We are, chronologically these days, in the second basement of the year. From December 26 to 30, these are days suspended between two festivals, two frenzies. Five days which escape the calendar, whose nights are deep. Between two parties, stuffed, idle, we take the opportunity to take stock. And it’s dizzying.
These days in limbo bring us face to face with ourselves. We briefly glimpse the imperfection of our existence and, panicked, we rush on the famous resolutions, these fallacious solutions to the anxiety that inhabits us. These extra days that force us to introspection are a necessary passage to the new year.
I talk about it because I have the impression that on the social time scale, for 22 months, we have had our piton stuck on a gigantic December 26th to 30th. Are we at 28 or 29? I do not know. But it is clear that we are in the dark, that the markers are blurry, the reflection more solitary than united. We live in worrying times, we who, for the vast majority, had not seen our lives crossed by the fury of history. We live folded up and carpeted.
What if we take advantage of this eclipse, this global equivalent of the empty days of the year, to reflect on our society, which turns out to be ill with its health system? History to have a plan when inevitably, the world will light up again …
I’m not even talking here about calling for a commission of inquiry into the calamitous management of the pandemic in several CHSLDs in the spring of 2020, which nevertheless deserves it. It goes way beyond. I am calling for a global reflection on the way in which the health system MANAGES QUÉBEC. Because our state is run like a hospital. It’s the number of beds available that ultimately dictates how many people can get together around a turkey, what we’ll do, if there’s a curfew, which business will have to shut down.
The government manages the entire life of the population according to the number of beds available in hospitals, without having done anything to increase the capacity of the health system. Not the ability of caregivers to provide care to humans: the number of beds! It is beyond ideology. It is accounting erected over successive governments as a system.
Admittedly, through this imperative of beds, there are admirable people and exemplary caregivers, but they too are bound by the implacable logic of the number of places. Is it normal, healthy? That it is also an accounting calculation which dictates not only the logic of care (closing an operating room in “normal” times), but in times of crisis, the organization of the life of an entire company in its smallest details very private?
The COVID-19 crisis will have acted as an extraordinary revealer: ultimately, the smooth running of Quebec society in 2021 does not depend on its level of education, a concern for its social and regional fractures, no more than a desire to iron out its economic disparities. No. What orders the smooth running of society, which is its foundation, is a stupid question of available beds. But what is this dehumanized logic?
It is more than hospital-centrism, it is a drift of public morals and democratic life.
The health care system is fragile, of course, billions of dollars have been invested in it over the years. He is rightly described as a mammoth, he works by dint of self-giving from the people who work there and who keep him at arm’s length. It was already saturated before the pandemic, we continue to botox it so that it looks alive, while its questioning should imperatively be global. We live in Absurdistan.
On the number of places available in a sick system depends not only our health, our life, but who we see, when and under what circumstances. It’s just crazy.
Healthcare workers, politicians, bureaucrats, ethicists, users of the system, the general population: we are all asking, I believe, for a profound revision of this system, wounded to death, and which is dragging society into its tragic implosion. .
The nights of the limbo days of the year are the longest for each of us, but collectively, too. This metaphorical end of the year has been going on for 22 months. Let us take advantage of the time for reflection that is offered to us. Because on the calendar, at the end of this stretched time comes the new year, rich in all possibilities. So let’s arrange for the will to change to inspire us collectively …