by Colin Hyde
I heard some people say that the Labor Day holiday should be on May 1, the official Labor Day, not Monday, April 29, which the government chose for expedience. We heard the Emancipation Day organizers protest when there were discussions about commemorating the occasion on a day other than August 1.
My feeling about this Labor Day is that the government is right on point to choose Monday. In a way, Monday is most appropriate because that’s the day employed people hate the most. Everyone labors, ever since that feeble Adam didn’t have the self-discipline, but Labor Day is for those who get paid, not for those who pay. There is an employees’ thing called hump day, that’s Wednesday every week, and the sense around that story is that Monday and Tuesday are uphill, Wednesday plateaus, and Thursday is so close to Friday, which is the day when at 4:30 p.m. some will brokout, those ones who have disposable cash after their bills are paid.
I have said, yes, I might have an, ehm, original thought: that there are two people who can drink in the morning—the rich (whiskey) and the very poor (cheecha and spuddy). The short of this story here is that if anyone doesn’t like Labor Day on Monday, then they can do it again, without pay, on Wednesday, May 1. Happy Labor Day, Monday and Wednesday!
Sorry, that Medico is textbook, Kareem
Last week, Minister Kareem said that personnel at the medical department had explained that untrained people moving a person with a bullet wound is not recommended. Indeed, a person with a bullet wound could be as fragile as one who has been seriously injured in a vehicle wreck. There are bullets that lodge in spines and necks, and any injury to those areas is delicate and difficult to deal with. ComPol Chester Williams has said that his department is guided, supported in its policy of hesitation in regard to the moving of injured people by officers. The experts at BERT in their public awareness campaigns insist that the job of moving people be left to those who are trained to deal with physical trauma.
On the label of all petroleum-based pesticides is the warning that if they are ingested, vomiting must not be induced as a first aid measure. Some of these pesticides are quite lethal, and obviously if one has swallowed what amounts to a lethal dose, the best thing to do is to get the person to expel as much of it from their body as soon as possible. From my memory bank, I know of two reasons why for some pesticides we are advised to not induce vomiting if someone has ingested it. One is that some of these pesticides are corrosive, and the person who ingested it will further damage the trachea and esophagus if they expel it. The second is that petroleum-based chemicals can induce a kind of pneumonia that is very terrible, and in getting the person to vomit, you put the person at great risk of expiring from this type of pneumonia.
But if you know the person has swallowed a lethal dose, and you can’t get the person to the hospital quickly, do you put all your marbles on bizzy nut or charcoal? I put that question to an expert, and he answered without hesitation: induce vomiting.
That man we call Father of the Nation left us with many valuable bits of advice. One of his pearls is that we should not let the best be the enemy of the good. I think that’s what’s happening here. The best situation is for the medical expert to get on the scene. But the good prevails when the best is not around.
We have been advised; we understand the fragility of the neck and the spine. Now we have to be practical. You see a person with a bullet wound to the head or belly, or a deep cut to a leg or arm, you don’t stand around; you spring to action. You see a person crumpled in an unusual position, think twice before moving the person. But you don’t have to think if the person has trouble breathing or is bleeding heavily—act.
BMJ Global Health says that in India “Victims of traffic crashes in LMICs [low and middle income countries] are typically transported from the crash scene to a hospital by bystanders and passing vehicles”, that in India ambulances account “for less than 5% of transport”, and that “the high equipment and operational costs of ambulance-based EMS [emergency medical services] suggests they will not be adopted or expanded to scale in many LMICs.”
SAGE Journals—we’re in the rich USA now—in the article “Police-to-Hospital Transport for Violently Injured Individuals: A Way to Save Lives?” said that “when comparing police hospital transport and emergency medical services transport for violently injured individuals, survival rates are at least equivalent”, and that “a modicum of evidence has emerged in past decades suggesting that prehospital transport by police for violently injured individuals, in lieu of EMS, may be a lifesaving municipal policy worthy of broader consideration.” SAGE Journals further says “this policy may be especially applicable in situations where firearm violence has occurred, advanced trauma care is accessible, and police and other security forces exceed the capacity of EMS.”
Our intellectual class, those people who were educated in universities, paarat what they learned in school too much. Those professors in universities, they aren’t gods. Many of them have few practical experiences to draw from. Any police brass or medical officer who insists that a seriously wounded person be left to wait for an ambulance is still in school, still has their heads buried in textbooks.
Hippies and Earth Day
My knowledge of hippies is that they were children of Europeans in the US who were disappointed in the sick behavior of their warmongering, racist, earth-violating ancestors, thus they revolted. After Europeans with their heavy artillery had vanquished the other tribes, the black and brown people of the earth, and had conquered the Americas and Africa, they fought over those pieces of earth and made treaties to share up the land, then they turned their weapons on themselves in WW I and WW II.
Maybe we should not be all harsh on the Europeans, for the black and brown men had done a lot of fighting themselves.
Yes, my sense is that hippies were rich white people’s children. The Europeans have been rich ever since the conquest of Africa and the Americas. The hippies sang give peace a chance during the Vietnam War and dodged getting drafted into the US army. I think they gave us that music I seldom listen to, rock and acid rock, and I share their liking for folk and C&W songs. Two of their big heroes were Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, and she could sing, and he composed some of the greatest poetry of any era. Hurray for Joan and Dylan.
Britannica says hippie derives from the word “hip”, a term applied to the Beats of the 1950s. According to Britannica, this Beats originated “in the 1950s and centred in the bohemian artist communities of San Francisco’s North Beach, Los Angeles’ Venice West, and New York City’s Greenwich Village.”
Britannica said, “Its adherents, self-styled as ‘beat’ (originally meaning ‘weary,’ but later also connoting a musical sense, a ‘beatific’ spirituality, and other meanings) and derisively called ‘beatniks,’ expressed their alienation from conventional, or ‘square,’ society by adopting a style of dress, manners, and ‘hip’ vocabulary borrowed from jazz musicians. They advocated personal release, purification, and illumination through the heightened sensory awareness that might be induced by drugs, jazz, sex, or the disciplines of Zen Buddhism. The Beats and their advocates found the joylessness and purposelessness of modern society sufficient justification for both withdrawal and protest.”
Hippies “experimented with communal or cooperative living arrangements, and they often adopted vegetarian diets based on unprocessed foods and practiced holistic medicine”, and they “were also involved in the development of the environmental movement.” Yap, hippies were environment-conscious and played a big part in the founding of Earth Day. Happy Earth Day!