The Fear Is Back
She was born in the Soviet Union, under Stalin. Her parents had lived through the Great War and the Revolution, and her father, a Russian Orthodox priest, had refused to renounce his God. So she attended a new school at least twice each year, never knowing when KGB attention would sharpen its focus on her little family and cause them to run in search of another place to live. In the end, the running was for naught, and by the time she was 12 her father was taken away for the last and final time. They were left with only a rumor, never formally confirmed, that her father had finally been executed. By the time war broke out again, she was fully indoctrinated, well trained in fear and suspicion and primal self-preservation.
After the war, she and her mother arrived as refugees in Canada. They worked as indentured servants for one year to pay for their passage, and they were incredibly fortunate. Their fortune was to be taken in together, instead of being separated, by a prominent gentleman and his wife. The gentleman was semi-retired, with duties only as a board member of a large and venerable publicly owned institution, and he mentored his younger ward, giving her the run of his personal library, and arranging for her employment at his firm’s head office in Montreal when her passage had been fully served.
“I remember this moment,” she tells me, “when everything changed. All my life I had lived with my heart clenched tight in total fear and paranoia, like a heavy rock in my chest. One day, as I stood on rue Sainte-Catherine waiting for the light to change, I became aware of everything around me in a different way. It was a perfect day, with blue skies and sunshine and a light breeze. Everyone on the street stood or moved so freely, so lightly. No one was afraid, or tense, or self-conscious. I stopped and stared, and the heavy clenching fear in my heart eased open and fell away.”
60 years later, she looks at me hopelessly and tells me, “It’s back.”, and then she tells me why.
In recent years, she, and her friends and family as well, have had cause to interact with our medical system, and related social services as well, repeatedly. There have been too many incidents where doctors and others engaged in providing medical care cited rules and procedures as their only communication to the patient. They filled out paperwork and routinely turned away anyone whose needs could not be clearly addressed by approved procedures. They offered narcotics and tests and specialist referrals that took months to materialize, were performed, and produced results that were ignored and not followed up on. She has further discovered that she no longer has access to effective representation by elected officials that can do anything to intervene on a citizen’s behalf.
For over 40 adult years, she worked hard, paid her taxes, always voted, and never hesitated to contact her political representatives when government services were delayed or inefficient. This process, she says, has stopped working. It seems to her now, that everyone she can expect to encounter through her old age works for the government, and acts more and more like the citizens of the communist country she grew up in, like chattel. This is why, she says, the fear is back. It is the fear of soulless automatons who thoughtlessly follow their master’s rules and do not see another human being when they look at her.
How much of this, I ask myself, is an echo of her past, and how much based on the current reality? Is there really much difference between advanced socialism and communism? There are some people who’ve received satisfactory medical care here in recent years. I’ve spoken to them. They were all highly successful, well known, and they were all men. I have not heard a happy patient story from an average citizen, or from a woman, in many years. The truly wealthy all leave the country for medical care.
How much does it take, I wonder, for those of us who haven’t been terrorized, to learn to be afraid?
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September 25th, 2007 at 5:38 pm
Vera, are you sure, that medical service abroad (in 99% cases that really means USA) is better?! I can tell you similar stories about several visits to one of the prestigious US hospitals in Chicago several years ago — and it was awful! I never experienced such humiliation in any USSR hospitals!
I wish you were right, that somewhere, somehow (by a miracle?) the medical system is much better. However, a couple years ago I was in Tijuana — a small border town in Mexico. Its only, but lucrative and perennial, business is selling medical (and some other) services to nearly 40 million Americans per year.
(A funny part of that trip: when I was crossing the border, returning back to USA, the officer, who painstakingly asked Americans, how many pounds of pills they bought today, became bored seeing my Canadian passport. He knows for sure: “poor” Canadians do not by “cheap” medicine in Mexico — unlike rich Americans… And “poor” Mexicans were also not interested in me as a customer: Canadians still do not need to buy there. When we support those who want to ruin our medical system, we’ll have to go to Mexico.)
However, your partner was right: she feels, better to say, intuits, as any other person born in the USSR, that a similar process has started (or has been started) here as well — the process of deprivation us from our rights and freedoms. Once Russians allowed it — and they still have problems. Do we, Canadians, need it?
September 25th, 2007 at 7:33 pm
Hi George,It’s interesting that you illustrate some increase in humanized relations in Russia in contrast to the decrease in North America, where so many Soviet refugees first tasted freedom. Are we, Canada and Russia travelling in opposite directions on the same road?You are absolutely right to point out that medical care isn’t necessarily better elsewhere. There are many places in the world where it is much worse than in Canada, and in some of them it is almost non-existent.This reality, however, is exactly what we are always told to remember in the name of state vs personal and societal responsibility. If the state isn’t doing a great job, well, it could be a lot worse. If we reduced state control then we’d be ‘less secure in case of emergency’, subject to market forces, and cast out on our own into a cruel and capricious world. That would be the price of freedom.The US medical system is, as usual, the most fascinating case of all. (I have lived, worked, and received medical care in the US.) There is, naturally, a wider spectrum between sub-standard care and excellent care than in any country with a fully socialized system. I know of individuals who could not afford long term treatment for serious illness (and couldn’t get more insurance of course) in the US who have moved here. So, for example, a kidney transplant candidate gets regular and free dialysis, but will never see the end of the transplant line. This example is representative of a core medical constituency which is at the heart of the argument for socialization, but this constituency is also a very small minority of the population. Most of us, with or without serious health problems, suffer from continuing deterioration and denial of care under socialization as the costs escalate beyond reach. We forget, for instance, that there are millions of mostly healthy Canadians who can’t even find a GP anymore.Is the US system better as it works now? Yes and no. Yes because at least there is personal choice. Even though most can not afford the best care, it at least exists, and could be obtained. No because of private insurance companies (replacing the nanny state for many people) combined with the litigious nature of the American society. Corporate entities are responsible to their shareholders and profits and are not capable of being truly moral in themselves, although they can be run ethically by highly moral people and behave best under peer pressure (also known as competition and free enterprise). As to the legal system, that is the more complex issue. The US doesn’t have a justice system; it has an advocacy system. This is a mainstay of freedom, but, as we see, can run amok when abused or manipulated, as can all freedom.What is missing in state run systems, and melting away in the US as well, is the human to human relationship between caregivers and patients. Where there is no government intervention at all, this becomes a very strong relationship because each is responsible to the other as well as to themselves. Any system which takes away our responsibility takes our rights along with it. I believe that the two are inseparable. My friend doesn’t fear a medical system per se, she fears a loss of autonomy and humanity.