“It is in order of triage not of arrival.” The guard says for the seventh time, but he will say it another thirty. Your job is to inhabit the impossible: “Take a seat.” There is no seat. “Don’t be in the middle.” Everything is the medium.
“You have to be attentive.” He tells who he walked away to get out of the way. It is impossible for this to be one of the doors to the welfare state; It is impossible that upon entering the emergency room of this hospital you feel that the State respects you or takes your suffering into account.
Parallel to these non-isolated events in the hallways of the Canary Islands hospitals, the Puerto Rican singer Bad Bunny is making waves with an album whose cover is two white plastic chairs in front of some banana trees. Half of the world, coincidentally the north of the world, did not understand the snapshot and there were serious tutorials circulating on the Internet explaining, with all the pedagogy in the world, what that everyday and painful image means for Latin American and Caribbean people, Because once upon a time the people we loved most sat in those chairs to sunbathe, which is the only thing for which those who didn’t understand anything still don’t get paid. The lyrics of that song, which has already permeated as if it were a classic, read: “I should have taken more photos of when I had you, I should have given you more kisses and hugs the times I could.” Simple, but devastating in the world of immediacy and every man for himself.
If you have followed the terrible fire in Los Angeles, a fire without public and voracious firefighters, you will have known about the idea of some billionaires who live there to pay for their own fire crew. I suppose that the same people who explained to them about the white chairs in Bad Bunny’s photo had the patience to explain to them why it is of no use that in the middle of a sixth generation fire one saves one’s house alone.
“It’s not in order of call.” The guard says again, somewhat angrier. A young man writhes in pain while standing, a woman waits sitting in her taca-taca while her son gets angry at the world with a gesture of “how is it possible that this is happening?” Everyone is neoliberal until they take their mother to the ER. Once you’re sitting there, you surprise yourself by humming why I didn’t take care of the welfare state when I had it, why I didn’t pay attention to the White Tide protests and give them hugs, not just applause, as many times as I could.
The times that a patient did not have to think about anything other than his cancer and his family and not about how to pay for chemo, the times that incubators save the lives of babies, are triumphs of the public, but they go unnoticed because they happen in everyday life, like Bad Bunny’s white chairs.
Not going into debt for living or dying at the door of a hospital without passing the landing for whatever is in your wallet is what we are risking. A system that could be improved, and so much so, those places, if the State took it seriously and wanted to send us the message that they care about us, should be like Versailles, without prejudice to the use that Versailles has today. Comprehensive care, monitoring of the pathology with the help of primary care, which is the first to detect diseases (and social problems), which can then worsen and is what would avoid, if it were not collapsed and precarious, which would then become saturated. hospital emergencies.
The piece that Iván Suárez publishes today for this newspaper talks about a chronic collapse in the Emergency Room of the Canary Islands University Hospital, where a patient referred judiciously waited 30 hours for an ambulance to transport him. For their part, in Gran Canaria, and according to the same information, the Insular and Doctor Negrín have not reached critical points, “a few days ago there were up to 85 patients pending admission to the Insular emergency room, 30 of them in the transition area, and almost twenty stretchers were already beginning to accumulate in the hallways.” You, who understood the album cover the first time, tell me, do you think this is what the scholars called to continue dividing the misery of the majority, the first world?
#Plastic #chairs #white #tides
