Indifference kills

My good friend and sparring partner Ralph Margetson called the other day. He was rather anxious. More than usual. At 95 years of age he has both time to worry and a life of experience to know there is plenty to worry about. He worries about the lack of worry in the community. He fears that too few care enough to act. Or worn out by the long fight.

Are other people writing letters? Are they calling the hospital? Are they calling their government representative? He sees and appreciates the regular correspondence from folks like Fran Renoy, Bob Williams and a handful of others. But he fears their voices are being drowned out by the dull drone of indifference.

He is not at all certain this community is ready to stand up and defend its hospital again. Will they tell QHC and the provincial government they have embarked down the wrong path? That diminishing PECMH won’t fix QHC’s financial ills? Not in the long run.

He worries that too many have given up— they have concluded the province will do whatever it wants and there is nothing they can do to stop it.

Ralph knows firsthand that arrogant, dictatorial and abusive governments are the product of a passive and disengaged citizenry. He has seen it all before.

Ralph points to how few of us actually bother to vote. In the last provincial election in October 2011, less than half of eligible voters bothered to do so. It set a new and disappointing record for apathy in Ontario.

He knows that when we turn our back on government, we allow tyrants in.

Much of Europe was a broken and disillusioned place between the great wars. Death and disease had taken a terrible toll. Violence, depression and hardship came to define life in Germany, Italy, Spain, France and much of Europe. People looked inward. Forced to fend for themselves, they turned way from their institutions. Governments were largely seen as weak and useless tools to enrich a small elite.

Into this gulf of apathy flowed a wave of tyrants offering easy answers to complex problems. Lacking an informed and engaged citizenry to slow it down, these nations succumbed to strong men promising renewed glory and triumph.

Ralph was among the millions of young men and women who bravely risked their lives to stop these tyrants and end the horror they had wreaked upon their people and upon the world.

These aren’t comparable times. He knows that better than anyone.

But Ralph understands apathy and the destructive forces that take hold when people stop believing their voice matters.

Time is running out for our hospital.

Soon the axe will fall on PECMH. And yet we don’t have basic answers about why PECMH is being cut far more than BGH. We don’t know how these decisions were arrived at. Who prescribed this solution? What principles guided their decision-making?

We don’t even know whether PECMH is, as we suspect, a more cost effective hospital than BGH.

We know only that QHC must find about $10 million in savings and PECMH will bear a wildly disproportionate share of those cuts. Just as it has done every other time QHC has felt a financial squeeze, it is turning to Picton to drain this reserve account.

Maybe it is over. Perhaps the fight was lost back in 1998—that this is just the slow motion unwinding of this proud community institution. Maybe there is nothing we can do.

I don’t want to be the one to explain this to Ralph.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca