Your passport is your national family membership. It comes with a food card and a right to housing. As all successful tribes in history did, so we do too. When you are one of us we feed and house. That is what membership brings and it makes us a nation. Now we have a national health service that works and not simply hospitals to mop up the sickness caused by stress and inequity. The difference is night and day. Our nation really works. Our society really works. Other nations spend their money on police, prisons and bombs... what we do is actually cheaper. So, yeah, we feel pretty smug about it... one could say... exceptionally smug.
When a health service becomes overwhelmed, then the lives they usually save, such as from heart attacks or accidental injuries, can become lethal too. So as we practice social distancing we protect the vulnerable - vulnerable kids included - and wider society from more than the virus itself.
There they were, the everyday heroes who are there when your need comes. They who know that, "words save lives," with kindness and ready smiles for all. We walk into the children's emergency department, bright emoji's from the ceiling, fictional superheroes moving in the breeze and rainbows on the walls. From the moment we arrived to the moment we left it was a place anxiety drained away, as if the staff had learned how to pull the plug on fear and fill it up with confidence instead. I hope there's someone there for them too, that they have care for the carers and enough time for their own health. The NHS is our British treasure, and it isn't the buildings or the machines, it's the people helping people.
"Yeah," said Derek, "I'm a senior accountant in the NHS, have been for so long. I was so proud when I started here. I was gonna make sure every penny went to helping folks. I believed in it, you know, or maybe you recall that optimism of youth. Since 2010 the real costs per year are 4-5%, but these increases the politicians keep shouting about, they're only 1%. So, in very real terms, this is deliberate underfunding in a really rich country. And since 2012, the UK austerity policies have caused 130,000 extra deaths, or that's what the Institute for Public Policy research says, so how is this not social murder? We are a rich country and we are loosing folks to preventable disease and the average lifespan of a man in the poorest part of Glasgow is 55 years? Most families who need benefits to survive have one or both parents in work, stress hormones are the main cause of all disease. People are suffering and dying, many pensioners too proud or unable to figure out claim pension benefit... the unclaimed figure now at 3.3 billion pounds... while we squabble over television licenses for the over 75's. For many of them their only friends are the familiar faces on the television screen. They're granting fracking licenses and putting up the VAT for the batteries that store solar energy while keeping the VAT on coal low and removing subsidies from green energy. So, yeah, it's time for me to speak up. The entire country's life span has dropped by six months since 2012, and you don't even wanna know how much that is due to youth suicide. At least I can say what they're doing to the NHS, because silence on the matter is killing more than my conscience."
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