Human Face

 

M

Most people in the UK have known about the Post Office Scandal for several years now. However it has taken the ITV drama , Mr Bates vrs The Post Office to galvanise the government into some drastic appropriate and justified action over the past week.

Interesting yes, surprisingly no, I’m not surprised at all. Once the general public knew that the Government investigation was in progress, it was all old news. 

Vindication would come in time and Horizon IT would be defunct.

But the truth has been very different

And here enters Toby Jones one of my favourite actors .

In the horror The Mist , Toby was famous for playing Supermarket manager Ollie Weeks, a mild mannered bachelor who turned sharpe shooting hero when the chips were down and this mild mannered hero-from-nowhere character surfaced again as the Post Master Alan Bates who took on the Post office henchmen and won.

The drama showed the human face of this disaster. It lifted away from mere news and gave it a heart and that heart fired up empathy and advanced empathy in most people who watched it. 

Empathy changed things 

And obviously the publicity didn’t hurt either.

Advanced empathy often gets lost in the day to day.

We lose track of that human face, those human feelings behind being us being right, getting along, walking our own path. 

Many years ago I nursed a spinal injury patient who was a horror to everyone around him. He was truculent and angry and rude and snappy not only to nursing staff but to his family and friends and colleagues. Visiting times were often filled with him yelling at his grandchildren for being noisy, or berating his wife for bringing the wrong book or even sitting in the wrong chair.

One day, after one of my staff had left his bedside in tears, I challenged his behaviour but instead of taking the this behaviour is unacceptable route, I sat down quietly and told him I was at a loss with him. 

“ I feel helpless and upset by your constant criticism ” I said “it upsets me to hear it and I am only on duty seven hours a day, so how does your wife feel being on the firing line 24/7? “

The patient went quiet and hung his head as the tears flowed. Suddenly he looked like the person he had become, a frightened child  who was angry at the world.

He was no longer the monster patient in bed four.

Smaller examples show up here in blogland, and it’s not hard to figure out just why it happens. Like in the press, bloggers often become unreal, polarised figments of ridicule or people just to disagree with. They are not people, they are adversaries that hide behind rhetoric and opinion, shit many don’t even have a face to put a name to.

 Only yesterday a blog commentator decided to use the fact that I am on long term antibiotics to support her bandwagon of the dangers of such practice in the health system. They did this, without my permission and without any full knowledge of the hoops I’ve been through coming to this decision with my GP, especially as any realistic alternatives cannot adequately protect me from a urosepsis, a condition which has laid me physically and mentally ,very low of a couple of occasions. I fully understand and support the modern day research based medical practice NOT to over prescribe antibiotics, but that wasn’t acknowledged at all just  that I was sanctioning misuse which was reported as fact. 

The empathy was lost in both of these examples, but like the bad tempered spinal patient who had psychologically regressed into childhood, it’s not hard to see his human face once you let your guard down and empathy in.

So before you rattle your sabres on line , 

Spare a thought to the human face of the person you seem so angry at.

And take a deep breath

Do you really need to make a point so badly ? 

Is empathy such a terrible concept ?

And I point this question at myself too

Perhaps I’m guilty of not seeing certain commentators human face too