2025-04-10
Deaths? Which deaths? There are so many ...
I could be talking about Gaza, Ukraine, Myanmar, or any other flash-spot around the world, I could be talking of the fentanyl crisis in the US, or I could be talking about our neighbour down the road in the UK.
Everywhere people are dying.
As they always do, mostly due to the encroaching frailty of advancing years.
But not always, and particularly now.
Now they die from bombs, from "terrorism", from diseases that are suddenly virulent - measles in the US, cancers everywhere, heart failure in young age-groups previously unacquainted with heart disease.
Yet we do not react. We just shrug and get on with our lives. Heaven knows that remaining socially upright requires solvency, and that solvency is being attacked on many fronts just now, as it has been over the last half-decade. So we do what we must to pay the ever-escalating bills, and if we have time or money left over, it's a bonus not to be given away lightly.
Besides, what can we do about these deaths? Many are faraway in foreign lands, with no connection to us (although they may have connections with our government's interests). Others are dying despite the best treatments available from our dedicated NHS - how could we help to save them if the NHS has failed? Perhaps more money would help, but that route has bee tried so often in the past that it would now seem like throwing good money after bad, with little prospect of better outcomes.
Or we could volunteer to fight the Russians in the Ukraine, but throwing more bodies into the meat-grinder on behalf of a government that has already spent billions supporting the Ukraine (to little effect, despite the rhetoric) doesn't seem like an obvious way to reduce the deaths.
So what to do?
If we write to our MP we inevitably receive the bland assurance that the current/incoming government legislations are appropriate to the situation and to give them our full support - yet twas ever thus, and look where we are. I suppose if you are an MP, every problem looks like an opportunity for more legislation. Perhaps they should try repealing as many statutes as they introduce? (Oops! Sorry! Must avoid the dreaded wrong-think!)
So we plainly cannot as individuals resolve all the many and pressing problems of the world, but we can play whatever part we feel able, to do something about some of them.
Here, Prof Angus Dalgleish offers some thoughts about the sudden uptick in deaths by cancer.
Perhaps, as Sherlock Holmes was said to remark, once we have eliminated all the probable culprits, the real culprit must be sought amongst the most unlikely.
