One of the posts I lost through my own dumbness (users = lusers, woot!) was about multiple drug-resistant tuberculosis and my experience working for the Division of TB Control in Maricopa County once upon a time. Actually, it wasn't so much about my experience as it was about the experiences, as they were related to me, of the visiting RNs who had to drive all over creation forcing patients with tuberculosis to take their INH.

Yeah, forcing. Believe it or not, there exist people who have active tuberculosis and won't take the cure for it.

Why not? Who knows? Oh, they had reasons--don't get me wrong. But you read 'em over and tell me if they sound like very reasonable reasons:

"It makes my pee turn dark." (This is a known side effect and is not harmful.)

"My cousin got out of jail and needed a car so I gave him mine but now he's back in jail because he used it in a robbery and the car was impounded and I don't have the money to get it out so I got no way to get to the pharmacy and even if I did I got no money." (Next time KEEP THE CAR. Blood is thicker than water, but TB is deadlier than either.)

"The doctor said not to take this medication while drinking alcohol." (Not drinking the alcohol--or getting help to keep from drinking the alcohol--somehow never registers as an option.)

I'm sure there were others I've forgotten. The point is, the ultimate reason these people wouldn't take their medication--thus endangering everyone around them, because TB is an airborne pathogen--is because they didn't want to. Period.

You can't save people from themselves without a lot of time and money. And if TB weren't contagious, I like to think the county would have let these fools die coughing up blood. TB is contagious, however, so Maricopa County spent the time and the money. And the nurses all got ulcers and became experts on checking to make sure those pills were swallowed and not just hiding in the cheek or under the tongue.

I left the TB Control division to work for the county's HIV/AIDS clinic because the pay was better there, but also, because it was only about 100% less depressing. The AIDS patients wanted treatment. They were (literally) dying for treatment. The TB morons didn't want any treatment. You'd tell them they could wind up needing a pneumonectomy if they didn't start taking their medications and they'd be all, so what? I got another lung still, don't I?

Yeah, they were the minority. Most people took the INH or the Rifampin or whatever and life went on. But a stubbornly stupid minority can make life miserable for the majority. That's mainly what I learned at the Division of TB Control.

And that's what I think's going on in Iraq, insofar as anyone in this country can tell what's going on in Iraq. This guy says we can't, because we aren't getting the whole story, because most journalists don't speak Arabic and they're too sissy to go into the really dangerous areas, unlike his own badass self. A few paragraphs down our hero, His Almighty Badazzness (and probably a distant cousin of this guy), relates sitting by as soldiers mistake a father of six for a Saddam supporter, even after the journalist recognizes a CD found in the father's belongings as being anti-Saddam. The soldiers, who can't read Arabic, only see Saddam's picture and conclude the father's a Baathist. I'll give you a cookie if you answer the following question correctly:

The journalist speaks up and clears up the misunderstanding between the soldiers and the father:
A.···TRUE
B.···FALSE

Journalists wonder why people like me hate 'em so much.

Personally, I don't doubt that the kind of things this reporter describes in the article go on. I see no reason to mistrust his reportage, even if I do think he needs to take his vaunted journalistic objectivity and shove it up his ass instead of watching some poor old guy cower on the ground and taking notes on it. But whatever.

My point is, if you read that article, you can't be too surprised by this news. See, my thinking is, you can't give people democracy. They have to want it. They have to want it bad enough to die for it. They have to be the AIDS patients who sign up for experimental protocols that might kill them just as surely as AIDS is killing them, and not the tuberculosis patients who won't take INH because it turns their pee dark. (I know being HIV-positive doesn't necessarily kill you right away anymore, but it just about did back when I was working in the clinic.)

Otherwise, we're just sending people overseas to die for people who don't care anyway.

This is about the point where someone pipes up with "What about Germany and Japan? We gave them democracy!"

And that's about the point where your typical antiwar fellow shouts, "Yeah, 60 years ago! Times have changed! And Iraq isn't Germany or Japan! Apples and oranges!" Well, I'm not going to do that. (In fact, I don't get people who think that because x number of years have gone by, we can suspend the laws of human nature. Human nature doesn't change. You can carrot-and-stick it into some semblance of civilized behavior, yes--but it fundamentally does not change.)

I don't see the harm in bringiing up Germany and Japan. I don't see any harm in comparing and contrasting the occupations there with the one in Iraq and asking, "Okay, what's different? What's similar? What did we do then that might work now? What should we avoid? What didn't we do then that we should be doing now?" Etc. This is called a-n-a-l-y-s-i-s by a-b-s-t-r-a-c-t-i-o-n. You go in knowing the situations aren't identical and you pick out the parts that are similar enough to justify reuse.

There are nonetheless several problems with relying on analysis:

At some point, you're going to run into a few things you did then that wouldn't work now. You're going to have some obstacles in situation B that you never encountered in situation A. Because your situation A data can't help you here, there are going to be arguments about the best course to take in situation B.

One of the things that's going to come up in the course of those arguments is that some guy is going to piss on the parade just at the point the group thinks it has finally hit on the best course to take in situation B. You know the guy. The guy who says, "Uh, that won't work." Or the guy who waits until you've already implemented your solution and then says, "This isn't working."

When that happens, the natural human response is to shoot the messenger. Oh, yes, it is. Don't tell me how much you love hearing about new problems. Even if you think you do, you don't. No one wants to be told his solution sucks. This is why when you work for some company and the company merges or gets bought or whatever, and the new CEO calls a company-wide meeting and in the middle of his usual new-CEO spiel that everyone's tuning out while trying to look interested, he says, "And I want you to know that I have a strict open-door policy and that you can come to me with problems any time," it's all the whole room can do not to roll their eyes in unison, because everyone knows it's bullshit.

I'll grant that maybe one guy in a million wants to hear his solution doesn't work. One guy in a million is so in love with the problem-solving process that he's delighted to hear his solution doesn't work, because now he has a new problem to solve. And there are people who can train themselves not to rip your head off when you come to them and complain that their solution doesn't work. But inwardly? Inwardly they're wishing you'd kept your mouth shut.

Blogwise, I'm seeing lots of shoot-the-messenger. I saw it when Zeyad posted the story about his cousin. I see it in the responses to his linking of that Reason article. The line of reasoning against such reporting on the bad news in Iraq goes, "Oh, you can't trust that reporter, because he works for [insert name of non-National-Review/FOX News/Washington Times media enterprise here], and everyone knows they're against the war."

Or, "Oh, that story can't be true because none of the military folks I've known and worked with would ever do such a thing."

Or, "Well, criticizing OUR BRAVE MEN AND WOMEN who DIED for you just PROVES how loathesome and ANTI-AMERICAN you people really are. YOU ALL MAKE ME SICK."

Or even--I've seen this one more than I want to--"Oh, they just always have to focus on the negative. They don't tell you the good news."

Look, I agree there's probably good news that doesn't get out because, I don't know if you've noticed, good news seldom gets out anywhere. Did your 5:00 p.m. local news carry thirty minutes of stories about people helping each other out, mending fences, making new friends, discovering their soul mates? Or was it five minutes of what's fucked up internationally, five minutes of what's fucked up nationally, five minutes of what's fucked up locally, and 10 minutes of what's fucked up with your health? ("YOU could be AT RISK for CANCER! An important health alert--NEXT!")

And frankly I don't mind if a bunch of people on the internet want to stick their heads in the sand and repeat "Everything's FIIIIINNNE!" No harm, no foul. I only mind if it's the people in a position to make a difference doing it.

And maybe there's no difference to be made there anyway, because maybe you can't always give people what you want to give them.

But you can sure as shit hire a bunch of frazzled nurses to shove it down their bloody-minded little throats.

It just takes a lot of time, a lot of money, and a lot of ulcer medication. Or in this case, a lot of soldiers.

Posted by Ilyka at April 1, 2004 04:19 PM in news