This fresh look at life is what we badly need. It is precisely this awareness that gets us most in touch with what is truly important to our lives. (It also helps us to make responsible and heart-felt decisions about how we use our techology!)
When I was a street kid, many years ago, it took my leaving the US and meeting an octogenarian Englishwoman who had lots of personal stories to help me break out of the entrapments of my "era." She expanded my sense of time and space as she shared her life stories...what life was like before penicillin...when she had a 7 year old son she had to watch die of "the consumption back in '33." What London was like before motor cars were invented...how afraid people were when the century changed from 1899 to 1900. What it was like to keep the children from playing on the undetonated bombs that were embedded in the street in Coventry just after The Blitz....
In the 21st century, I am a nursing student in a graduate program in south Texas. Technopoly was assigned to us by our Health Promotion professor. I came to her lecture listening to the class talk about "that nut Postman." I was (perhaps naively...) shocked! I was also shocked to notice that the book was out of print! (I had to search high and low for my copy...rather than settle for the dog-eared one in the reference room...!) This book gave me another mind-expanding encounter...like the one I had years ago with the Englishwoman....
How poignantly relevant this material is as we pass through yet another techno-paradigm! And yet we seem, as a culture, to be so blissfully unaware of it all...even apathetic...or apethetically blind.
I am a high tech intensive care nurse in (really) the world's largest medical center. My patients hang on to dear life with multiple life support machines and intravenous medications titrated to keep their organs functioning as they wait for a new heart/liver/lungs/kidney.... There are so MANY things I depend on to function properly...which affect how well I do my job...how well the human being I call "my patient" survives that day. It is am awesome responsibility. I am also expected to know a lot more than most of my general nursing colleagues are...and I cannot have a bad day and make a simple mistake...or I could cost the human being I call "my patient" his or her life.
An example: I focus on the cardiac output and the arterial waveform, et cetera...and hurry through the technical things I have to accomplish, constantly looking for time to nurture this human being I call my patient...and his wife...and children...and other loved ones. (Some people in my profession can call this "going above and beyond the call of duty.") Telling the human being's wife that she was actually the most important team member of this process made her cry...and I got to feel altruistic, as this quite appealed to my vanity. But not for long because I know that it shouldn't be that way! It shouldn't be up to My Good Will to Bequeath her elevated status...SHE HAS BEEN MARRIED TO HIM FOR LONGER THAN I HAVE BEEN ALIVE!!! Our technology has stripped their marital relationship...! She has to ask permission for access to him for the first time in their marriage. (I am embarrassed by how grateful she is. She deserves better than this...and I know it.)
As a graduate student, the themes of my papers repeatedly get focused on humanizing the hospitalization process...for the patients and their families. We seem to have let technology rule the way we handle human factors...with absolutely everyone...ourselves and our patients and their families. I am sensing this slipping away of something so very important....
Dr. Postman's book put a finger on the pulse of this "thing" I am deeply sensing that has been troubling me. But I am not in dispair...and I did not sense that Dr. Postman's intention was to bring dispair. I just feel that it was the AWARENESS that I needed...and that he wanted us to have...a consciousness raising.
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