The expendables

So why? Why do it? Why travel a couple of hundred kilometres down the road to protest wrong-headed decisions about our community hospital to folks who are clearly not listening? Folks who toil in isolation in hushed meeting rooms believing they know better about health care in our community?

What is the value in complaining to a government that enlists faceless bureaucrats to determine which communities will get expanded services and which ones must lose their hospital to pay for them—who will win and who will lose? Folks who decide who among us are expendable?

What difference can a few busloads of average people possibly make? How can a few dozen folks hope to alter the trajectory and momentum of a government and its soldiers who wake up every morning certain they know best?

Politicians and decision makers face objections to their ideas and proposals most days of the week—how will the voices of Prince Edward County have any more impact than the traffic noise they hear outside their office windows?

The most likely outcome, of course, is that nothing at all will be changed.

The folks from the County will be treated politely. We will say our piece. Opposition politicians will tell us it will be different when they come to power. We will quietly file back onto the buses and come home.

Meanwhile the machinery of government will grind on, oblivious to the harm it does to this and other communities; ignorant to the forces that shaped health care in rural communities like this one; focused single-mindedly on big systemic solutions rather than many small, organic community-driven solutions that might actually work.

Because that is what they do. That is the way the world appears when you spend your days gazing from office towers in Toronto, with scarcely a connection to the people who are affected by your decisions. These folks believe they are but one or two adjustments away from provincewide health care efficiency and effectiveness. They’ve always felt that way. Will always.

Of course, it will be a generation before history proves this crop of smart folks wrong—but by then we may have grown accustomed to travelling to Kingston or Toronto when we get sick. Then a fresh crop of bright, able folks will declare with brilliant certainty that centralization of health care was a mistake; that the real answer to our health care woes is to devolve services to the community.

So why? Why do it? Why are we on the bus today?

long as Prince Edward County Memorial Hospital exists—there is hope, slim as it may be. As long as the County benefits from the mix of collaboration, skill and personalized care that health care professionals provide in this community, there is a reason to fight for it.

As long as we continue to get older and wish to stay in our community we must strive to insist that governments do as they promised—deliver health care as close to home as possible.

To do otherwise is to accept that all is lost— that we as citizens have no influence upon those who govern us. That we don’t matter.

That is an unacceptable and intolerable position. It is accession to tyranny. Nothing less.

So we must push back. If for no other purpose than to show our children and our grandchildren that we did not simply accept our fate. They must see that we did not give in—or give up. They must know that we resisted with all our might.

We do it too for our forefathers—those who built these “healing places” to care for the needs of this community. It is our duty to them that we resist this professional larceny—in which the resources of the Picton hospital are depleted to shore up the ravenous needs of Belleville’s hospital.

I don’t believe anyone on the buses today is confused about why they are there. Few expect the provincial government or its health care apparatus to change direction because a few dozen County folks expressed their unhappiness on their doorstep. Nor will the determined administrators of QHC or the LHIN be thrown off course by this demonstration of citizen discontent.

But unless we commit to pushing back against government’s tyrannical tendencies—as best as we are able—we become complicit in our own powerlessness. We concede that others will decide who among us matters and who does not.

Why are we on the bus today? Because bad decisions must be confronted, even when no one’s listening. Perhaps more so.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca