Dear Friends,
another week as gone, and restrictive policies are getting more severe.
The model of Whuan seems to be the only reasonable way to prevent the spread of the virus,
and Milano is now a quite, desertic city.
Today I am off and at 22 I will start the first night shift of my life. This is unusual, but true! None of the hospitals where i worked previously required me any night shift. So now I will experience this new adventure by holding up an ICU with severe ill patients during a pandemy of a lethal virus. Not bad as a start, isn’t it?
Due to the lack of trained intensivists physician, I also have been upgraded to the “degree” of attending; basically I feel like the private that during the battle is upgraded to Officer.
Talking in military jergon is sadly appropriate, because now in the wards and in the corridor of the hospital, there are military health care providers, either from navy, airforce and army.
I never saw collegues in uniforms walking around and taking care of patients. Their presence gives me a further warning about the severity of our condition.
This is sad. And scary.
At the same time I realise that we do not choose our challenges, but we are asked to face them, and to behave at the top of our humanity.
Big challenges and big responsabilities.
Patients in ward still are struggling to survive, and I still struggle with my internal questions.
Where to put the therapeutic ceiling.
When I try to talk about this with my collegues, everything ends up in a messy talkative confusion, and we do not really share a common approach.
I understand this, because this is war time.
This is the moment in which we should take out the answers we already gave to those critical questions, rosen in peace time.
But apparently we were not ready enough.
Of course we were not ready talking about the number of ventilator or ICU beds.
But we were especially not ready as collective conscience.
We prefered to hide ourselves behind the abundancy of the past present, rather to think and create the structural tools that would let ourselves survive in case of change of the trend of resources.
And this is what is happening right now.
We have been organizing our society only facing a positive trend. After seven biblic years of “fat cows”, what is forecasting now are seven years of “slim cows”. And I feel we forgot what this mean. I feel we partied way too much. And the bill for those hardcore party, is gonna be huge.
Today, as you can read, I am a bit angry.
I am angry with the miope vision of the generation of my Father.
A generation that globally spent more than what it had. And is delivering to my generation a very imperfect world.
In a certain way, I feel like that now I am rushly asked to sit at the “table of the adults” and to help to solve a mess I did not create. After an whole life in which I have been hearing that I am too young for everything, now It seems that I am foundamental to fill the gap of a holed system.
I am being born now, and to use again a Christian metaphore, I see my original sin.
This is not working.
For me, this is not sustainable.
Of course now I need to work to help my Community to solve this terrible situation.
But when all this will be over, we will need to sit down, and at that day, the agenda is gonna be set by the next generation, hoping in higher awarness and more farsighted behaviour.
We cannot let anymore allow that our planet is crashed against the rocks by miope pilots.
At any level, we will need to discuss the entire hierarchy of values, facing the real sustaniblity of these.
The bill of all the “ all for a dollar” chinese shops is now being delivered.
We thought we could save money by relying on the endlessly cheap production of goods in Asia.
We did not really care about the conditions of workers and civil rights in those countries.
We only saw the cheap part of it, and we took advantage of it.
The capitalistic “western world” as been seen as an example to imitate by those rising economies, at any cost.
We are now served the bill of all those trampled rights.
I hope you and your family are all doing well,
and I invite you to keep a positive and solid attitude.
Let’s keep in touch next week.
Ciao a tutti,
Ale