Memories of a sheep in pink
COLUMN
|
|
|
By Reetta Meriläinen
The human mind is a strange beast. It works in mysterious ways, and it can suddenly come up with an answer for a long-forgotten question.
Around ten years ago, I attended an agricultural fair in North Carolina, in the state capital Raleigh.
I have three strong recollections of the North Carolina State Fair. One is of a vegetable musical featuring dancing tomatoes and cabbages. The music was almost unspeakably jolly.
My second memory is of a humungously fat man who was being pushed around by his family in a specially-constructed wheelbarrow. The man was eating deep-fried onion rings.
The third and most jaw-dropping image of the event was a sheep that was an entrant in a livestock beauty pageant. It was wearing a rosette, had been shorn all over, and was dressed in a pink tracksuit. The sheep looked confused and embarrassed. My first reaction was: this cannot be true. I started laughing. Then I began to feel bad about it all.
The embarrassed sheep suddenly thrust itself back into my memory the other week when I read a couple of news items about the Koukkuniemi old people's home in Tampere (HS, 31.3.2006) and the Kustaankartano home in Helsinki (HS, 1.4.2006).
The stories did not make me laugh; they made me angry and gave me a sense of nausea.
Finland performs well in international comparisons of welfare performance and competitiveness, in PISA studies on our education system, and in many other barometric analyses.
Finland shows its bigger brothers how it is done.
It seems almost as if all Finnish life is about bone-headed, hard-hearted, dogged effort borne out of the country's small size and the harsh jolts of history.
Amidst all the forward movement, the old, the sick, and the handicapped are tossed to the ditches at the side of the road. And yet, all the time we hear we live in a Nordic welfare society.
The immediate causes for the plight of old people in care are known: the municipalities are strapped for cash, there are staff shortages, there are structural problems in the service sector.
These are all headaches that will only worsen in years to come as the Finnish population takes on more than a touch of grey.
No. I wrote that the wrong way around. The things above are not causes - they are consequences.
They are the products of society's choices and the importance we attach to certain things. The elderly infirm have fallen to the bottom of the heap in terms of importance. In modern thinking, they are a wasted investment object.
Wage levels are a question of values. Caring for people is not regarded in today's Finland as work worthy of a decent salary. Hence some of the nursing staff go abroad, and others find work in other sectors. Those left behind run around in a state of exhaustion. They are not the ones responsible for the present state of affairs.
It is also a question of values to patch the shortage of nursing staff by administering drugs. It is an inhumane choice.
The old people stumbling around and falling over in a pill-induced haze are not numbers, but mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, colleagues from work. It is heartbreaking to watch a person change into a glassy-eyed, confused tree-stump because of powerful sedatives.
On Easter Saturday we can recall the European cultural heritage. Christian faith is a significant part of that cultural legacy. It urges us to take care of "the least of these my brethren".
In recent months there has been much said and written about the collision of cultures. I don't know if there is a danger of collision. Can European culture any longer be party to a collision - a collision requires of the collider that it has solid form, some semblance of values. An aircraft cannot collide with a cloud, after all.
The reader has doubtless reached the conclusion that the writer probably has her own axe to grind on this one.
Quite true.
I have no complaints about my health today, but one of these days I may be sick and old. The future as a disoriented block of wood, pretty in pink, in a hospital bed - it scares me. I do not want anyone to wind up in that twilight zone, at the mercy of indifference.
Yes, a sheep dressed in pastel pink. It had lost its dignity, its dignity as a sheep, to human stupidity. That is why it felt bad.
Stupidity is not a force of nature, it can be controlled.
Let the sick and even the dying preserve their dignity. We can afford it.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 15.4.2006
The writer is editor-in-chief of Helsingin Sanomat
REETTA MERILÄINEN / Helsingin Sanomat
reetta.merilainen@hs.fi
