WHATEVER HAPPENED TO STOICISM?

                                                

                                           WHATEVER HAPPENED TO STOICISM?

Much of the past years news has been taken up by the NHS and its ability to manage the pandemic along with all the other responsibilities and services it has to deal with on a daily basis.  Credit goes to all that serve in the Good Ship NHS, but why oh why do we witness such weakness of mind and spirit.  Might I suggest that media in general and the BBC in particular has done a ruddy good job of spreading gloom and despondency over so long a period that no-one has any metaphorical balls left anymore.  There are those who have 'stepped up to the plate', but the burnout rate is phenomenal.

Only yesterday my attention was caught by an item on the BBC's Red Button service regarding those who  are suffering all manner of after-effects.  The story reads : 'Many hospital staff treating the sickest patients during the first wave of the pandemic were left traumatised by the experience, a study suggests. Researchers at Kings College Hospital asked 709 workers at nine intensive care units in England about how they were coping as the first wave eased.  Nearly half reported symptoms of severe anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder or drinking problems.  One in seven had thoughts of self-harming or being 'better off dead'. 

As Captain Mainwaring might have commented 'What sort of talk is that Wilson?'.  It's their job, get on with it.  It does make you wonder whether the interviewers skewed their questions so as to obtain a more sensational set of statistics.  Would we today find a group of 19year olds champing at the bit to take to the skies in a Spitfire or Hurricane in order to punish the Hun and defend Dear Old Blighty?  Can you imagine the Health and Safety exams, the Diversity indoctrinations, the Equal Opportunities battering?  Now that WOULD be stressful!  Listening to some Oxbridge educated buffoon with degrees in Pointlessness and Unworldliness blather on about the importance of 'Inclusion' before you're allowed in the cockpit would be enough to consider a life as a mercenary... a white supremacist... though still possessing a model railway for those 'quieter moments', obviously.

Meanwhile, back in A&E, Intensive Care etc, are those serving today really so fragile?  Did Florence Nightingale and her ilk when tending soldiers who had suffered appalling injuries seek counselling for that myriad of cop-outs discussed earlier?  We seem to be breeding a generation that lacks spine, backbone and guts.  Still, they are all medical conditions one way or another,. A case of self-healing possibly...