only a surgeon but an entire team of people and complex equipment to safely sterilize tools, most of which are now based around laparoscopic surgery that requires camera tools instead of the old-school open surgeries. You could not even say “but the surgeons can still operate” because no. They can’t. Not safely. Not with ether instead of succinate and fentanyl. I could deliver your baby after the apocalypse, but who’s staffing the blood banks when you have a post-partum hemorrhage and I don’t have three trained nurses with a kit of specialty meds to slow the bleeding? I still remember the time during the worst of COVID when I couldn’t fly a patient from our rural hospital to an urban hospital that could have done the operation he needed, because the hospitals were completely full. I had to buy time with heavy-duty IV antibiotics (the one and only time I’ve been allowed to use a -penem) while he lay there in agony for 12 hours until a bed came open and we could transfer him. If we couldn’t treat the pain and keep the infection from killing him long enough to operate, he would have died then and there, in front of us, while we stood there helplessly.
So how many kids are you OK with watching die from a ruptured appendix? That’s what comes in to the ED at two in the morning and within half an hour if you’re lucky has an ultrasound proving the diagnosis and a surgeon getting scrubbed in. If there isn’t ultrasound, ultrasound techs, pain medication, anesthesiologists, ventilation machine for when you’re under, light-up scopes with blades to allow for intubation bc then there’s direct visualization of the vocal cords, paralytic medications to keep you still, medications to keep you asleep, monitoring machines that read your blood pressure ans CO2 levels and pulse oximetry while you’re under, computer scheduling for OR time, post-op recovery nurses, gurneys, autoclaves, specialized small metal tools for the surgery—if there are interruptions in training or production of any of these and a whole lot more, anyone could die of a surgical problem, but it hurts worse when it’s a kid. Watch breast cancer come back into vogue, as we lose mammograms. You ever treated a woman who’s ignored breast cancer so long it’s now a fungating mass? Go Google what that looks like. Two cases have walked into my office and they are both dead now. One was schizophrenic. Without modern global supply chains, we don’t have lorazepam or morphine for humane death, let alone psych meds. How many people would deteriorate? Get specific. Which friends would you be willing to watch die? Which of their kids are expendable?
What kind of violent revolution are you planning where you are able to look a patient in the eye and tell them, “Your death is necessary to my vision,” and not understand that you are the villain?
You get to decide whether you want to end your own life for this glorious future. You do not get to decide to end my life or my patients’ lives or anyone else’s. You are not God and you do not get to make plans as if you are, as if you have the One Correct Vision and the rest of us just need to fall in line and follow the prophet. Fuck you. You think the Black kid whose treatment team I was on while he writhed in pain on a hospital bed because he had a kidney transplant and it was rejecting wouldn’t tell you to go fuck yourself about your violent revolution? Our society is no longer able to tolerate large-scale disruptions. We have built too much and we would lose too much. We are too big to fail, and although it’s easy to see that as a bad thing, what I keep seeing, over and over, is that transplant team. How the nephrologist and the resident and the nurses and techs and pharmacists and therapists were working together to keep that kid alive. The scientists who did the research, relying on impossibly complex systems that have taken hundreds of years to build. Collaboration is how we survive.
We cannot allow the vulnerable to die and call that progress. We cannot turn the lights out on any hospitals, because the people in the ICU on ventilators will stop breathing and die within minutes. Would you want that to happen if it’s your mother in that ICU? Would you tell your mother the answer to that? What if it was your child? What about your favorite sibling? How many of other people’s families are you willing to sacrifice for the sake of something that stands a virtually 100% chance of going up in flames immediately, when we look at prior attempts at creating a new government out of war and chaos? The massive impacts of even “small” shortages on patients is not theoretical and has killed patients since I’ve been an attending, starting three years ago.
You do not own the right to anyone else’s life.
And if you think you want a violent revolution, see how you do with your next toothache without pain meds, lidocaine, dental expertise, and composite that lets you keep the tooth and keep chewing. How long would you have to suffer to crack?
i think some of you guys are insane 👍 it's actually possible for a 16 year old to be online friends with someone in their 20s. source: teenagers are actually people who can talk to other people about shared interests.
like, the moral panic about age gaps in dating is one thing but this reddit thread was literally about Being Online Friends. you can be online friends with a teenager. they are actually people you can talk to. i promise.
it's very easy to not be a creepy adult when talking to a minor. step one: don't act creepy. that's it. that's all you need to do.
When I was sixteen, I and my boyfriend (eighteen) and his little brother (fourteen) all belonged to the same gaming group, which had been started by his father's friend Steve. We played twice a week with a bunch of people twice and even three times our age, and we learned that adults weren't aliens, they were people with their own feelings and fears and they weren't always right about everything.
Those years at Steve's table were incredibly important to my development as a person. And we had something in common: the game.
Here's the truth: when you grow up, as you go through the various developmental stages, there are things which are vital to happen for proper psychological and cognitive development. For example, when you're very young it is absolutely vital that you are exposed to language. A lot of language. Of varying levels of complexity and formality. That's vital for the healthy development of the language centers of the brain and for early socializing. It must happen. If it does not, you see severe dysfunction as they get older.
This is basic psychological and cognitive development theory. It's taught in pretty basic level Psych courses. This is known science.
Socializing with adults, of various ages, both related to you and not related to you, in various social situations from social equals to authority figure, is one of those vital landmarks. And it comes up over and over and over during development. As a young child you must interact with adults, who care for you, so you can understand care and safety. And it gets more deep and more complicated as you develop.
Preteens and teens must interact with people older than them, significantly older, in various ways, up to and including casual friendly socializing as equals, or they will not develop properly. This is absolutely vital. Your ability to function in the real world socially depends on it.
We are fucking destroying our young people with this bullshit.
Source: Majored in Psychology with a focus on childhood development in university. This is what I went to school for.
I'd like to point out that those stages of development and crucial periods of interaction don't stop at some magical arbitrary definition of adulthood. Young adults, middle aged adults and senor adults, need to have interaction with children and teens and people who are younger than they are or they lose their grip on reality and ability to communicate with people who don't share their privileges and abilities. Source: can you fucking hear yourself?
The deliberate dismantling of intergenerational society by capitalism is one of the most damaging things to happen in the 20th century.
Humans evolved with alloparenting. You are supposed to have meaningful relationships (friendship, mentorship, tutelage) with extraparental adults and older kids.
Also just to talk on the very simple level the original thing is operating on-
Teenagers being friends with adults protects them from grooming. Why? Because then they know what a normal adult acts like. PLUS having an adult that ISNT an authority figure they could go to for help if needed? glorious. a lot of teens are in a stage of development where they're realizing that authority is dangerous. and it is! but it also makes them wary of asking for help from authority, even if it wouldnt be a problem, because they are learning.
This is in ADDITION to everything else mentioned in this post.
I regret to inform you the middle class insecurity industry has now given us the concept of "microcheating", which is when your husband talks to people or has friends
To be fair 99% of our evolutionary stress response was meant to deal with far more immediately conclusive scenarios than the tedious bullshit we put up with these days.
not to leave a serious comment on a silly post but one of the best pieces of advice I ever got about stress was to SLEEP but secondly, when overwhelmed, lay in a bed and intentionally hold all your muscles clenched. clench EVERYTHING. hold it for a few seconds, then let go. It tricks your animal fight-or-flight monkey brain into thinking it had, and won, a fight, and some of the stress response will leave you
I need everyone to know that when I am educating clients on tension release exercises in therapy all I can think of is this post. It takes everything out of me not to say "let's try the fucked up tiger trick" in session.
A spoon's only objective in life is to make soup go upwards, and it knows this. That's why when you put one under a running tap it blasts the water way high. The spoon thinks there's suddenly TONS of soup to deal with and it freaks out.
"You want people to work through their discomfort with someone based on their appearance? Sorry, that's only available if you're transitioning to the Moral, Good Gender (woman) and not the Bad, Terrible Gender (man). This is in no way simply an inversion of patriarchal bullshit and is, in some way, a deconstruction of it. Pinkie promise."
For fuck's sake. Liberation is not "and this time it's MY boot on the neck!", it's "maybe nobody's neck gets stepped on."*
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