AMUSING, INTERESTING, OUTRAGEOUS, or PROFOUND

Somewhere there is an article by a political writer who happened to have a hurt shoulder, who was in a position to get the same injury seen by doctors in the US, Europe, Cuba, and India.

His experience in Cuba was as described: Western medicine, just for free and quick with a high standard of care and attention. His experience in India was that they gave him oil to rub on it and prayers to say, and a very specific set of movements he was supposed to do with it which in my personal opinion would have healed it if he had followed through on them. He said that during the time that he was doing them, it was getting steadily better. His experience in both the US and Europe was that they wanted to do surgery on his shoulder, vastly more expensive in the US, and otherwise they did nothing but fairly useless physical therapy, and bills.

This was before the great recent private-investment putrefaction of medicine in the United States. Probably now it would have been much worse. I think at the time, the social contract and care for other human beings that are encountered day to day was still in some tattered kind of existence, instead of being dead and bloated like it is currently in anything resembling a retail or institutional setting in the US.

Related story: I was at the airport today and was already fucked by events. I was waiting in line, and they called up a particular flight to get in the priority line so they could get seen right away, since it was leaving soon. Even though I was next up when they said it, I let a few people go ahead of me, explaining that I wasn't going anywhere quickly regardless of anything that happened, and their issue was time-sensitive, so what's the point in me going before them. They reacted with stunned over-the-top gratitude as if I'd gifted them a ticket to the Wonka factory. When I got up, the manager refunded me $240 for cancelling one half of a $300 round-trip ticket. I don't know if letting the people in front and generally being chill when I talked to her made an impact on her decision but I sort of suspect that it did.