#people are referring to the pandemic in past tense and have lost understanding for others who they'd have understood before | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

nerds-escape · 3 years

Text

Hi I am now in an anti-Snape mood so...here we go.

Quick preface before we begin: I will be talking about abuse and some other topics, I’ll put trigger warnings at the beginning of everything

NOTE: This is based off my experience as a person who was abused by both friends and family as well as a disabled person and a person who has been sexually harassed and something I don’t even know the term for it was somewhere in between sexual harassment and sexual assault.

“He was Abused as a Child”

TW: Abuse

I know it’s mentioned a lot but just because Snape was abused doesn’t mean he was destined to be a bad person, in fact, when someone says that, it makes it a lot harder for people to come to terms with what has happened. As a person who was manipulated and belittled my entire life I would like to say: I have been told I am a good person so I think I’m a good person, really it’s kind of subjective. But if you want to know some things so you can judge for yourself (a lot of these things had to be put on hold because of the pandemic which is why I’m using past tense):

I taught mentally and physically disabled kids how to swim

I had good grades

I work four jobs so I can pay to go to Uni

I have a hard time setting boundaries which means whenever someone ask me to do something, I do it out of fear of disappointing them (not a good thing but a thing none the less)

I was captain of the swim team

I was in a club that the soul purpose was to raise money for a children’s hospital

I spend a lot of my time volunteering

I know this sounds like I’m patting my own back but I just want you to understand who I am as a person. I like to think I’m a good person but it’s up to you if you believe that or not.

I have lost my autonomy due to my trauma. Every other word coming out of my mouth is sorry because I have been trained to believe everything is my fault. It took me years of therapy and talking with friends to figure that out.

The other day I asked my coworker if I could go to the bathroom because everything in my life I have had to tiptoe around and get express permission on including going to the restroom at times.

Obviously everyone reacts to abuse and trauma differently but having a villain and saying that they are bad because of the abuse they faced is just not it.

Source:

I don’t really know why you need sources on my abuse but here are some sources on trauma and how it can effect kids

https://www.ptsd.va.gov/understand/isitptsd/common_reactions.asp

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK207191/

https://www.kempe.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/The_Battered_Child_Syndrome.pdf

“The Marauders Sexually Assaulted/Harassed Snape”

TW: sexual assault/harassment

AMAB sexual assault and harassment is a real thing that needs to be talked about more, and something that shouldn’t be used to win an argument.

Snape Stans can’t seem to decide if this is sexual assault or sexual harassment. At most it is sexual harassment, this isn’t to say that sexual harassment is something to scoff at, this is to ask: pick one because saying these two are the same things is wildly misleading so stop using these words interchangeably.

Stop using male victims and survivors as trophies for your arguments. Did you know that 1 out of every 10 rape survivors are men? This is a real issue so don’t use it as a defense because guess what? It also makes makes men of sexual abuse seem like they are villains.

Pantsing was just a thing that happened when I was in grade school. Does that make it okay? No. But pantsing is mainly considered “schoolyard fun” especially when it’s between two people of the same sex. Again. Does this make it okay? No. Do I believe what James did was okay? No. But you can not tell me that if you got pantsed and your best friend was there to comfort you, would you call them a slur? I wouldn’t.

Sources: https://wlv.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/2436/96284/Duncan_PhDthesis.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantsing

Yes I am using Wikipedia as a source because they have some good sources attached.

“He was Abused by Muggles and that’s why he Hated Them”

Okay and? He knew good muggles. I was abused by men. Does that mean I want all men dead? No. I have been abused by women. Does that mean I want all women dead? No! I could go on for a while of people who have abused me and I can tell you right now I don’t want any of those groups of people dead because guess what: those groups did nothing.

“Sirius Tried to Kill Him”

Yeah, no.

Nobody forced Snape to go there. Was it fucked up for Sirius to do that? Yeah. Like really fucked up but Snape didn’t have to go. He knew what he was getting himself into. He suspected Lupin to be a werewolf. He didn’t have to go to the shrieking shack.

I genuinely don’t think that Sirius thought this one through. To him Moony wasn’t a vicious creature, he had fun playing with Padfoot and he never hurt Padfoot so to Sirius it didn’t even cross his mind that he might be putting Snape in a dangerous situation.

That’s one theory, there are many theories and we don’t know why Sirius did it all we know is that Prongs saved Snape’s life. And Snape hated James for that. Which to be fair if someone saved my life I would probably be pissed off too but that’s besides the point.

“Snape Loved Lily”

No. Snape has the same energy as the guy who I blocked on Instagram after I repeatedly told him to stop something and then made four accounts just to keep texting me and went as far as to find and harass my friends. Same Energy.

“Their patroni match UwU” shut up. No. James’s patronus was a stag a stags mate is a doe, Lily’s was a doe. Snape’s was a doe as well. Now listen I’m down for two dope ass lesbian does but as we know because J*R that was not the case. That was an obsession. If you think that’s what love it like you are going to have very toxic relationships in your life and quite honestly lowkey concerned for you and/or your future, current, and/or past partners.

“He’s a good teacher he was keeping up the act”

No! Teachers abusing students is a real thing, what’s ever worse (as if that’s already bad enough) school was Harry’s safe haven. Now you could say the same for Snape, sure but Snape could defend himself against the Marauders. Choose your fighter: Eleven year old Harry who just learned that magic was a thing and that his parents didn’t die in a car crash vs Thirty-One year old Snape, a teacher. Let me tell you as a person who was bullied by her peers, when my sixth grade math teacher called me stupid, it had a lot greater of an impact than a student pushing me into the lockers.

Teachers are supposed to teach regardless of if they want to fuck your mom or not. It wasn’t only Harry that he was terrible to either.

Also see this entire article to disprove your point:

https://www.learningforjustice.org/magazine/fall-2014/abuse-of-power

Sources:

https://isiarticles.com/bundles/Article/pre/pdf/130622.pdf

Also refer to the article above as well.

I am done with my source arguments here is just a fun tidbit

My abusers favorite character is Snape and and he said he fully understands Snape...

Anyways I will be sending this to all people who try to argue with me about Snape.

#anti snape #rant #harry potter #james potter #hp #marauders #sirius black #Snape Stans #Snape apologist #some people say not to put anti Snape stuff in the Snape tags but also I feel like they need to hear this and this is about Snape #lily evans #I have been holding onto this for awhile #Snape

211 notes · View notes

spacetimewithstuartgary · 4 years

Photo

CryoSat still cool at 10 Today marks 10 years since a Dnepr rocket blasted off from an underground silo in the remote desert steppe of Kazakhstan, launching one of ESA’s most remarkable Earth-observing satellites into orbit. Tucked safely within the rocket fairing, CryoSat had a tough job ahead: to measure variations in the height of Earth’s ice and reveal how climate change is affecting the polar regions. Carrying novel technology, this extraordinary mission has led to a wealth of scientific discoveries that go far beyond its primary objectives to measure polar ice. And, even at 10 years old, this incredible mission continues to surpass expectations. The launch of a satellite is always a time to hold your breath, but CryoSat’s liftoff on 8 April 2010 was arguably more tense than most as it came less than five years after the original satellite was lost owing to a rocket malfunction. So important was the need to understand what was happening to Earth’s ice, the decision to rebuild was taken quickly – and thankfully, this day 10 years ago heralded the beginning of a mission that was set to advance polar science like no other. While other satellite missions can measure changes in the extent of Earth’s ice, CryoSat completes the picture by recording changes in ice height, which are used to work out changes in thickness and volume – key to understanding the total amount of ice loss. CryoSat was designed to observe two types of ice: the vast ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland that rest on land, and the sea ice floating in the polar oceans. Not only do these two forms of ice have different consequences for our planet and climate, but they also pose different challenges when trying to measure their thickness. To do this, CryoSat carries the first spaceborne synthetic aperture interferometric radar altimeter, a sensor optimised to detect sea-ice floes as they drift in the ocean and to study the rugged glaciers that drain the polar ice sheets. In addition, CryoSat’s orbit reaches latitudes of 88° North and South, which takes it closer to the poles than all previous polar-orbiting altimetry satellites. ESA’s Director of Earth Observation Programmes, Josef Aschbacher, said, “CryoSat is the epitome of an ESA Earth Explorer. It uses completely new technology to fill gaps in our scientific knowledge. The issue of diminishing ice linked to climate change is a real concern, and over the last 10 years this mission has been a game changer. “For example, CryoSat has contributed to the recent worrying findings that Greenland and Antarctica are losing ice six times faster than in the 1990s, which has clear implications for future sea-level rise. Information such as this is vital for international policy making in responding to climate change.” Andrew Shepherd from the University of Leeds, UK, added, “CryoSat’s contribution to polar science is truly astonishing. Not only do we now have a clear picture of how much ice Earth is losing, but its measurements have helped to improve the models we use to predict future climate change – information that is critical for society to adapt.” CryoSat has also revealed how the world’s 200 000 mountain glaciers have succumbed to climate change, thanks to advanced swath processing of its radar measurements, which allows small regions to be mapped in fine detail. This new technique takes the mission beyond its brief to study polar ice alone. Although changes in sea ice do not affect sea level directly because it is afloat, it plays a central role in the global climate system as it reflects solar radiation back into space, and because it moderates ocean heat transport around the planet by insulating the relatively warm water from the cold polar air. CryoSat has been instrumental in mapping changes in the thickness and volume of Arctic sea ice. Prof. Shepherd added, “Despite the long-term decline in the extent of Arctic sea ice, there have been significant year-to-year fluctuations in its thickness, and its volume has fallen in only seven of the past 10 years. But even with a decade of CryoSat measurements, the seasonal cycle of sea-ice growth and decay is still too large to confidently detect a long-term trend in volume, and so continued observation is essential. As well as fulfilling its primary role as a polar ice mission, CryoSat’s measurements have been put to good use in a wide range of alternative and innovative applications. During the winter, CryoSat has been able to record changes in the thickness of ice on lakes, and in the summer it has been used to monitor lake and river water levels across the globe – information that is important for travel and fishing, for example. CryoSat’s measurements are now an important reference of global sea level in the polar regions and beyond, thanks to its high-inclination orbit and long-repeat cycle, allowing scientists to refine the long-term trend and to detect short-term fluctuations associated with ocean dynamics. And, it has even revealed what lies beneath the ocean surface thanks to its ability to detect tiny changes in marine gravity, which reflect the shape of the sea bed. CryoSat’s bathymetric charts are now an important tool for studying ocean dynamics, currents and tides, as well as for ship safety. ESA’s CryoSat Mission Manager, Tommaso Parrinello, said, “These are just some of CryoSat’s outstanding results and the mission is still going strong, but we will focus more on this at the CryoSat anniversary conference, which we’ve had to postpone until October because of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the meantime, however, I cannot praise the mission and all the people who have worked on it enough.” ESA’s Mark Drinkwater added, “Indeed, CryoSat is still giving us incredible data to advance science, and with its new synthetic aperture radar and interferometric capabilities it has also laid the foundation for the Copernicus Polar Ice and Snow Topography Altimeter (CRISTAL) operational mission, which we are now developing on behalf of the ESA Member States and the European Commission.” CRISTAL will fill the recognised gap in sustained long-term monitoring of polar ice variability for the Copernicus Climate Change Service and Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service, maritime security and international ice charting, and in support of the EU Integrated Arctic Policy and commitments to the Paris Agreement and Green New Deal. TOP IMAGE....ESA’s Earth Explorer CryoSat mission is dedicated to precise monitoring of changes in the thickness of marine ice floating in the polar oceans and variations in the thickness of the vast ice sheets that blanket Greenland and Antarctica. ESA/AOES Medialab CENTRE IMAGE...Europe's first mission dedicated to studying the Earth’s ice was launched from Kazakhstan. From its polar orbit, CryoSat-2 will send back data leading to new insights into how ice is responding to climate change and the role it plays in our ‘Earth system’. The CryoSat-2 satellite was launched at 15:57 CEST (13:57 UTC) on a Dnepr rocket provided by the International Space Company Kosmotras from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The signal confirming that it had separated from the launcher came 17 minutes later from the Malindi ground station in Kenya. ESA - S. Corvaja, 2010 LOWER IMAGE....November Arctic sea-ice thickness as observed by CryoSat. Although November 2016 saw ice thicker than usual north of Canada, there is less ice overall in southerly regions such as the Beaufort, East Siberian and Kara Seas.

#space #science #earth sciences #ESA #cryosat

3 notes · View notes

toocomplexforthehumanmind · 3 years

Text

Opening Up – Collective Joy in Prison and Beyond

Originally posted here .

‘Hozho is not something you can experience on your own,

the eagles tell us as they lock talons in the stratosphere and fall to the earth as one.

Hozho is interbeauty.’

Lyla June Johnston – Hozho

As a trainee Good Vibrations facilitator, my first visit to a prison was not a typical one. As I approached the grey, hunched, fort-like building, went through security, and was led through a maze of corridors, locked doors and barbed wire fence I felt my body tense up with claustrophobia and anxiety. This combined uneasily with the guilty relief that I was a visitor – not a resident – of such a place. Yet not long after this, I was in a nondescript backroom surrounded by tuned, ornate brass Gamelan instruments resonating together in harmony, improvising and composing a unique and beautiful piece of music with a group of smiling strangers. My nervous system was confused, to say the least.

I don’t recall exactly when I heard the expression ‘collective joy’, but I remember that satisfying sense of something being named which needed naming. In a basic sense it refers to that transcendent feeling of connection and creative communion we can experience only in relationship with others. We need collective joy, and, after a year of lockdown restrictions and enforced ‘social isolation’, we are missing it now, more than ever. As such, we are in a better position than usual to imagine, in some miniscule way, what life might be like for the 80,000 odd people in the UK - and some nine million worldwide - who were isolated in prisons before the pandemic, and have suffered even harsher conditions since, locked up for an average of 22 hours a day.

Is there even any such thing as joy which isn’t collective? According to Jeremy Gilbert, a cultural theory academic and DJ I interviewed last summer for Good Vibrations, joy is ‘always sort of collective. You can experience collective joy sitting quietly in a library, relating to people through reading their books…’ . Yet there is something particularly important about the ability to experience connection with other humans in the flesh; the multidimensional complexity of another being responding to your own complexity in the moment. Collective joy is also in no way a given in the presence of other humans of course - in a traffic jam say, or at a gathering at which you feel unwelcome or disconnected from or even fearful of the people around you. Some degree of safety (both real and perceived) and trust in the people around you is a necessary condition for collective joy. It is inevitably hard to access in an oppressive institutional setting like a prison. This is one of the main problems with the existing criminal justice system, as Gilbert puts it: ‘there’s a tendency for prison to produce people who come out more alienated than they went in, and less able to effectively relate to other people around them’.

This analysis is borne out by another moving interview with Good Vibrations past participant and former prisoner Russ Haynes: ‘You’re on guard 24/7… the way I survived was to close up… you’re careful who you speak to, you’re really careful about what you say, where you go, who you interact with… and all of that happening on a day to day basis can be really mentally exhausting’. Yet even small, genuine experiences of collective joy can also cultivate the ability to trust in others and see collectivity as a source of potential joy, empowerment and liberation, as he described recalling his first experience of a gamelan workshop:

‘There was something about it that was so… and this sounds really cringey but it’s the only word I can use to describe it… so spiritual… I just felt.. there was a sense of freedom. It was the first time I felt truly free to express how I was feeling through music. It took me away from my environment, I remember how I felt, it was so calming, it was so spiritual, it was so relaxing… that that sort of stone of anger that I had inside me was starting to break away and I was not only connecting with the guys around me but connecting with the battle I was having inside of myself at the time. And it opened me up to experience emotions that I was suppressing because of my anger, because I didn’t want to be perceived as as weak as I felt. The whole thing gave me an experience I needed at the time which was to be able to relax and feel something… for me it was my first step to communicating with the outside world, which before I was refusing to let in.’

Gilbert’s understanding of the phenomenon of collective joy is influenced by the 17th Century German philosopher Baruch Spinoza. In this understanding, it refers to ‘that dimension of any experience which is a product of even a microscopic enhancement of a subject’s capacities’. Collective joy is a form of freedom in other words - not the kind of freedom associated with the rugged individual (usually male) hero, enforcing his will upon the world, but the empowered freedom you feel when you transcend your limited capacity as an individual via acting together, consensually and creatively with others. Prison in this sense restricts not just your literal freedom to move, but your ability and your natural instinct to access liberatory forms of collectivity.

Collective joy and the impacts of its absence is not a topic relevant purely prison or even of the pandemic lockdown however. I think this concept means so much to me because as someone who has experienced chronic depression since my early twenties, genuine collective joy feels like its opposite. Depression is the ultimate feeling of psychic isolation, alienation and disconnection; a prison of the soul. At its worst it is not a feeling of sadness, or even despair, but of nothingness, and it is very much a ‘disease of civilisation’ (i.e Western civilisation). Recovery and staying well for me has always been associated with an ability to reach out and connect with the people and the world around me. The sad truth is experiencing this kind of collectivity was for many of us an all too rare experience even before the pandemic however. This is not to say we crave collectivity all of the time of course - many of us, myself included, need and appreciate ‘alone’ time. But we are social mammals nonetheless, and forced isolation, and its associated affective state, loneliness, is not just an unpleasant emotional reality impacting our mental health but increasingly recognised as a devastating threat to physical health with a mortality risk impact akin to smoking.

Before ‘socially isolating’ became a public health instruction, it was mostly known as a public health problem, with increasing attempts to address it, and identify its deep root causes. Some point to the loss of community and shared spaces of collectivity associated with the decline of religion. I formerly worked as a Community Organiser for secular congregational community Sunday Assembly, founding a new congregation in the East End of London. Sunday Assembly was founded in 2013 by two comedians, Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans, who wanted to recreate the feelings of community and connection they remembered from attending church in their youth, without the framing of a faith they had since lost. They kept the basic ingredients of a church service; a reason to get up and be with others on a Sunday morning; a shared celebration of life in all its tragedy; an emphasis on community service and crucially communal singing - pop singalongs with a live band. The first assemblies were a huge success and the idea quickly gained traction, leading to assemblies springing up around the world. Yet I remember the first time I attended an assembly, and the awkwardness and reluctance and self-consciousness I felt - and felt others feel - when asked to stand and sing with a room of strangers. That feeling got easier to manage and bypass but never fully disappeared: though we crave it, collective joy doesn’t always come naturally anymore, because it’s culturally pretty alien to many of us. We can very quickly feel ‘self-conscious’ - worried about embarrassing our all-important individual selves. How many of us are able to dance and sing enthusiastically and freely without the aid of alcohol for instance? What does our culture do to our children - such natural dancers - to inhibit them from doing so when they grow up?

Sunday Assembly East End

This line of inquiry has inherently political implications. Gilbert places at least some of the blame on the dominant political and economic ideology forced on the world over the last 50 years: neoliberalism:

‘Under advanced capitalist culture, neoliberal culture, we are discouraged from experiencing collectivity as joyful, we’re encouraged to think of any meaningful or satisfying experience as being by its nature private… we are encouraged to feel that the only truly satisfying and meaningful agency in the world is to to buy something and to consume it… we’re encouraged to think of every aspect of lives in terms of something that we’re acquiring, something we’re buying, something we’re making an investment in from everything from relationships to education.’

This loss has deeper and older roots however and it is perhaps no accident that Good Vibrations employs a non-Western (Indonesian) musical form to facilitate experiences of collective joy. In ‘Dancing in the Streets - A History of Collective Joy’ Barbara Ehrenreich details the fascination and horror of early European colonialists when they witnessed the ‘almost ubiquitous practice of ecstatic ritual, in which the natives would gather to dance, sing or chant to a state of exhaustion and, beyond that, sometimes trance’. Such examples of collective joy and ritual ‘ecstasy’ are well known to anthropologists as universal human impulses which have had to be heavily repressed to facilitate the strange, lonely and disconnected individual selfhood prized and developed in the West then exported forcibly upon the rest of world over the last five hundred years or so. Even now the forms of music and dance we associate with contemporary Western cultures of collective joy, from jazz to techno, largely have their roots in the African diaspora.

‘Tam Tam’ weekly open jam session, Montreal

Experiences of collective joy, particularly through music, can facilitate deep healing, in the most inhospitable of conditions, supporting people locked up, whether in literal and psychological cell, to experience even for a moment the possibility of a world beyond. Yet this has lessons for our wider culture too, about what we’ve lost and what we need to heal collectively. Going further, it may even have implications for our relationship to not just ourselves and each other but the natural world. Can opening up to the world beyond our individual selfhood begin to undo the dangerous disconnection from the ecological foundations of life which has in no small part facilitated the devastation we continue to wreck upon it? Collective Joy in this sense seems to me to relate in some sense to the untranslatable word ‘Hozho’, said to be the most important word in Diné Bizaad, a Native American language, and described by Navajo poet Lyla June Johnston (quoted at the beginning) as a sense of ‘interbeauty’, in which we feel intimately connected to all of life. As ecological activist and philosopher Joanna Macy argues, to truly transform our relationship to the natural world, instead of ‘caring’ for nature as an abstract other, we must ‘extend our notions of self-interest; ‘it would not occur to me to plead with you, “Don’t saw off your leg. That would be an act of violence.” It wouldn’t occur to me because your leg is part of your body. Well, so are the trees in the Amazon rain basin. They are our external lungs. We are beginning to realize that the world is our body.’

Ende Gelände anti-coal protest, 2016

This may sound like a standard hippie appeal to oneness. But the more we learn about ecology, biology and physics, the more it turns out the hippies were right, right? Everything is connected, and like love, this reality is only a superficial cliche to the extent it is abstract and disembodied. When you truly experience it, you know it. You feel great, you smile at the people and the world around you, and feel part of it again... yet you also open up yourself to deep grief at the violence we regularly do to each other and the biosphere. To ourselves. In this sense perhaps collective joy can only truly be accessed if we are prepared to open ourselves up to collective grief. Perhaps this is the deepest reason so many of us are resistant to it.

Perhaps it is time to open the gates and let it all in.

0 notes

orbemnews · 3 years

Link

A Year of Risk, Fear and Loss for Families in Medicine Gabrielle Dawn Luna sees her father in every patient she treats. As an emergency room nurse in the same hospital where her father lay dying of Covid last March, Ms. Luna knows firsthand what it’s like for a family to hang on to every new piece of information. She’s become acutely aware of the need to take extra time in explaining developments to a patient’s relatives who are often desperate for updates. And Ms. Luna has been willing to share her personal loss if it helps, as she did recently with a patient whose husband died. But she has also learned to withhold it to respect each person’s distinct grief, as she did when a colleague’s father also succumbed to the disease. It’s challenging, she said, to allow herself to grieve enough to help patients without feeling overwhelmed herself. “Sometimes I think that’s too big a responsibility,” she said. “But that’s the job that I signed up for, right?” The Lunas are a nursing family. Her father, Tom Omaña Luna, was also an emergency nurse and was proud when Ms. Luna joined him in the field. When he died on April 9, Ms. Luna, who also had mild symptoms of Covid-19, took about a week off work. Her mother, a nurse at a long-term-care facility, spent about six weeks at home afterward. “She didn’t want me to go back to work for fear that something would happen to me, too,” Ms. Luna said. “But I had to go back. They needed me.” When her hospital in Teaneck, N.J. swelled with virus patients, she struggled with stress, burnout and a nagging fear that left her grief an open wound: “Did I give it to him? I don’t want to think about that, but it’s a possibility.” Like the Lunas, many who have been treating the millions of coronavirus patients in the United States over the past year come from families defined by medicine. It is a calling passed through generations, one that binds spouses and connects siblings who are states apart. It’s a bond that brings the succor of shared experience, but for many, the pandemic has also introduced a host of fears and stresses. Many have worried about the risks they’re taking and those their loved ones face every day, too. They worry about the unseen scars left behind. And for those like Ms. Luna, the care they give to coronavirus patients has come to be shaped by the beloved healer they lost to the virus. Working through grief For Dr. Nadia Zuabi, the loss is so new that she still refers to her father, a fellow emergency department physician, in the present tense. Her father, Dr. Shawki Zuabi, spent his last days in her hospital, UCI Health in Orange County, Calif., before dying of Covid on Jan. 8. The younger Dr. Zuabi almost immediately returned to work, hoping to keep going through purpose and her colleagues’ camaraderie. She had expected that working alongside the people who had cared for her father would deepen her commitment to her own patients, and to some extent it has. But mainly, she came to realize how important it is to balance that taxing emotional availability with her own well-being. “I try to always be as empathetic and compassionate as I can,” Dr. Zuabi said. “There’s a part of you that maybe as a survival mechanism has to build a wall because to feel that all the time, I don’t think it’s sustainable.” Work is filled with reminders. When she saw a patient’s fingertips, she recalled how her colleagues had also pricked her father’s to check insulin levels. “He had all these bruises on his fingertips,” she said. “It just broke my heart.” The two had always been close, but they found a special connection when she went to medical school. Physicians often descend from physicians. About 20 percent in Sweden have parents with medical degrees, and researchers believe the rate is similar in the United States. The older Dr. Zuabi had a gift for conversation and loved talking about medicine with his daughter as he sat in his living room chair with his feet propped up. She is still in her residency training, and throughout last year she would go to him for advice on the challenging Covid cases she was working on and he’d bat away her doubts. “You need to trust yourself,” he’d tell her. Updated March 12, 2021, 9:30 a.m. ET When he caught the virus, she took time off to be at his bedside every day, and continued their conversations. Even when he was intubated, she pretended they were still talking. She still does. After difficult shifts, she turns to her memories, the part of him that stays with her. “He really thought that I was going to be a great doctor,” she said. “If my dad thought that of me, then it has to be true. I can do it, even if sometimes it doesn’t feel like it.” Love tempered by risk and horror In the same way that medicine is often a passion grown from a set of values passed from one generation to the next, it’s also one shared by siblings and one that draws healers together in marriage. About 14 percent of physicians in the United States have siblings who also earned medical degrees, according to an estimate provided by Maria Polyakova, a health policy professor at Stanford University. And a fourth of them are married to another physician, according to a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. In interviews with a dozen doctors and nurses, they described how it has long been helpful to have a loved one who knows the rigors of the job. But the pandemic has also revealed how frightening it can be to have a loved one in harm’s way. A nurse’s brother tended to her when she had the virus before volunteering in another virus hot spot. A doctor had a bracing talk with her children about what would happen if she and her husband both died from the virus. And others described quietly weeping during a conversation about wills after putting their children to bed. Dr. Fred E. Kency Jr., a physician at two emergency departments in Jackson, Miss., understood that he was surrounded by danger when he served in the Navy. He never expected that he would face such a threat in civilian life, or that his wife, an internist and pediatrician, would also face the same hazards. “It is scary to know that my wife, each and every day, has to walk into rooms of patients that have Covid,” Dr. Kency said, before he and his wife were vaccinated. “But it’s rewarding in knowing that not just one of us, both of us, are doing everything we possibly can to save lives in this pandemic.” The vaccine has eased fears about getting infected at work for those medical workers who have been inoculated, but some express deep concerns about the toll that working through a year of horrors has taken on their closest relatives. “I worry about the amount of suffering and death she’s seeing,” Dr. Adesuwa I. Akhetuamhen, an emergency medicine physician at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago, said of her sister, who is a doctor at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. “I feel like it’s something I’ve learned to cope with, working in the emergency department before Covid started, but it’s not something that’s supposed to happen in her specialty as a neurologist.” She and her sister, Dr. Eseosa T. Ighodaro, have regularly talked on the phone to compare notes about precautions they’re taking, provide updates on their family and offer each other support. “She completely understands what I am going through and gives me encouragement,” Dr. Ighodaro said. The seemingly endless intensity of work, the mounting deaths and the cavalier attitudes some Americans display toward safety precautions have caused anxiety, fatigue and burnout for a growing number of health care workers. Nearly 25 percent of them most likely have PTSD, according to a survey that the Yale School of Medicine published in February. And many have left the field or are considering doing so. Donna Quinn, a midwife at N.Y.U. Health in Manhattan, has worried that her son’s experience as an emergency room physician in Chicago will lead him to leave the field he only recently joined. He was in his last year of residency when the pandemic began, and he volunteered to serve on the intubation team. “I worry about the toll it’s taking on him emotionally,” she said. “There have been nights where we are in tears talking about what we’ve encountered.” She still has nightmares that are sometimes so terrifying that she falls out of bed. Some are about her son or patients she can’t help. In one, a patient’s bed linens transform into a towering monster that chases her out of the room. A nurse’s purpose When Ms. Luna first returned to her emergency room at Holy Name Medical Center in Teaneck, N.J., after her father died, she felt as though something was missing. She had gotten used to having him there. It had been nerve-racking as every urgent intercom call for a resuscitation made her wonder, “Is that my dad?” But she could at least stop by every now and again to see how he was doing. More than that though, she had never known what it was like to be a nurse without him. She remembered him studying to enter the field when she was in elementary school, coloring over nearly every line in his big textbooks with yellow highlighter. Over breakfast last March, Ms. Luna told her father how shaken she was after holding an iPad for a dying patient to say goodbye to a family who couldn’t get into the hospital. “This is our profession,” she recalled Mr. Luna saying. “We are here to act as family when family can’t be there. It’s a hard role. It’s going to be hard, and there will be more times where you’ll have to do it.” Kitty Bennett contributed research. Source link Orbem News #families #Fear #Loss #Medicine #risk #Year

0 notes

sociologyontherock · 3 years

Text

Erwin Out

By Erwin J. Warkentin

By the time you read this, I will no longer be the Head of the Department of Sociology at Memorial University. In fact, more correctly, I was the Interim Head (2019-2021), if one can truly call someone “interim” who has led a department for 25 months.

Other than faculty, staff, and graduate students, many of you probably had little contact with me. This is not because I didn’t want to meet with you, but because of several external factors beyond our control. The most significant was the Covid-19 pandemic that found all of us locked down at one time or another. A second factor was that I was not a sociologist, criminologist, or involved in police studies in any way. You would not have found me teaching any of the courses offered by the department. I am a Germanist; that is, someone who studies all things German, whether it is language, literature, or culture.

However, one might make a tenuous connection between my personal academic interests and sociology without stretching the point to breaking. My interests in propaganda, political warfare, and censorship verge on sociology. I am the author of the books The History of U.S. Information Control in Post-war Germany: The Past Imperfect (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016) and Unpublishable Works: Wolfgang Borchert’s Literary Production in Nazi Germany (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1997).

The only purpose you might have had in contacting me would have been decidedly bad. For example, you might have needed my signature on the bottom of a form to have an academic indiscretion go away. When you look upon the DR or DEX (drop without academic prejudice [exceptional circumstances]) on your transcript, I ask only that you remember me with kindness.

All of this is to say that I was an outsider. As such, I was in a unique position to observe things which might not have occurred to an insider, someone who had been properly christened into the world of the sociological endeavour, someone who knew how sociology was supposed to work.

You will note that I use the past tense in describing how I related to the Sociology Department at Memorial. The faculty and staff still reject my “outsider” status despite my protestations to the contrary to the bitter end. They did not permit me to claim that after more than two years of my headship I was still looking in from the outside. My stubborn penchant for offering only German courses in MUN’s Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures and insisting on doing that in German undermines my credibility as an insider.

Be that as it may, I would still like to offer some observations on both the discipline and the department itself. I will argue that right now is an exciting and important time to be a sociologist at Memorial. I was also gobsmacked, if I may use that term, at the quantity and exceptional quality of the published and in-process research. It also revealed some of the embarrassing misconceptions that I had about my social scientist siblings in the faculty. They actually embody almost everything which I hold dear as a humanities scholar.

Well, there are many different aspects of sociology and its various subdisciplines that I could speak of. I’m afraid this would only serve to give each of those short shrifts and do them all a disservice. What I have decided to do is concentrate on one element of the sociological endeavour; however, it is the one that permeates everything else that they do. Without this one thing, not all of the others could function. Strangely, it is the one that I had not even considered as being part of good sociological scholarship because I had never really thought it was a necessary attribute. To my mind, it was reserved for the humanities. The emphasis on “science” in social science does not conjure up too much in the way of imagination. What I am referring to is the concept that C. Wright Mills coined as the “sociological imagination.” He went on to define, describe, and ultimately apply this in his 1959 book titled The Sociological Imagination.

I have chosen to highlight Mills’ work in order to better understand sociologists and their research for reasons that have nothing to do with most of the book’s contents. The fact that it contained this notion of the sociological imagination was a happy accident. It was not something that I was looking for or had hoped to find when I stumbled on it. Mills interested me for other reasons. It was actually the preface of another book that led me to this notion. This other book engaged me in a topic that I deal with on an almost everyday basis in my own professional life. The translators of Weber’s essays in their book From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, Hans Heinrich Gerth and C. Wright Mills, included a preface that briefly debated how the meaning of a text changes as one tries to reproduce it in another language. They, of course, focussed on bringing German to English, which immediately interested me so much that I decided to read whatever else they might have written or translated. It had not even occurred to me that these two were sociologists engaging me, a Germanist, in an engrossing debate in what is theoretically the purview of my discipline. From there, I followed Mills down his scholarly rabbit hole to The Sociological Imagination. Moreover, it convinced me of the overlap of all our academic disciplines no matter how disparate.

Now, I’m not going to go into a lengthy exposition of what Mills meant by his book’s content. There are people in the Department of Sociology, dare I say all of them, who are more qualified than I am to explain what Mills attempted. I simply want to use the notion of the existence of a “sociological” imagination as a jumping-off point for my observations of the world of sociology at Memorial. Mills’ idea was my own inspiration for how to best describe what the sociologists in the department are about and the curiosity they attempt to awaken in their students, even if the notion has lost some of its original meaning in my translation.

The sociological endeavour looks for connections between larger events. It also seeks the relay points between the individual and their private world and with the public sphere of these large events. This is the essence of Mills’ sociological imagination. Events may play themselves out on a grand scale but affect the individual on a very personal level and vice versa. Events that may shake the foundations of an entire society may emanate from an individual and the waves caused by their interaction with other isolated individuals.

At Memorial, the Sociology Department provides students with a place to discuss these sorts of issues. What I learned was that the faculty teaches a method of approaching and understanding how individuals and social forces interact to create the communities in which we live. More than that, how we can identify and correct our failings while strengthening

those things that we do well.

To teach the newest and most exciting aspects of sociology and criminology, one needs to conduct research into the “how’s and why’s” of society. What has impressed me most is not that the faculty excels at providing students with the right answer to their questions, I simply assumed that they could, but teaching students how to ask the right questions in the first place and then framing those questions in such a way that they can find the answer for themselves, even if it is not to be found in a book but rather in data that may not have been collected yet.

In the last 25 months, I have been asked what one might do with all the above. It was as if the students (or often their parents) had forgotten that they were not talking to a sociologist. I would humour them and produce the standard answers that one might find in a very unoriginal Google search. I would then enumerate the usual suspects, which I had quickly learned by rote:

Social researchers

Paralegals

Public policy researchers

Data analyst

Public relations specialists

Etc. ad nauseam

I even added that they might continue into law, social work, or, if they had nothing better to do, sociology as a professor at a college or university.

Usually, this satisfied people. They left with a smile, secure in the knowledge that they or their children would be able to put a roof over their heads and food on their table with a major in sociology or police studies/criminology. However, I ached to give them the answer that lay close to my heart. The one that I knew the faculty were actually conveying to our students. I really wanted to say: “You know. The people in the department, from Adler to van den Scott, really excel at creating an informed and educated citizenry vital to our society and our form of government. That means they are creating the future without anyone really knowing it.”

For one reason or another, they never received that answer from me. I’m not usually that shy. My impression of what we did for our students and our communities, province, and country may not have been as unassuming as getting them a job after graduation. Still, it is what I observed the department doing collectively, perhaps even quite unawares. They may have been trying to do it consciously on an individual basis and even thinking that they were failing at it, but as a collective, they are succeeding spectacularly.

I am so happy that I was permitted over the last 25 months to be this casual observer, allowing myself to be educated in what it means to be a sociologist.

What does this mean for the future?

I think the department will see some exciting changes. The first of these is the change of name of Police Studies to Criminology. This was approved by the University Senate in February 2021. This not only reflects what the situation is. It labels quite precisely what the department’s faculty are actually teaching, researching, and publishing. It also brings Memorial into line with what most other programs in North America do. This will be good for the department and its graduates.

This is only the end of the beginning. With new leadership in place, the Department of Sociology is set to grow stronger into the future.

0 notes