nursingforsocialjustice

The world is complex. We cannot know everything. In order for the world to work we have to trust a lot of people. We have to trust that the food we buy in the store isn’t full of poison, that the car we are driving was made in a factory by machines designed by people who knew what they were doing, that when we go to the hospital the clinicians who are providing care know what they are doing, that the words I read in a textbook were written by someone who knew something about the topic they were writing about. So much trusting is necessary to make the system work.

This whole system that we live in depends on us trusting a lot of people. We trust so so many people who we have never met, who we personally did not do background checks on, to make decisions that can result in life or death. In recent years there has been some murkiness about fact and fictions, truth and lies. At the bottom of all of this we have to make some big choices about what trustworthiness is. The amount of fear, anxiety, inner turmoil that one would experience everyday if they didn’t trust other human beings…that would be crippling. And, a lot of these schemas, these cognitive organizations of our understandings of the world, are dependent on where we are in the world, when we were born, who we were born to, the privileges we have in life, the contexts of our lives.

I’m thinking about this in terms of the doubt that people have that a serious, life changing virus is spreading through the world. The sources some people are looking at are made for the purpose of confusion, distraction, agitation. Some people without firsthand knowledge are questioning, is happening in the world? Or are we in the Truman Show? Are we living in N. Night Shyamalan’s The Village?

Sometimes I’m not sure if high trust and high skepticism can co-exist in harmony…or do they have a symbiotic relationship?

At the bottom of all of this it is necessary to understand that there is a difference between the scientific process and what counts as evidence in terms of what actually gets funded and what makes it into peer reviewed journals. And no, this is not common knowledge. This is privileged knowledge. But I shouldn’t be.

Love,

Michelle D.

P.S.

I cannot stop laughing about Donald Trump’s press conference at the 4 seasons…total landscaping store parking lot.